46. Conflict in New York

Boston was not the only place where armed conflict exploded between the citizens and British troops. We remember that the New York Assembly had been forced by British threats to comply with the British Mutiny Act, and therefore voted to supply British troops in New York in June 1767. At the end of 1768 the Assembly, under pressure from the Sons of Liberty and coming under control of the radical-liberals, resumed its resistance and bravely refused to vote for the supplies during 1769. Finally, the Assembly yielded in mid-December 1769 by a thin majority. The agitation of the people, aggravated by the economic depression of the day, was led by the Sons of Liberty. Spearheading the attack was the merchant Alexander McDougall, one of the radical leaders of the Sons of Liberty of New York. McDougall, in the pamphlet “To the Betrayed Inhabitants” of New York, attacked the Assembly’s capitulation and urged imitation of the deeds of the “brave Bostonians.” At a popular meeting of fourteen hundred people led by John Lamb of the Sons of Liberty, a committee of Sons was appointed to pressure the Assembly. The Assembly lashed back at the McDougall broadside “as a false, seditious, and infamous libel” and called for the author’s arrest. Lamb and Benjamin Prince, a friend of McDougall’s, were accused of authoring libel, but the Assembly could find no evidence against them.

In mid-January 1770, resentment against the British soldiery came to a head. Since 1766 the British troops in New York had repeatedly cut down the Liberty Pole, which had been built by the Sons of Liberty to commemorate repeal of the Stamp Act. One of the grievances against the British soldiers was that they offered themselves as cheap civilian labor, thus undercutting the regular laborers. This was a major reason for the clashes between ropewalk laborers and soldiers (who sometimes worked as civilians there at low rates) in the days before the Boston Massacre. In New York the Sons of Liberty, on January 16, issued an attack on those who employed British soldiers, and called a meeting at the Liberty Pole. The soldiers promptly cut down the pole and contemptuously deposited the pieces at the doors of the Sons of Liberty. The enraged Sons held a mass meeting of three thousand people, who protested the destruction of the Liberty Pole and the employment of British troops in laboring work. In retaliation the British troops issued a handbill denouncing the Sons of Liberty as dangerous enemies of the country. As some soldiers tried to post the leaflet on January 19, they were seized by Isaac Sears and a group of Liberty Boys and taken to the mayor’s office. An attempt by the British to effect a rescue led to a clash between the troops wielding bayonets, and the crowd armed only with chains and sticks. Several citizens were wounded at this, the Battle of Golden Hill.

A clash with occupying troops thus antedated Boston’s by nearly two months. But the consequences were considerably different. New York was ruled not by a popular leadership of radical-liberals but by factions of a conservative land-based oligarchy. In New York, the Sons of Liberty were not the vanguard of a dominant movement, but a radical group trying to work its way into position to crack open an oligarchic power structure. The armed clash, instead of cementing libertarian control here, intensified a conservative backlash and made the conservatives determined to crush the Sons of Liberty. Broadsides appeared, supporting the granting of money to the British troops and ridiculing the Liberty Boys, McDougall being attacked as an Irish upstart. His authorship of the “seditious” pamphlet criticizing the Assembly having been betrayed by an informer, Alexander McDougall was arrested by the Assembly during February and turned over to the common-law courts to be indicted for “seditious libel.” Consciously emulating the courage and career of John Wilkes, McDougall remained in jail rather than post bail, and was visited by adoring crowds and hailed as the “Wilkes of America.” The radicals even used the talismanic Wilkite number 45. To the New York conservatives, McDougall was indeed a Wilkes who sought to “trample down all legal authority, and shake the government to the foundation.” He was defended by John Morin Scott as well as by the Liberty Boys; but with the prosecution’s major witness (the informer) dying, the government decided not to press the case further. McDougall was released from prison to great popular rejoicing.

His freedom was short-lived. At the end of the year McDougall, on the same charge, was hauled before the vindictive Assembly, acting by its own authority. First, the Assembly tried to force McDougall to testify against himself. When he refused, it threatened him with torture to force him to testify. Still refusing, McDougall was asked to write out his reasons for doing so. Typically, the Assembly decided that this statement contained fresh libels in contempt of the Assembly, and demanded that he beg its pardon. When McDougall still refused, the Assembly sentenced him to indefinite imprisonment for “high contempt,” and ordered the sheriff (as in the Smith-Moore case in Pennsylvania in the 1750s) to disregard any writ of habeas corpus. Only five members of the Assembly voted against this brutal suppression of freedom of criticism, by a government body that acted as its own complainant, judge, and jury. McDougall was finally released at the end of the Assembly session, in April 1771, with the government dropping all charges against him.