Desperate Sons

by Les Standiford

  Sir Henry Moore had been appointed as permanent governor and was at that very moment en route to the colony aboard one of His Majesty’s ships. Perhaps they might let the matter rest until the new governor arrived, Colden suggested. If there was any spite hidden in the long-overlooked Colden’s suggestion, no one seemed to detect it.

  According to the minutes of the meeting, the governor’s council was of the unanimous opinion that Colden’s proposal was the very thing. “His Honour might publickly declare he would do nothing in relation to the Stamps, but leave it to Sir Henry Moor to Act in this matter as he should think fit.” The minutes further reported that the lieutenant governor had acquiesced in the council’s wishes and that he would comport himself accordingly. If those in attendance were not engaged in a round of backslapping as they left the chambers, it was only because decorum prevented it. Finally, they had found a way out.

  Colden and his ministers lost no time in leaking the results of the meeting, but the response was far less than they had hoped for. On Sunday morning, Colden was roused from his bed by an officer. A sentry had found a message stuffed into an oyster shell and left outside the gate:

  Sir,

  As one who is an enemy to mischief of all kinds, and a Well wisher to you and your Family, I give you this Notice that Evil is determined against you and your Adherents and will in all human Probability take Effect, unless Speedily prevented by your public Declaration upon Oath, That you will never, in any Manner, countenance, or assist, in the Execution of the Stamp Act, or anything belonging to it; and also, that you will, to the utmost of your Power, endeavor to get it repeal’d in England, and meanwhile prevent its takin Effect here. Your life may depend upon the Notice you take of this Advice.

  BENVELOUS

  It was also reported to Colden that a call to storm the fort and seize the stamps was circulating on the streets. Even if Colden did not sigh at such news, he well might have. Clearly, there would be no simple way out of this mess.

  On Monday, Colden summoned Mayor Cruger to his offices, where he repeated his pledge that he would take no action regarding the stamps and even handed Cruger a signed declaration to that effect. As the Gazette reported, that gesture had little effect. Word came back to Colden that unless the stamps were delivered up to the citizenry, they would be taken away by force, “which would have been attended probably with much bloodshed.”

  Lieutenant Montresor’s journals give a deft shorthand account of the mounting tension. “Engineers all on Duty this night to fortify the Fort,” he wrote on Saturday. On the streets, he said, leaders of the protests were extracting money for their ends “from private people” under threat of death. On Sunday, the men were ordered to spike the cannon outside the walls of the fort on the Battery and in the artillery yard. The defenders now totaled “153 Rank & file and near 30 officers.”

  The front gates were barricaded with cordwood, and for those inside the fort duty was extended around the clock. “Even the master of the vessel who brought the Stamps,” Montresor wrote, “his life being threatened, was obliged to fly.”

  On Monday, Captain Kennedy again refused to move the papers to any of his ships, and the sense of crisis deepened: “Advertisements throughout the Town threatening the lives of particulars. Many stragglers thronging in with arms from several parts even Connecticut, for plunder, Etc. The Fort pretty well under cover this night. The Governor’s Family obliged to seek protection on board His Majesty’s Ship the Coventry.” Major James determined it prudent to leave the fort and observe matters from the decks of the Garland.

  On Tuesday, November 5, Colden received a message from the city’s council advising that the stamps should be delivered into its hands. The papers would be held in City Hall and guarded by their own officers. Sensing that he was at the endgame, Colden sent a message to General Gage: if townspeople were to storm the fort, he was ready to give them a “warm welcome,” but he wanted the general’s advice.

  Gage was not disposed to be cowed by thugs, but he was also an experienced military tactician. Firing upon the mob might indeed keep it out of the fort for a time, but it would not put an end to the matter. “The consequence,” said Gage, “would in all appearance be an Insurrection . . . the Commencement of a Civil War, at a time when there’s nothing prepared or can timely be so, to make opposition to it.”

