Conceived in Liberty (77 page)

On June 26, the revolutionary Committee of Safety met in Queens. Most of the counties of New York accepted the invitation to send delegates, and prominent citizens attended from New York City, Kings, Queens, Westchester, and Richmond (Staten Island) counties, as well as one each from the towns of Tappan, Hackensack, and Elizabethtown in New Jersey. The county delegates were in turn elected at county meetings of delegates elected by the towns. Refusing to send delegates was Suffolk County, where the towns—especially Southold and Setauket —once again hoped to join Connecticut. Albany, Kingston, and most of New Jersey also failed to send representatives. It seems clear that the town elections were highly democratic, with almost all of the adult males of the participating towns voting in the elections for delegates.

The Suffolk towns were not, incidentally, the only ones that wanted to merge with Connecticut. Jacob Leisler was particularly active in
working for such a merger, and Connecticut did agree to send two delegates to the meeting of the Committee of Safety along with ten friendly soldiers.

The delegates to the committee, to repeat, were not unknown members of a mob, but prominent citizens of the community. The revolutionary committee, for example, included in its ranks Dr. Gerardus Beekman of Kings, a future acting governor of the colony; William Lawrence of Hackensack, a future councillor; and Samuel Edsall, father-in-law of both Lawrence and Delanoy, and a prominent trader who had held political office in New Jersey. The Committee of Safety officially dissolved the authority of the royal Council and its customs commissioners, appointed Peter Delanoy as moderator of the committee, and confirmed his appointment as collector. It also named Jacob Leisler as permanent captain of the fort.

The old municipal court now ceased to meet; Leisler refused to guarantee the safety of its members. The reactionary pro-Andros mayor of New York City, Stephanus Van Cortlandt, and his fellow councillors made themselves scarce. The revolutionary government was now the sole government in New York City and vicinity.

Now that the revolution had been accomplished and the old order completely overthrown, we may pause to ask about the meaning of this revolution. For it is important, when weighing the reasons for the outbreak of a revolution, to separate this stage from the later history of the revolutionary government
after
it has taken power. Many writers have judged the rebellion to be a class struggle, a pure outbreak of religious hatred, or an ethnic war of Dutch against English rule. Yet it should be clear that all these explanations are either fallacious or—in the case of the religious explanation—partial and misleading. The revolution was
not
a class struggle of the poor against the rich, or of the laborer against other occupations. It was the culmination of many years of political and economic grievances suffered by every great economic class in the colony, by every section, by English and Dutch alike. The aggressively English towns of Suffolk were and had always been even more revolutionary than the Dutch of New York. And the Dutch members of the ruling oligarchy—the Bayards, the Van Cortlandts, and the leading Dutch ministers—were just as fiercely opposed to the revolution as were the English members. Economically, the leaders of the revolutionary movement ranged from the prominent merchants, and other citizens named above, to such men as Joost Stol, a carter and an ensign in Leisler’s militia company. Stol was probably the single person most responsible for the fateful decision of the militia to seize the fort on May 30. In short, this was truly a liberal
people’s
revolution, a revolution of all classes and ethnic strains in New York against the common oppressors: the oligarchical ruling clique and its favorites, receivers of patronage, privilege,
and monopolistic land grants from the royal government. Indeed, the counterrevolutionaries—the opponents of this popular rebellion—were almost invariably the ruling clique: the royal bureaucracy and the recipients of monopolistic land grants. In this group were Bayard, Van Cortlandt, Philipse, William Nicolls, and Peter Schuyler and his brother-in-law, Robert Livingston.
*
As in the other colonies under Dominion rule, though with greater difficulty because of the Nicholsonian bureaucracy, the people took heart from the overthrow of Andros in Boston to end the hated rule of the Dominion in New York as well. Even the anti-Catholicism is largely explainable by the Catholicism of James II and many of his ruling henchmen in New York. And, finally, the revolution in New York cannot correctly be termed “Leisler’s Rebellion.” The fact that Jacob Leisler acquired control of the revolutionary government after it had assumed power should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Leisler was only one of the many leaders of the actual revolution, and that this was a spontaneous uprising of the mass of the people.

