USA > New York > New York City > The Memorial History of the City of New York: From Its First Settlement to the Year 1892, Volume II > Part 38
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been in our possession at Serlby, and is very good of the original picture. You are doubtless aware that in West's picture of General Wolfe's death, Monck- ton, who was second in command, is the figure standing up with his arm in a sling." EDITOR.
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Martinique on June 12, 1762. He immediately assumed the reins of government and entered upon its duties with a personal prestige of the highest character. Monckton's first business on his return was to complete the bench. Pratt opportunely dying, he appointed Daniel Horsmanden chief justice. Mr. Thomas Jones received the next com- mission, William Smith, the elder, the third, and Robert R. Livingston the fourth. All these commissions were accepted during pleasure; but the hold of Monckton on the gentlemen of New-York was different from that of Colden. Yet a third time was the latter invested with the government. The health of General Monckton making it advisable for him to leave the province for a time, he pre- pared to do so early in June, 1763. Col- den had already advised the Earl of Hali- fax on March 22 of the probable departure of the governor. On June 28 Monckton sailed for England, again delivering the seals to Colden, and leaving his private affairs in the charge of his intimate per- sonal friend, John Watts. 1
Nothing of importance took place after Monckton left until Mr. Colden called the assembly together, on September 5, 1764. In his speech opening the session he con- fined himself to generalities; congratula- Thomas Jones tions on the peace with the Indians; a recommendation to discharge the public debt; and another to renew the expired act granting a bounty on hemp, a product for which the lands of the province were well adapted and in which the British manufacturers were greatly in- terested. To these trite suggestions the assembly replied in an address which was the signal note of the coming contest. It ran :
Nothing can add to the pleasure we receive from the information your honour gives us that his Majesty our most gracious sovereign distinguishes and approves our conduct. When his service requires it we shall ever be ready to exert ourselves with loyalty fidelity and zeal and, as we have always complied in the most dutiful manner with every requisition made by his directions, we with all humility hope that his Maj- esty who is and whose ancestors have long been the guardians of British liberty will
1 Smith's "History of New-York" closes with the return of Monckton from the conquest of Martinique. There is no further history by any contemporary of Colden except that by Chief Jus- tice Thomas Jones, written after the Revolution. and recently published by the New-York Histori- cal Society. The work of a disappointed and
exiled loyalist, it is unfortunately narrow and pre- judiced, and while correct, no doubt, as to the facts of which he was eye-witness, it is not to be trusted in its opinions or criticisms on the action or characters of the moving spirits in the great drama which was about to open in the colonies.
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so protect us in our rights as to prevent our falling into the abject state of being forever after incapable of doing what can merit his distinction or approbation. Such must be the state of that wretched people who (being taxed by a power subordinate to none and in a great measure unacquainted with their circumstances) can call nothing their own. This we speak with the greatest deference to the wis- dom and justice of the British Botoro Many of 195ma Gentlemene parliament in which we con- fide. Depressed with this project of inevitable ruin by the alarming informations we as there are my here belonging to The Shellany Driving That have have from home neither we nor our constituents can at- tend to improvements con- good Shirley Rey? not as yet tan if you will in fase any Numbershould come - float them & There a Transport putting Aromazone no Brand for their Defrageos Dispatch et to Town one at Chiquect -Sendung By the same Opportunity thosemorning Balla - and Provides as Before ducive either to the interests of our mother country or of this colony. We shall how- ever renew the act for grant- ing a bounty on hemp, still hoping that a stop may be put to those measures which if carried into execution will oblige us to think that nothing but extreme poverty can pre- serve us from the most insup- portable bondage. We hope your Honour will join us in an endeavor to secure that great badge of English lib- erty of being taxed only with our own consent to which we conceive all his Majesty's sub- Growth can beprot Soft Phonela jects at home and abroad equally entitled; and also in pointing out to the ministry the many mischiefs arising from the act commonly called THE MONCKTON LETTER. the Sugar Act both to us and to Great Britain. Your Honour may depend on our giv- ing all due attention to the support of Government and that by the punctual discharge of our public debts the irreproachable credit of this Colony will be maintained.
