USA > New York > Westchester County > Westchester County, New York, during the American Revolution > Part 23
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Julge Jones, in his History of New York, i., 11-ta, gave a very inter- esting account of the .Isociation and of the signing of it, warily tinted, of course, with his peuliar bitterness ; but, nevertheless, he is our principal authority on the subjects.
1 Thisstairmeut of the proceedings of the Meeting at which a Deputa- tion was chosen to represent Westchester-county, in the first Provincial Congress, is made on the authority of the official report of that Meeting, signed by " JAMES VAN COUTE ANDT, Chairman for the Day," and pub. H-hed in Rirington's New- York Gazetteor, No. Ins, NEW YORK, Thursday, May 11, 1775 ; and ou that of the Credentials, signed by each of the twenty-three Members of the Committee for the County who were then procent, which Credentials have been preserved wrong Credentials of Delegates, in the Historical Manuscripts, relating to the Wier of the heroln- tom, in the Secretary of State's Office at Albany, Volume XXIV., Page 1.5%.
" The Provincial Congress, on the twenty-ninth of June, 1775, issned a Warrant to David Dan, as First Lieutenant, nuder Captain Jonathan
$ The Provincial Congress, on the twenty-ninth of June, 1775, issued a Warrant to Jonathan Platt, ao Captain.
did not constitute even a respectable minority of those who were heads of families and householders, through- out the County.4 It will be seen, also, that the Mor- ris family, strengthened by itsalliance with its kindred family of Graham, had fully entrenched itself, as the political head of the County ; and it will be par- ticularly noticed of what kind of material Delegates were made, even at that early period of the revolu- tionary movement in Westchester-county, the most ill-disguised monarchists and even officc-holders holding Commissions under the Crown, from among the non-producing class in that purely agricultural community, boldly, if not audaciously, assuming to be in harmony with the industrial masses whom they really despised, and crowding forward, in their greed for place aud emoluments, to seize whatever oppor- tunity for advancement, their ingenuity and their superior intelligence should place within their reach.
If a mere handful of the inhabitants of the County, who neither possessed nor claimed to possess any legal qualifications whatever to do such an act; who did not act nor claim to act under the guidance of any thing except its own unrighteous impulses ; and who neither possessed nor claimed to possess even a shadow of delegated authority from any one, within or without the County, to do any such acts or any others, with the authority and in the name of the County, can be said, with even a semblance of truth, to have really done so, the ancient and entirely conser- vative County of Westchester, by the revolutionary ac- tion at the Meeting at the White Plains, on the eighth of May, was wheeled into the front line of the Rebellion,
4 In all which has been written concerning the political affairs of Westchester-county. prior to the first Session of the First Provincial Con- gress, which assembled on the twenty-second of May, 1775, as far as we have knowledge or the subject, only fifty-one persons hare been named. as residents of that County, who favored the revolutionary proceedings recommended by the Continental Congress of 1774. Of these fifty-one, two were Representatives in the General Assembly -- one of them, was, then, the County Judge, under the Royal Government. Of the remain- ing forty-nine, one rose no higher than a place in the Cominittee of his Town ; six were satisfied with only places on the Committee of the County, in whom, however, great power in local matters was vested, and by whom much money was disbursed for the support of prisoners of war quartered in their vicinities ; one aspired to both the Town and County Comunitteos, and held seats in both ; throo were given nothing elso then Commussious in the Regiments of the County ; eleven Leld various Civil Offices, as well as Commissions in the Regiments of the County ; one held a seat in the Provincial Congress, and was cont utri with that single place ; sixteen held beats in one or more of the Provin- cial Congresses, together with other places, at the same time or subs :- queutly ; five became discontented with their associations, and were accused of being lovalists, and were prosecuted as such ; leaving only five of the entire forty-nine who did not, as far as we have knowledge, accept places of either authority or emtolument. Even the Secretary of the first County Courmittee looked out for the profits of official station. and secured, through his associations, some of the fait things of place- Micah Townsend, the Clerk of the first County-Committee, secured the command of a Company of Colonial Troops, early in 1776 ; and he was, in other respects, well provided for, during that era of distrest and ruin.
The reader may judge from this exhibit how much of gennine patriot- ism and how much of personal selfishness, controlled the revolutionary politics of Westchester-County, 1274-73.
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abreast of the most advanced of the anarchists ofthat period ; and if, withont a semblance of that "consent" of which so much had been said and written, as a pre- requisite to any change of government-without, also, any of those qualifications in itself and anthorities from others, of which mention has been made-the same handful of new-born revolutionists, at the same time, can be said to have really done so, the alle- giance of the great body of the anti-revolutionary farmers of that County, and there were no others, to its Sovereign, was violated, if not abrogated, and all the obligations of that great body of the inhabitants of the County, to obey the legally established Gov- ernments and the legally enacted Laws of the Coun- try, were dissolved, and all were made subject, in- stead, to that self-constituted County Committee which was then organized and taking its first step in Rebellion ; to the proposed Congress of the Colony, in whom was to be vested absolute, unrestrained author- ity, in all classes of governmental affairs relating only to the Colony of New York ; and to the coming second Continental Congress, in whom, also, a simi- larly absolute, unrestrained authority, on every con- ceivable subjeet, within each and every of the several Colonies, would, also, be seated; and, therefore, every one of those peaceful and peacefully inclined farmers and every member of their respective families were, by that handful of revolutionists, insignificant in numbers and only tools in the hands of an unprinci- pled master mischief-maker, made subject, not ns rolens, to every edict which should be pro- mulgated by either of those three golf-constituted, unirestrained, revolutionary bodies ; to whatever they or either of them should determine, no matter how monstrous its character might be ; and, very often, to whatever individual members of one or other of those bodies, intoxicated with the possession of a power to which, previously, they had been strangers and revel- ing in a despotism to which the Colony had not, at any period of its existence, been subjected, should de- mand and require.