  Gage’s conclusion was succinct: “The Fort tho’ it can defend itself, can only protect the Spot it stands on.”

  With the wave seemingly about to crash, Colden called his own council together that afternoon. He shared Gage’s thoughts and the demands of the town council and passed along intelligence suggesting that demonstrators had gathered a hundred barrels of powder in preparation for an assault on the fort.

  Colden warned that even if they were to yield up the stamps, it might not satisfy the people. It would quite likely be seen as a sign of weakness on the government’s part, not to mention a breach of his own oath of office. It was Colden’s belief that this was the first step toward a civil war.

  Whether his councilmen shared this dire (if prophetic) assessment, they saw no further equivocation possible. Yield up the stamps, they counseled Colden. And so, explaining to Major James that “I could not stand single,” he did. “I deliver’d the Packages.”

  As Montresor described it, “Seven Boxes of Stamps were delivered and proceeded to the city Hall in Carts and deposited there attended by 5,000 people. I was on duty at Fort George this night. . . . The Governour ordered double Guards. . . . Major James embarked for England, where he was obliged to remain, being in danger, otherwise of his life. Two Guns fired at 4 o’clock pm for the men of War to their stations.”

  There was little need for double guards, as it turned out. In fact, Major James might even have returned to the city without fear of being buried, for the time being, at least. The effects of Colden’s actions were instantaneous. “After which,” as he wrote to London, “the Mob entirely dispersed, and the City remained in perfect tranquility, till I delivered up the Administration to Sir Henry Moore.”

  Hindsight would suggest that the actions of the mob were controlled largely by city officials and their influential friends, but the fact that nearly one-third of the city’s population turned out to escort the convoy of stamps to their own hall also suggests that there was great accord across all social lines. Certainly, the outcry surrounding the event would be greatly influential in determining the fate of the Stamp Act.

  ( 10 )

  Hornets and Firebrands

  Montresor summed up the immediate aftermath in New York using few words: “6th. Perfect tranquility (as to appearances) this day: advertisements put up about Peace proclaimed. The Governor’s family returned from on board the Man of war. The Lawyers leveled at, by the people, to be at the bottom of this disloyal Insurection and seconded by many people of property of the place and its neighborhood.”

  With lawyers properly excoriated—“Hornets and Firebrands of the Constitution, The Planners and Incendiaries of the present Rupture”—Lieutenant Montresor termed the matter essentially at an end: “8th. Sailed the Edward—Cap’ Davith with major James of the Royal Artillery on board for England, with dispatches to the Secretary of State from the Lieutenant Governor and General.”

  Colden remained to await the new governor, though his attempts to pass the buck to Governor Moore did not go unnoticed in London. Secretary Conway sent back a scathing condemnation of Colden’s pusillanimous statement that he would take “no Step ’till Sir Henry Moore should arrive. It is not comprehended upon what Principle you could take upon You thus to suspend the Power of Government, ’till the arrival of the Governor.”

  Colden did his best to explain the realities of his situation. “At the time the Mob Demanded the Declaration from me that I should not distribute the Stamp’d Papers, they knew that no Man would distribute them and that no Man dared to Receive a Stamp’d Paper,” he told Conway, arguing that he had only been following the advice of his advisers.
“The Council thought I should be under no difficulty in saying I would not do, what it was not in my power to do.”

  As for the matter of deferring action until the new governor arrived, it was only a matter of protocol, Colden suggested. “My promise was founded on the supposition of the arrival of Sir Henry Moore in a very short time: If any accident had happened to prevent his arrival . . . that Promise ceased; and I believe no Man would have thought me perpetually bound by it.” In fact, he told Conway, he had stood up against the mob until the last possible moment, causing the council to call him an “obstinate old man.”

  His property and bodily safety and that of his family were at risk, and, furthermore, it would have probably meant a slaughter and the beginning of a civil war had he tried to keep the papers in the fort, he went on. He was a long and faithful servant to the Crown; instead of criticism, he said, he hoped for understanding and approval.