This significant address was reported by Philip Livingston, member for the city, whose name appears on the journals of the assembly as alderman, from his having held the office of alderman of the East Ward from 1754 to 1762. In replying to it, Colden stated that as the material parts could not with any propriety be made to himself, he should transmit it to more proper judges of the sentiments they adopted. But, while declaring that their method was improper, he would do nothing to prevent their making a representation of the state of the colony as they should think best. This was on September 17. To the lords commissioners of trade and plantations he declared him-
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self on the 20th in a more emphatic manner. He said the address ap- peared to him so undutiful and indecent that he thought it incumbent upon him to give an account of his conduct therein. He had obtained a reconsideration of the address, but no material modification ; and in the absence of most of the council from town he had not the advan- tage of their advice. When, however, they came together in sufficient number, he was unanimously advised not to dissolve the assembly. He ascribes the ill-temper of the assembly to the influence of the great landed proprietors and the merchants of New-York, the principal of whom were connected with the proprietors. These he insists were, by their influence as members of the assembly, or upon such members, freed from the ordinary quit-rents and every other tax as well.
Meanwhile, in the privacy of their committee-rooms, and, as Colden directly asserts in his letter to the lords commissioners, in a secrecy from himself which he did not think it requisite for himself to inquire into, the assembly prepared petitions to the king and to the houses of lords and commons. The assembly were no longer content to deal with Great Britain through its representative authorities here. They car- ried their grievances to the mother-country and to the foot of the throne. To account for the intense feeling aroused in the colonies by the attitude of the British ministry, a brief summary of the Seven Years' War is necessary. The memory of this great struggle is still fresh, after the lapse of nearly a century and a half, in the towns of New England and the Middle States which were then border settle- ments. Many a family preserves the old King George musket and the heavy saber which were the arms of some forefather on one of the hundred fields of this close contest.
While a nominal peace still existed in Europe, there was a smol- dering border struggle along the line of the English settlements in America, which broke into flame when the French began to tighten the interior cordon which inclosed the colonies from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi: a cordon doubly dangerous because it included the savage tribes who were under the influence of the French. The build- ing of a post by Du Quesne, the governor of Canada, at the junction of the Monongahela and Alleghany rivers, was the immediate cause of hostilities. Washington, then a youth of twenty-two, was sent by the Virginia government with a regiment of colony troops to drive them out. Met by a superior force of French and Indians, the Virginians were forced to surrender. The news reaching England, Braddock was sent out with a few regiments of British regulars to support the British claims. On his arrival a convention of colonial governors assembled at his request in Virginia, and a plan of military movements was con- certed. Of the three operations he reserved for himself the attack on Fort Du Quesne. The disaster from which Washington with difficulty
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saved a fragment of the army had far-reaching effects; one of which was to teach the colonists that in a conflict with Indian antagonists they were the superiors of their well-trained but inexperienced British cousins.
From the signature of the hollow peace of Aix-la-chapelle, France had been silently consolidating an alliance which almost isolated Eng- land from continental influence, and she now openly threatened her entire colonial system. The close family compact of the French and Spanish branches of the great house of Bour- bon had been still further strength- ened by the support of Austria, Russia, and Saxony, the first two of which were contemplating the parti- tion of Prussia, while the latter could not as a matter of safety hold herself aloof. The league of the five powers was completed in 1755; the treaty between Austria and France being signed the next year. To oppose this formidable coalition England found no ally but the great Frederick : for- tunately for her, a host in himself. Never was England so ill prepared for war. Newcastle, weak and inca- pable, was at the head of the ministry. The utter want of military preparation is sufficiently shown in the startling fact that at the beginning of the year 1756 there were but three regiments fit for service in all England.