Any libertarian revolution that
takes power
immediately confronts a grave inner contradiction: in the last analysis, liberty and power are incompatible. Thus, Peter Delanoy was now supposed to collect the colony’s taxes. But a tax paid to a Delanoy was no less oppressive or tyrannical than the same tax paid to a Nicholson. And so the merchants still refused to pay the duties, again using the argument that they had not been levied by a representative assembly. Six weeks later, the revolution took a decisive step from liberty to power. On August 16 the Committee of Safety, in its second meeting, created an executive of almost unlimited authority—by naming Jacob Leisler commander in chief of New York Province.

As soon as Leisler assumed supreme power, he, naturally, began to use it. The first step was to arrest whoever dared to criticize the new regime. Arrests included merchants and laborers, Dutchmen such as the Schuylers and Philipses, and Anglicans such as Thomas Clark. Many were arrested on suspicion of disloyalty. It is true, however, that the prisoners were treated with relative moderation and many were freed on taking a loyalty oath to William and Mary. Leisler also used his power to conscript youths and even children into labor gangs to repair Manhattan’s Fort James.

The revolutionary Committee of Safety, before adjourning, decided to press ahead with the annual September elections that had been held in pre-Dominion years; also, to expand democracy and check oligarchy by subjecting justices of the peace and militia captains to the decisions of the voters. In an action reflecting the bitter anti-Catholicism of the people, all Protestant freeholders were made eligible to vote. In New York City the people elected aldermen and common councillors according to the old charter. In addition, Leisler made elective the three top posts in the city—mayor, sheriff, and town clerk—which had always been appointive. The free elections removed the counterrevolutionaries from office, and Stephanus Van Cortlandt was replaced as mayor by Peter Delanoy (who was to be the last popularly elected mayor of New York until the nineteenth century).

Although Leisler and the committee controlled the bulk of New York, they did not command the allegiance of Albany. Albany, tightly run by the privileged monopolists of the Iroquois fur trade, was devoted to the Dominion. Its top officials were leaders of the Andros oligarchy: for example, Mayor Peter Schuyler and his assistant and brother-in-law, Robert Livingston. In the fall elections, Albany simply reelected its old officials.

The shift from liberty to power was now proceeding apace. Leisler and the committee became filled with imperialistic zeal to impose their unwanted rule on Albany. An expedition of three ships was sent by Leisler, under his future son-in-law, the merchant Jacob Milborne, to seize Albany. Albany, to cover itself, forced every townsman to take an oath of allegiance to William and Mary. The Albany convention then refused to permit Milborne to enter the fort. Milborne now tried to appeal to the people of Albany over the heads of their rulers; he urged them to overthrow all government derived from James II and promised free elections and other liberties. Milborne’s stirring words had some effect, and a hundred citizens of Albany elected Jochim Staats as captain of Milborne’s troops in Albany.

But the support of Staats and the Albany opposition for Milborne was not enough. The convention oligarchy and the fort determined to resist and they threw into the breach the powerful support of the Iroquois, fur-trading allies of the Albany oligarchs. The Iroquois threatened to attack Milborne should he persist, and Milborne finally left ignominiously for home. Moreover, to complete the fiasco, Captain Staats and his Milborne militia were now obliged to take orders from the convention. Albany was the more strengthened by Connecticut’s recognition of its convention government.

At this point, Leisler’s fortunes took a swift turn upward. A letter arrived in mid-December from King William, legitimizing the rule of either Nicholson or “such as for the time being take care for preserving
the peace and administering the laws,” and naming said person lieutenant governor.

Thus, by the end of 1689 the revolutionary government in New York, as in Massachusetts, had been at least temporarily legitimized by the Crown, while the other New England colonies resumed their old ways of self-government. As with the other colonies, the key to their fate rested on the decisions of the new monarch.