  Of course, if hopes were horses, beggars would ride, and if Colden truly expected a pat on the back, he would forever go wanting. Still, he was spared outright punishment for his actions (there was a call by some colonists that his salary be diverted to pay for the repairs to the home that Major James had leased, but it came to nothing), and Colden would remain in office until the final days of British rule.

  Colden’s capitulation and Governor Moore’s arrival on November 13 did not put an end to tensions in New York. Even though Montresor was ordered by the new governor to raze the defenses at Fort George and Moore issued no public statement regarding the stamps, the legislation remained in effect and milder protests continued in the town of New York and elsewhere.

  News of demonstrations in New Hampshire, North Carolina, Philadelphia (where Franklin’s home was threatened), and Charleston also reached London. Twelve of the colonies’ stamp collectors relinquished their duties by mid-November, and though the stamp master for Georgia did not arrive until early in January 1766, his first official action was to resign.

  In late November a group of three hundred men ferried themselves to Long Island in pursuit of Stamp Master Zachariah Hood, who had been spotted at a home in Flushing. On December 1, Montresor reported that a member of the Royal Artillery had stabbed a protester with a bayonet, but nothing came of it. A ship from Quebec arrived in New York with its captain holding a stamped clearance he had obtained there, and word came from Philadelphia that a ship had arrived from Barbados, also bearing a stamped permit. Protesters in Philadelphia seized the captain’s papers and took them to the common, where they were burned.

  On December 13, a British man-of-war intercepted one ship attempting to leave the harbor without stamped papers, forcing it to return to dock. On December 16, Governor Moore called a meeting of the New York merchants to advise them that he had ordered the navy to seize any ships attempting to leave without stamped papers. The announcement occasioned a march culminating in the burning of Lord Grenville’s effigy on the common, but no rioting accompanied the demonstration. Broadsides and advertisements were posted everywhere, Montresor observed, “seditious and infamous as ever.”

  A week before Christmas, the first snowfall of the year blanketed the city with a six-inch carpet as a forty-person contingent of militiamen maintained its watch over the stamps in the town hall. Undeterred by the weather, a mob gathered on Christmas Eve outside Captain Kennedy’s house, calling out threats that they would burn it, but they dispersed when Mayor Cruger appeared. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Montresor was deputed to draw up a proper survey of the town and its harbor; though he accepted the commission, he did so without calling attention to his charge, for reasons made obvious by such actions.

  At about the same time, the town council suggested to Governor Moore that he advertise for someone to fill the vacant post of stamp master and that if no one could be found, he should issue free passes to ships so that trade could resume. It might have been deemed a clever ploy on the part of the opposition, but the governor took no notice of it.

  On New Year’s Eve, notices went up at the Merchants Coffee House warning that the homes—and the lives—of the captains of the men-of-war were at risk should they try to stop ships leaving New York harbor without stamped paper, but though the customs house was reopened, no stamps were issued and no ships attempted to leave. Business was essentially at a standstill in the town, and Montresor continued to work on his maps, “Sub Rosa, as observations might endanger ones house and effects if not ones life.”

  Most significantly, the threat and lingering tension in the town of New York had taken on a quasi-legitimate identity. At first, the discord was centered in the essays and broadsides attributed to individuals such as John “Freeman” Scott, or in such papers as John Holt’s Gazette. Then the faceless “mob” had joined the fray, and whether its members were the pawns of the intellectuals or the “attorneys” or constituted the spontaneous uprising of the common people, they were similarly disaffiliated and disorganized, appearing one night to loot and burn, then vanishing. But by the end of 1765—and not only in New York—the disparate forces had begun to coalesce. What had begun as a generic epithet tossed off on the floor of Parliament had metamorphosed into a distinct reality.

  On December 8, John Montresor wrote in his journal, “The Sons of Liberty they term themselves, openly defying powers, office and all authority.” They had acquired an identity—and at last vague discontent and patriotic philosophy were joined to action and a political agenda.