The capture of Fort Mahon in Minorca, the key of the Mediterranean, by the Duc de Richelieu with a French force; the withdrawal of the British fleet sent to the relief of this post by Admiral Byng; and the equally disgraceful retreat of the Duke of Cumberland with an army of fifty thousand men, raised for the defense of Hanover, before a French force, aroused and alarmed the people of England. Great emergencies develop strong characters and bring to the front great men. In this dire stress England found a man and a character equal to the demand; a man who embodied all those types which, strong and unlovely though they be, combine to form a great English statesman. Such was William Pitt, the great commoner, foremost of Englishmen since Cromwell. Toward the close of the year 1756 the Whigs, who from the accession of the house of Hanover to the crown of England had held the confidence of the people and maintained their rule, fell
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at the very zenith of their power. In December Pitt was called to form a ministry. His first business was to introduce a liberal policy toward the colonies. In this, as in other of his schemes for the benefit of the English people, he was thwarted at every step. His colleagues were forced to resign, and he himself was dismissed by the king in April following. He had said to the Duke of Devonshire, "I can save this country, and nobody else can"; an assertion which the sequel showed was no idle vaunt. For eleven weeks vain efforts were made to form a new administration. Finally the king and his aristocratic advisers were forced to yield to the popular demand, and in July, to the universal satisfaction, Pitt again kissed hands as prime minister of the realm. Such was the confusion in public affairs that his in- coming was hailed by all parties with a like enthusiasm. The king engaged to him his confidence; Lord Bute and John Wilkes joined in congratulations. He was hailed as the savior of Protestant Europe, as the great defender of the rights of the people against the autocratic assumption and aggression of the house of Bourbon.
The contest, as has already been stated, began in America. The fight at Fort Du Quesne was the initial movement in the great strug- gle, which was immediately to change the face of America, and ulti- mately of the political world on both continents. The several successful campaigns in the Canadas have been briefly summed up, the war con- tinuing with unabated vigor, but with varied success, till the fall of Quebec.1 The spirit which the magic power of Pitt infused into the colonies appears in the alacrity with which they voted men and money and supplies of war. Dr. Franklin states that the number of Ameri- cans, or provincial troops, employed in the war was greater than that of the regulars, and that the colonies raised, paid, and clothed nearly twenty-five thousand men, a number equal to those sent from Great Britain, and far beyond their proportion. In a letter from Boston of December 18, 1766, preserved in a newspaper extract in a curi- ous volume entitled "Lord Chatham's Clippings," it is stated that the Royal Americans engaged in the single campaign which resulted in the capture of Quebec amounted to fifteen thousand men. Little won- der, therefore, that Pitt should hold himself the unflinching friend of the hardy colonists who had made his victory possible; for without their aid, under the material conditions of the last century, the Cana-
1 Series of glorious victories from the begin- ning of hostilities in 1755: The expedition of that year of General Winslow against the French and Nova Scotia, with an army of provincials chiefly ; of 1758 against Louisburg and the islands of Cape Breton, under Admiral Boscawen and General Amherst; against Frontenac by Colonel Bradstreet, with regulars and provincials detached from General Abercrombie's army; of General Forbes against Fort Du Quesne, with regulars and
provincials ; of General Prideaux and Sir William Johnson, with regulars and provincials, against Niagara, in 1759; of General Amherst, the same year, against Ticonderoga and Crown Point, with regulars and provincials; and of General Wolfe against Quebec, and the final capture of Mon- treal by General Amherst, with regulars and pro- vincials, which completed the conquest of the Canadas.
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das could not have been wrested from the grasp of France. In the spring of 1762 the French ministry, disheartened by defeat, and at a loss for means to continue the war, made overtures for peace. In No- vember the treaty was signed at Paris by England and Portugal on the one hand, and the Bourbon houses of France and Spain on the other. To England were ceded all the French possessions in America, the Spanish possessions of Florida, all Louisiana to the Mississippi, except New Orleans, which France transferred to Spain in considera- tion of the cession of the Floridas, on which England insisted to com- plete the Atlantic border of the colonial settlements.
