Type in the street

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 33 for his account.

Thomas Greenleaf’s New-York Journal was the one paper in the city still open to Antifederal writers. Rothbard says Federalist pressure had shut the others to them, and that the Federalists won the state by pressure and secession threats more than by argument. Three days before the vote, nearly four thousand artisans from more than fifty trades had marched down Broadway for the Constitution. New York ratified at Poughkeepsie on July 26, 1788, by 30 to 27. Greenleaf wrote afterward that he came home that night to find that men had fired guns into his house, and went to bed armed. Past midnight there was a violent knocking at the door. He sprang up, fired both pistols, and retreated as the crowd broke from the shop into the entry. The men plundered his type and threw it out of the window into the street. Rothbard says the mob then paid a visit to Governor Clinton’s house, though Clinton came home three days later. One account counts five hundred men, and says they went on to the house of John Lamb, the old Sons of Liberty leader, who had barred his windows and armed himself, and the crowd’s enthusiasm cooled. The last daily Journal had appeared on July 26. It came back on July 31 as a weekly, and on August 7 Greenleaf printed his own account of the night in its pages.