  ( 11 )

  From Airy Nothing

  As the aggrieved Henry Van Schaack would attest, the men who called him to account in Albany on the evening of January 4 were just a group of Dutchmen, most of whom he was familiar with—he easily rattled off the names of thirty-six who had been present the night he was first accosted at Williams’s Inn.

  But two nights later, those men had become something else. In a handbill nailed to the Dutch church door, Van Schaack saw that he was now up against an organization: “Whereas Mr. Henry Van Schaack has by great impudence and unequal’d obstinacy drawn upon himself the resentment of his Fellow Citizens already, There are, Therefore, to advise him To meet the Sons of Liberty at Mr. Thomas Williams’s, Vintner, to Morrow at 10 o’clock . . . to prevent worse consequences.”

  Of course, there was correspondence between men of influence and similar political leaning in New York and Albany. And Albany sent its own set of delegates to the Stamp Act Congress in October. Montresor noted in one of his journal entries early in December that the new governor, Henry Moore, was eager to make arrangement for the quartering of a garrison of troops in Albany, “great disputes having cropped up there on that score.”

  There is no evidence that the Dutch fire masters of Albany were operating under any brief but the common resolve now uniting the colonies. But in only two days, they left off existence as a group of concerned citizens and were now issuing public statements as the Sons of Liberty, just as their counterparts in New York, Boston, and elsewhere were. And if it was a frustration for Van Schaack to find himself forced to address an organization, as opposed to John Lansing and friends, it would have been an equally invigorating transformation for the fire masters.

  In short order, the group would draft a document titled “The Constitution of the Sons of Liberty of Albany,” which began, “As in our present distressed condition, while under the greatest apprehensions of yet threatening Slavery, our surest refuges seem the mercies of God, and our own fixed and unanimous resolution to persevere to the last in the vindication of our dear bought Rights and Privileges.”

  There were eight articles of this constitution, including: (1) the stipulation of a thirteen-man elected committee, (2) that this committee was to be formed for the purpose of considering grievances pertinent to the Stamp Act, (3) that the group would “countenance no step whatsoever to the disturbance of the public tranquility, nor private peace of any man,” (4) that the group would oppose, and help bring to punishment, anyone who would injure any person or property, (5) “that we will discourage, d
iscountenance and oppose the mean practice of dropping Letters on the Streets, setting up scandalous Libels, Verse, etc.,” (6) that anyone who opposed the articles would be considered as “cold Friends to Liberty, and treated accordingly,” (7) that the group held the “highest esteem of his most sacred Majesty, King George,” and (8) that should any person “subscribing or publicly assenting and behaving agreeable to these Articles” be arrested or prosecuted for that behavior, then “we will do the uttermost for their relief.” The document was signed by ninety-four citizens of Albany, including most of the men whom Van Schaack had identified.

  On January 7, 1766, a meeting was reported at which the New York Sons of Liberty also voted to formally organize themselves, and in his diary entry of January 11, Lieutenant Montresor noted that the New York town Sons had received “advice of the Riots at Albany by the Sons of Liberty there.” When Governor Moore announced that he was still in possession of the stamps originally intended for Connecticut and would be willing to issue them to anyone who applied, the local Sons issued threats against his life.

  “Children nightly trampouze the Streets with lanthorns upon Poles & hallowing,” Montresor lamented. “The Magistracy either approve of it or do not dare to suppress the children.” He reported that “insolent advertisements” had been placed at the coffeehouse warning against anyone daring to aid in the enforcement of the Stamp Act and passed along rumors that a group of colonists in Hartford—a “large body”—had assembled there to discuss forming “a new system of government.” Some called for an intercessor such as Oliver Cromwell to seize control of the royal government while others argued for something altogether new. Only one thing was certain, Montresor said: “they were very much divided & the consequences amongst themselves were dreaded.”