Nowhere was the glorious peace hailed with more patriotic joy than in the American colonies; not alone because it brought to an end the border warfare with its aggravations of savage cruelty, but because it was the triumph of England, that mother-country with whose every heart-beat their own pulses throbbed in unison. Their temper toward the mother-country before the year 1763 was, in the words of Benjamin Franklin at his examination before the bar of the House of Commons, " the best in the world. They submitted willingly to the government of the Crown, and paid in all their courts obedience to Acts of Parliament. . . They were led by a thread. They had not only a respect, but an af-
. fection for Great Britain, for its laws, its customs and manners, and even a fondness for its fashions that greatly increased the commerce. Natives of Great Britain were always treated with particular regard ; to be an Old England Man was in itself a character of some respect, and gave a kind of rank." Franklin gave no testimony as to the feeling of regard and attachment with which the person of the sovereign was held by the colonists. It was needless. There was never a question of their loyalty to the king.
The great results secured by the peace of Paris were not achieved without the expenditure of a vast amount of treasure as well as of blood. Pitt spared neither in his iron determination to reach his aims, which were English supremacy in America, English dominion on the seas, the humbling of the proud house of Bourbon before the Protestant house of Hanover. The public debt of England, doubled by the expenses of the Seven Years' War, had risen to one hundred and forty million pounds sterling. Before the peace was signed Pitt was no longer in office. The young king, in his inexperience, not only chafed at the domination of his masterful spirit, but was greatly controlled by the concerted action of Lords Bute and Newcastle, whose personal intercourse with the sovereign was more intimate and direct than that of the stern minister. Pitt was not satisfied with the con- quests he had made. At the council meetings called to consider the French proposals he had insisted on a war with Spain. Nothing would satisfy him but the absolute destruction of the Spanish monop-
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oly in the New World, "a general resignation of all Spanish America in all matters which might be deemed beneficial to Great Britain." The Whig lords took issue with him. On October 5 Pitt resigned the seals. The king accepted the resignation, and tendered him the government of Canada with a salary of five thousand pounds. This the proud minister declined, asking that such rewards as the king might intend be conferred on his family rather than himself. The king and his advisers were for peace. Pitt looked to the ascendancy of England; the Whig lords to the supremacy of the king. The king him- self was swayed by those who advised him to main- tain the prerogative in its extreme authority. "God," said one of these ministers, "had ordained him with the prerogative, and left to his servants the glory of THE MONCKTON ARMS. obedience." "Cost what it may," said Halifax, at this time lord lieutenant of Ireland, but destined later to take his part in the impending conflict for chartered rights,-"cost what it may, my good Royal Master's authority shall never suffer in my hands." What to such men was the glory of England when com- pared with the royal pleasure.'
For a time the new ministry continued Pitt's policy. Without his high purpose, however, the prosecution of the war was impolitic, and within a week after the declaration of hostilities against Spain, the king ordered measures to be taken to detach Austria from the confed- eration of the Catholic powers. It was pending these negotiations that news of the victories of Monckton and Rodney in the West Indies reached England. These successes strengthened the hands of the king's friends, led by his favorite, the Earl of Bute. A crisis ensued in the king's cabinet; Newcastle withdrew, and, says our American historian of this period, "so fell the old Whig aristocracy which had so long governed England. It was false to the cause of liberty, and betrayed the man of the people." On the retirement of Newcastle in May, Bute became first lord of the treasury. Grenville took the seals of the northern department; Egremont, brother-in-law to Grenville, became secretary of state for the southern department and America; Lord North remained in the treasury board, with Bedford as privy seal, and Charles Townshend secretary of war; and in June Lord Halifax returned from Ireland, and joined the cabinet as first lord of the admiralty.
The new cabinet, content with the recent successes, were at heart as willing to make peace as their foreign foes. Through jealousies in the
1 The blow struck at the independence of the in the American Revolution, was delivered within New-York judiciary by the obsequious Colden, the six weeks of Pitt's resignation of the seals. first in the series of aggressions which culminated
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king's council, and chiefly owing to Lord Bute's duplicity, negotia- tions languished. In this condition of affairs news arrived of the capture of Havana. Again the cabinet divided on the policy to be followed. The king intervened, and seized the opportunity, by a personal indignity to the Duke of Devonshire, to drive into retire- ment the last remnant of the great Whig families who still clung to the traditions of the great revolution of 1688.
