Volume 4, Chapter 12, New York fumbles in the crisis.
The major weapon of American pressure on Great Britain at the time of Lexington and Concord
had been the Continental Association, and after the shooting started, this boycott weapon
continued its work with redoubled force.
In mid-May 1775, Congress resolved on an absolute boycott of trade with those English colonies
that had not joined the association, Quebec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, St. John's Island,
the Floridas and Georgia, with the exception of radical St. John's parish, which sent
Dr. Lyman Hall as an accredited delegate to the Second Continental Congress.
The boycott succeeded in injuring Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and the Floridas, but British
exports soon made up the gap.
The news of Lexington and Concord sparked the local governments into circulating defense
associations, a more radical extension of the Continental Association.
In New York and New Jersey, signers of these mass statements agreed to support any measures
New Jersey, Maryland and South Carolina. The new, more radical Defense Associations understandably
superseded the Continental Association in the support of the public. The New York Associations
responded to the electric dues of Lexington and Concord on April 23rd by immediately putting
Leadership into the Hands of the Leaders of the Radical Forces, Isaac Sears and John
Lamb.
Organizing parades in the towns, Sears and Lamb called on the people of New York to arm
themselves in defense of their injured rights and liberties.
Shipments of provisions for General Gage's forces in Boston were quickly stripped by
a mob led by Sears, Lamb and Peter Levinson.
Sears and Lamb also broke into the City Hall arsenal and seized and distributed the muskets
and gunpowder inside. Armed citizens patrolled the streets and Sears and Lamb hastily drilled
their followers. Revolutionary popular rule prevailed. Hated Tory printer James Rivington
was forced to flee to the safety of a British warship. The Reverend Miles Cooper and other
The former Tory Anglican clergyman of New York went into hiding, and an armed mob, led
by Sears, forced the collector of customs to surrender the keys to the customs house,
which was promptly shut down. Sears ordered no ships to be cleared for Halifax or British-occupied
Boston and even went so far as to close the port of New York. The old predominantly radical
Committee of Sixty, after failing in its bid to run the city, organized a citywide election
for a Committee of One Hundred as the city's government. Elections were also called for
provincial congress to unify the whole province. In the election of April 29, two slates contested
for the twenty city delegate positions and for the Committee of One Hundred. Sears, Lamb,
The election was a victory for the conservative wigs of Robert R. Livingston's wing of the
landed oligarchy and a blow to the Sears-Lamm radicals, who had been weakened by the growing
conservatization of the third member of the once great radical triumvirate Alexander McDougall.
The conservatives swiftly moved to tame and bolderize the revolutionary movement in New
York City. At a conservative-run mass meeting immediately following the election, headed
by Isaac Lowe and Robert Livingston, a defense association drafted by the highly conservative
James Duane, John Jay, and Peter Van Schaak pledged to carry out the measures of the Continental
and Provincial Congresses. This was a seemingly bold and sturdy step, but actually it channeled
the revolutionary movement in New York into passive legal measures and shunted aside the
extra-legal activities of Sears and Lamb. The newly elected Committee of 100 quickly
resolved to offer this defense association to every citizen of the city and to record
The Committee of 100 also mobilized and drilled the militia of the city, and sale of arms
to Tories was prohibited. The swift military mobilization performed two functions, one revolutionary,
The other, repressive. On the one hand, the militia prepared against an expected British
invasion of New York City. On the other, its actual concrete function was the centrist one
of keeping the Sears-Lamm radicals under wraps. The meeting of the first New York Provincial
Congress on May 22 marked the first highly significant expansion of the revolutionary
Revolutionary Movement from the city to the whole province, which had until then been
conspicuously lacking in revolutionary fervor.
The Congress expanded the Defense Association of April 29 to the entire province, and county
committees were selected to offer the association to every inhabitant.
Although no penalties except public obloquy were attached to non-signers, by September
The patience of the Provincial Congress had worn thin. It resolved on September 1 that although this Congress have a tender regard for freedom of speech, the rights of conscience and personal liberty, the public safety required a stern crackdown upon those withholding allegiance not only from the Provincial and Continental Congresses, but even from county and district committees, all of which were
for Extralegal and Spontaneously Created Bodies. In two weeks, the Provincial Committee of
Safety, the Provincial Congress' executive arm, pressed further to force the disarming
of all non-signers of the Association, who were presumed to be ipso facto rejectors of
the authority of the revolutionary bodies. While this step was too radical for the Congress
and the conservative neo-Tory sentiment, thereby playing into Tory hands. Outright Tory were
the Delancy Wing of the landed oligarchy, the Anglicans concentrated in New York City,
and oppressed tenants whose landlords were Whigs, for example Livingston, and who hoped
to gain by opposing their masters. Thus the inner contradictions of New York's drive for
for Liberty that acquiesced in oppression of tenants arose to plague the revolutionary
cause. When the association was circulated throughout New York, it was found that Tories
were in a majority on Long Island, overwhelmingly so in Queens and Richmond counties, where
they prevented the election of deputies, and very strong in parts of Westchester, Albany
and Duchess Counties and in New York City. The military effort of New York was thereby
gravely crippled and few men or supplies and no money could be furnished by New York for
the crucially important invasion of Canada. While outright Tories were unusually strong
in New York, even the dominant conservative Livingston Whigs were eager for reconciliation
with England. Only in New York was it credible that as late as the end of May 1775, the Provincial
Congress should adopt the reconciliation report of the highly conservative Governor Morris.
Morris's principals, obsolete elsewhere in the colonies, approved Britain's right to
regulate American foreign commerce, but not domestic affairs, and moved along the lines
of Galloway's Old Defeated Plan of Union with Great Britain.
So timorous were the Livingston Whigs that at the end of August when Lamb, under provincial
Congress authority, attempted to strip the battery port of royal authority and a British
ship opened fire, the Whigs totally succumbed to Governor William Tryon's demand and left
When the Continental Congress recommended jailing all persons inimical to the American cause
and especially royal officials, the Whig rulers of New York City hastened to assure royal
governor Tryon of his permanent safety. Further, in early November, when the Continental Congress
urged New York to seize all British military stores in the city. The Whigs flatly refused.
What sort of a Revolutionary War was this? New York was clearly a pest hole for Revolutionary
activities. Rendered desperate by the dead hand of the ruling Whigs, the New York radicals
decided they had to carry on the Revolution by themselves. In early June, before Montgomery
Montgomery and Shuler marched for Montreal. Marinus Willett defied the Provincial Congress
and raided the baggage train of the royal governor embarking for England. An ordinance
warehouse was looted and a royal barge burned. Sears, backed by Montgomery, decided to seize
Tryon and take him to Connecticut in the summer of 1775, but he was overruled by the oligarchs
Schuller and Washington
Like so many other American leaders at the Battle of Quebec. Meanwhile, the third radical
triumvir, Alexander MacDougall, the last remaining in New York, continued to shift ever more
steadily rightward into the Livingston camp. Thus, with their great leaders gone or recreant,
New York radicalism and the Sons of Liberty were dealt a staggering and decisive blow,
A blow which such new leaders as Daniel Dunscum and William Goforth could not hope to repair.
New York was now deprived of a left and remained only with a strong Tory right and a conservative,
Saint-Harded, Livingston, Centre-Right