The August session of the Committee of Safety had decided to send an agent to England to plead its case. Chosen was the revolutionary cartman, Joost Stol, whose lower-class ways were not, alas! calculated to endear him to the aristocratic officials of the Crown. Stol presented seven bold demands to the Privy Council, including royal and parliamentary approval of the actions of the revolution, a new self-governing charter for New York, and encouragement for a united colonial effort to conquer French Canada. But unlike the cause of Massachusetts at court, Leisler’s regime was doomed from the start. For even as Leisler was being temporarily confirmed in his post, the king prepared to end his rule and all self-government in New York. Heavily influenced by the reports of the old oligarchs, Bayard and Van Cortlandt, the Lords of Trade recommended that a royal governor, with two companies of troops, be sent to rule New York. Colonel Henry Sloughter was promptly chosen as governor. Only a war in France held up Sloughter’s actual arrival in New York and permitted Leisler to continue his interim rule.

In contrast to conditions in other colonies under Dominion rule, everything was quiet during the Glorious Revolution in the colonies of East Jersey and West Jersey. While the New England colonies aimed to resume self-government and while New York tried to move from royal colony to self-government, the Jerseys had been proprietary colonies before the Dominion. With Nicholson and his royal officials gone, the proprietors, who had been facing
quo warranto
action against their territories, trod warily indeed, and did nothing during the years of turmoil after 1689. Central government in the Jerseys disappeared with the end of the Dominion and the colonies were left with existing local governments only. In this state of purely minimal government, the people of the Jerseys were happy. The royal officials were gone. Their ancient proprietary enemies were cautious and inactive. Indeed, there was virtually nothing against which to revolt.

*
A leading historian of the rebellion has written: “A fair characterization of all [the opponents of the revolution]... would be that they were officials and landed, or would-be landed, aristocrats. There are, however, no grounds for terming the ‘rebellion’ a ‘class struggle’ in the Marxist sense. Capitalists were found in both camps” (Jerome Reich,
Leisler’s Rebellion
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953], p. 73). The reason for the last statement might be added: “capitalists” are never a homogeneous entity, as is true of all Marxian classes that are not, as we have noted above, “estates” or “castes.” The capitalists who gained their money from government privilege were against the revolution; the capitalists who earned their money in free market activity joined all the other producers in the colony to favor it.

While the northern colonies were routing the hated Dominion and at least temporarily restoring self-government, King William was inaugurating his reign by taking England into a general European alliance (the League of Augsburg) against France. William had already been at war with France as stadtholder of Holland, and he was now eager to continue in that tradition. The war with France, beginning in 1689, had important repercussions in the New World.

Historians of each nation, when treating their country’s foreign affairs and conflicts, almost always make it appear that
their
side was the righteous one and
their
state beset and threatened by lowering enemies. Any objective historian of New France and the English colonies, however, should certainly conclude that the menace was
to
New France, and not
from
New France. New France had a population of 12,000 compared with that of 100,000 in New England alone. Second, the English were solidly allied with the most feared, most aggressive, and most imperialistic Indians in the northeast—the Iroquois.

The basic struggle between the French on the one hand and the Iroquois, Dutch, and English on the other was economic—the beaver trade. In the seventeenth century the French had settled in Quebec and along the St. Lawrence and had developed a thriving fur trade with the Indian tribes farther west. But this trade interfered with the Iroquois, who tried by coercion to obtain a monopoly of the intermediate fur trade. The French in Canada could deal directly with the western tribes, but the Dutch and English in Albany could not. In Albany the Iroquois could find a market for resale of the furs purchased from the Indians
farther west. In short, both the Iroquois and the English had a vested interest in aggressions against the French: the Iroquois to eliminate competition for the purchase of furs from the western Indians, and to obtain a monopoly of the middleman fur trade; the English to oust the French from the fur trade, and to grab French land for the glory and benefit of the Crown.