The peace was ratified on February 10, 1763. The joy of the colo- nists was dashed by the dread which had grown upon them of serious encroachments on their own rights and liberties since the enforced re- tirement of Pitt. They seem to have been perfectly aware of the nature of the threatening contest. One of the colonial governors, Hutchinson of Massachusetts,-like Colden, a subservient upholder of the royal prerogative,- said : "A good peace with foreign enemies would enable us to make a better defence against our VESB DEAN domestic foes." Beyond the general dissatisfac- tion of the colonies with the subordination of the judiciary to the pleasure of the crown through A COCKED HAT OF THE PERIOD.1 the tenure of their warrants, the greater subject of discontent was the enforcement of the acts of trade by the court of admiralty: a court of vast powers, wholly inde- pendent of the province, acting, not on fact as determined by jury, but on information supplied by crown officers,-a system in which judge and informers drew their emoluments from the forfeitures they insti- gated and declared.
While the colonists awaited in anxiety the next step in the radical changes which the despotic young king, by a use of bribery and cor- ruption unexampled in the history of England, was effecting in the composition of parliament, the American question was the all-absorb- ing theme in Great Britain itself. How to hold in dependence on the crown the hardy colonists who had learned their strength in the late contest, and found the measure of their powers side by side with the proud regulars from the British Isles, was a question trying enough for any statesman ; enough for even the masterly mind of Pitt, but not, at least in his own opinion, beyond the will or the power of the young king. In February, 1763, the Earl of Bute, in prosecution of a well-matured plan, removed Lord Sandys from the board of trade and put Charles Townshend, an ambitious statesman, able and unscrupulous where his ambition was at stake, in his place; and in March the several govern- ments in America were notified of the change, and of the rule of future correspondence. Although holding only the office of first lord of trade, Townshend had also a seat in the cabinet, counseled the king in
1 Copied from an advertisement in the " New-York Gazette" of the year 1765. EDITOR.
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person on administration affairs, and, while the self-willed Egremont still held the nominal control, Townshend became the actual secretary of state for the colonies. Though Bute himself was personally weak and inexperienced, these defects of character and education were sup- plied by his private secretary, Jenkinson, "an able, indefatigable, and confidential aid." In the conduct of American affairs Townshend had full sway, and in the cabinet found no opposition to his plans.
Under James II. began the attempt to introduce government by prerogative-an attempt resisted at the very beginning in New-York province by the famous Declaration of Rights and Privileges by the assembly of 1683. It had been continued under subsequent colonial administrations, but without success. It was now a settled fact, if not a written law, that no taxes could be imposed on the inhabitants of a British plantation but by their own assembly or by act of parliament. The new scheme was that while the ministers should act in the name of the king, they were to be sustained by the authority of the parlia- ment ; and it was to this end that the avenues of corruption were opened so that the complexion of the House of Commons should be altered in favor of the king. The first step in the new policy was the announcement that the ministry would no longer tolerate disobe- dience to the royal instructions; that the claim of the assemblies to discuss or limit the supplies demanded (a right claimed and enforced by parliament itself) would no longer be endured; and that in the future there would be no more requisitions by the king, but that the colonies would be taxed by parliament itself in its discretion. The first charge on the revenue thus raised in the colonies was to be the civil list, which would render all royal officers, governors, judges, independent of the assemblies as to their pay and emoluments, and would limit their tenure of office to the king's pleasure. To carry this scheme into effect, the colonial charters were to be annulled and a uniform system of government established. This does not appear in the journals of parliament, but was declared by Townshend on the floor of the House of Commons. As a natural corollary to such an arbitrary scheme, the revenues to be raised in America were to be se- cured by a rigid enforcement of the navigation laws, which, strict though they were in the text, had been invariably evaded or compro- mised in practice. The whole plan was to be enforced by the presence in America of a powerful standing army.
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