Volume 3, Chapter 10, Reaction in New York
Neither was New York laggard in protesting the molasses tax.
The New York Assembly appointed a committee in September 1764 to draft a protest against
infringing the right to be taxed only by consent.
The assembly approved the committee's statement the following month and, unlike Massachusetts,
Connecticut and Rhode Island made absolutely no concessions to a supposed expediency.
The historian Bernhard Nolenberg justly called the New York Assembly's addresses, one each
to the Houses of Commons and Lords and the King, among the great state papers of the
Pre-Revolutionary Period Thus the assembly's remonstrance and petition
to the commons took its stand against taxation without representation squarely on the natural
right of private property.
The exemption from such taxation was not simply a privilege but a natural right of
The Petition expressly repudiated the artificial distinction between internal and external taxation, since all impositions, whether they be internal taxes or duties paid for what we consume, equally diminish the estates upon which they are charged.
The New York Petitions were prepared by three New York City lawyers, the liberal leaders
of New York, John Moran Scott, William Smith Jr., who wrote the drafts, and the eminent
liberal William Livingston, the leading theoretician.
As early as March, Livingston had written of his implacable hostility to the deep-formed
and Steadily Prosecuted Plan of the British Ministry to Reduce Us by Degrees to Perfect
Vassalage, a judiciary appointed by the Crown, a standing army among us, a measure absolutely
inconsistent with civil liberty, and now the crushing the trade of North America in such
essential articles as must reduce us to beggary.
Did they also carry another favorite point, subjecting us to the payment of the national
tax? We should certainly envy the superior political happiness of the French.
The boldness and daring of New York's action was undoubtedly traced to the shock of a recent
message by Governor Cadwallader Colden, ordered by the Board of Trade. Colden urged the unilateral
Annulment of a huge land grant of 800,000 acres that had been given by Governor Cornberry
to 13 grantees in 1708.
Underlying Colden's urging was a threat of further parliamentary coercion to annul the
grant.
By 1764, ownership of this tract, the Cayo de Roseros grant, between the Hudson and Mohawk
The question of the Kea der Rosaris grant was ostensible altruism in behalf of the probably
The assembly defrauded Mohawk sellers of the land, but the assembly correctly suspected
chicanery behind the altruistic mask. All the Crown officials involved stood to gain
handsomely by the annulment. Governor Colden stood to earn 10,000 pounds, his fee for re-granting
The Kea de Roseris Land, Cauldron's son, Alexander, £4,000 in fees as Surveyor General of land
in New York for the re-granting. The Crown itself would gain from an increased annual
quit-rent payment of over £1,500 for negotiating the lands, and Sir William Johnson, the Crown's
Superintendant of the Northern Indians, who pushed the Mohawk claim, had received overlapping
land grants from the Crown and from the Mohawks of over 100,000 acres in the same area.
Colden agreed to back Johnson's highly dubious Indian claim after Johnson offered him 10,000
acres from the tract.
The New York Assembly swiftly and angrily rejected the whole scheme and, no doubt, its
reaction radicalized the Assemblymen into taking a firm, principled stand on the molasses
and Business Tax.