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 inteh 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, bedizeued
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, throughont the County ; and old obli- gations were di-regarded, 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 fuet 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 sliglitest 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- nal 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 mumber, whom, by reason of their greater wealth or of their higher social standing, we may properly re- gard, as they 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 seets 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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F pire, and to enforce on sich of those Merchants, I called, was deceptive ; and, partienlarly, in the last- in his individud business, that a's lience to the Law- mentioned of the two means employed, as hazardous as it was fraudulent-but it is also true that, while the maximis 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 anxiliaries, thus enlisted from among the unfranchised and 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 tliem, 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, in this instance, were familiar, had clearly indicated to both -- were jointly contending. which would be no more than his reasonable duty, while it would also tend to the suppression of that wrruption of the local Revenne-officers and of that general practice of Smuggling from which he was so complacently acquiring wealth and influence. Except " hvem these aristocratie Smugglers employed their ships' crews and the habitués of the docks and slums of the City, for purposes of intimidation and political effect, the unfranchised masses of the Colonists in the country as well as in the City, with very rare excep- tions, and the Freeholders of small estates and those Freeholders, of either large or small degree, who pos- ressed 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.
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In fact, while the aristocraey of the Colony was thus confederating and consolidating discordant ele- ments and plotting and breeding disaffection to the Mother Country, the unfranchised Mechanics and Working-men, residents of the City and toilers for their daily bread, with occasional exceptions, pur- sucd their respective industrial voeations, peacefully and industriously, without taking any greater interest in the anxieties of their aristoeratie neighbors than those "well-born" "Gentlemen in Trade" were taking in their welfare or in that of their respective families ; while the great body of those who occupied the rural Counties of the Colony, also hard-working and peacefully inclined, knew little of and eared 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- tocratie 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- mental 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- freueing and, if possible, of intimidating the Home Goverment, in theiropposition to that Home Goy-
ernment, because of those assumed grievances, those high-toned lawbreakers had repeatedly resorted to the desperate means of, first, appealing to the maxims and the teachings of the fundamental law ; of employ- ing the former for their partisan slogan, and the latter for the foundations of their passionate appeals ; and, sometimes, second, of employing, directly or indirectly, the floating and the less respectable portions of the population of the City, as superun neraries on the stage on which they were aeting their several parts in the drama of their seeming patriotism-means which were a- unreal, in their hands, as their own " patrotism," so
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, iu 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 ordinarily 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 Colonists 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 prolifie, but corrupt, souree 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- lar 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 infliet 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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-were no more than additional instrumentalities in had employed for the intimidation of the Home Goverment and by their own persistent selfish- ness, gradually 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 troubled 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, vatil it had become so well the hands of wealthy and unprincipled lawbreakers, Smugglers, employed for the purpose of sheltering those aristocratie culprits from the penalties whiel the Revenue-laws had imposed on them and, if possi- ble, of enabling them to contime, with impunity, those flagrant violations of morality and of Law which men of less wealth and influence could 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 ! established that it was enabled not only to assert but what has been, more recently, unduly elevated to the to maintain its standing. dignity of a popular patriotic uprising, in support of The character and influence of that new factor in Colonial polities, during the revolutionary era, require a few words concerning its origin, beyond what we have already said of it. violated Rights and for the preservation of the Colo- nies from governmental devastation and ruin; and this, in its various phases, was all there was of that notable Revolution, until 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 uto an instrumentality of lawless violence, of internal strife, and of a disastrous 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 aristocratie Smugglers, in the City of New York, to inaugurate aud to sustain a general disaffection against the Home Government; and while their aims, in this creating and fostering a general discon- tent among the Colonists, were purely temporary and selfish, intended for nothing else than to perpetuate their own immediate opportunities to make gaiu at the expense of the Laws and the morals of the Colony, 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 cesay and of every partisan harangue, for years past, and who, besides having been politically ambitious, 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 outraged Law, which tend, more surely, to the production of disaster than to that of success, so the wealthy and aristocratie culprits, in the City of New York, to whom we have referred, in the instance now under consideration, through the means which they
The outlay of wealth can generally secure ingenious advocates for any cause, no matter how unsavory it may be; and, in that of the coufederated 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 couneetions 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 impassioned 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, in their purposes to oppose the Home Government and to shelter their opulent 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," without the slightest qualification, as if every man and every Colonist were intended to beincluded in those general and unquali- fied terms; as if every man throughout the Colony were intended to be considered the equal of every other man, therein and el-ewhere; as if every Colonist of every sect and party and in every condi- tion of life were entitled, of right, to be recognized and received and entertained, as an equal, socially and politieally and in every other relation, by every other Colonist, of high or of low degree-and, without any qualification, those popular catchwords with which the City had echoed, 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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:lat long period, presumied 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- men ed to measure 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 normal obscurity and political insignificance, may be seen the beginning of that ceaseless conflict between the ari-tocratie and the democratie 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 polities of the Colony, 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 made, but with sufficient of modifications, iu 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 Government, in the Colony, in those aris- tocratic 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 contemptnous 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-qualitied they were to navigate the troubled waters of Colonial politics.
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