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Chapter 6:
America resolves to meet in general congress.
July, 1774.
George the Third ranked ‘New York next to Bos-
ton in opposition to government.’
There was no place where a congress was more desired, and none where the determinations of the congress were more sure to be observed.
The numerous emigrants from
New England brought with them
New England principles; the
Dutch, as a body, never loved Britain.
Of the two great families which the system of manorial grants had raised up, the Livingstons inclined to republicanism, and uniting activity to wealth and ability, exercised a predominant influence.
The
Delanceys, who, by taking advantage of temporary prejudices, had, four years before, carried the assembly, no longer retained the public confidence; and outside of the legislature, their power was imperceptible.
After being severed from
Holland, its mother country, New York had no attachment to any European State.
All agreed in the necessity of resisting
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the pretensions of
England; but differences arose as
to the persons to be intrusted with the direction of that resistance; and as to the imminence and extent of the danger.
The merchants wished no interruption to commerce; the Dutch Reformed church, as well as the Episcopalians, were not free from jealousy of the Congregationalists, and the large land-holders were alarmed by the levelling spirit and social equality of
New England.
The people of New York had destroyed consignments of the East India company's tea; but from them the
British ministry had borne the insult without rebuke; striving only by bland language to lull them into repose.
The executive officers had for several years avoided strife with the assembly, listening patiently to its complaints, and seeking to comply with its importunities; so that no angry feeling existed between the provincial legislature and the royal governors.
The city had, moreover, been the centre of British patronage, and friends had been won by the distribution of contracts, and sometimes by commissions in the army.
The organs of the ministry were to cajole, to favor, or to corrupt; above all, to give a promise on the part of the crown of a spirit of equity, which its conduct towards the province seemed to warrant as sincere.
Besides, the assembly had
Edmund Burke for its agent, and still hoped that his influence in public affairs would correspond to their just estimate of his fidelity.
The lovers of peace, which is always so dear to a commercial community, revolted at the thought of an early and unavoidable ‘appeal’ to arms, caught eagerly at every chance of an honorable escape from the certain miseries of a desperate conflict, and exerted themselves
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strenuously to secure the management of affairs
to men of property.
For this end they relied on the ability of
John Jay, a young lawyer of New York, whose name now first appears conspicuously in the annals of his country.
Descended from
Huguenot refugees, educated in the city at its college, of the severest purity of morals, a hard student, an able writer, a ready speaker; recently connected with the family of
Livingston by marriage; his superior endowments, his activity and his zeal for liberty, tempered by a love for order, made him for a quarter of a century distinguished in his native state.
At that time he joined the dignity of manhood to the energy of youth.
He was both shy and proud, and his pride, though it became less visible, suffered no diminution from time.
Tenacious of his purposes and his opinions, sensitive to indignities and prone to sudden resentments, not remarkable for selfposses-sion, with a countenance not trained to concealment, neither easy of access, nor quick in his advances, gifted with no deep insight into character, he had neither talents nor inclination for intrigue; and but for his ambition, which he always subjected to his sense of right, he would have seemed formed for study and retirement.
On Monday, the fourth day of July, it was carried in the committee of fifty-one, that delegates should be selected to serve in the general congress.
Sears, who was still foremost in the confidence of the mechanics, seconded by
Peter Van Brugh Livingston, a man of great intelligence, proposed
John Morin Scott and
Alexander Macdougall.
Fitter candidates could not have been found; but they were both passed over by
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a great majority, and the committee nominated Philip
Livingston,
Alsop, Low,
Duane, and
Jay for the approval of the people.
Of these five,
Livingston as yet dreaded the thought of independence;
Alsop was incompetent; Low was at heart a tory, as at a later day he avowed;
Duane, justly eminent as a lawyer, was embarrassed by large speculations in
Vermont lands, from which he could derive no profit but through the power of the crown.
The mass of the inhabitants resolved to defeat this selection.
On Wednesday, the sixth of July, many of them, especially mechanics, assembled in the Fields, and with
Macdougall in the chair, they recommended the
Boston policy of suspending trade, and approved a general congress, to which, after the example of
Virginia, they proposed to elect representatives by a colonial convention.
It has been kept in memory, that on this occasion a young man from abroad, so small and delicate in his organization, that he appeared to be much younger than perhaps he really was, took part in the debate before the crowd.
They asked one another the name of the gifted stranger, who shone like a star first seen above a haze, of whose rising no one had taken note.
He proved to be
Alexander Hamilton, a West Indian.
His mother, while he was yet a child, had left him an orphan and poor.
A father's care he seems never to have known.
The first written trace of his existence is in 1766, when his name occurs as witness to a legal paper executed in the
Danish island of
Santa Cruz.
Three years later, when he had become ‘a youth,’ he ‘contemned the grovelling condition of a clerk,’
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fretted at the narrow bounds of his island cage, and
to a friend of his own years confessed his ambition.
‘I would willingly risk my life,’ said he, ‘though not my character, to exalt my station.
I mean to prepare the way for futurity; we have seen such schemes successful when the projector is constant.’
That way he prepared by integrity of conduct, diligence and study.
After an education as a merchant, during which he once at least conducted a voyage, and once had the charge of his employer's business, he found himself able to repair to New York, where he entered the college before the end of 1773.
Trained from childhood to take care of himself, he possessed a manly self-reliance.
His first sympathies in the contest had been on the
British side against the
Americans; but he soon changed his opinions; and in July, 1774, cosmopolitan New York, where he had neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother, nor one person in whose veins ran the same blood as his own, adopted the volunteer from the tropics as its son.
The committee of fifty-one, with some of whom
Hamilton was to be bound by the closest political ties, keeping steadily in view the hope of conciliation with
England, disavowed the meeting in the Fields.
A minority of nine,
Sears, MacDougal,
Van Brugh Livingston being of the number, in their turn disavowed the committee from which they withdrew.
The conservative party, on their side, offered resolutions which
Jay had drafted, and which seemed to question the conduct of
Boston in destroying the tea; but the people, moved by the eloquence of
John Morin Scott, rejected the whole series, as wanting in vigor, sense, and integrity, and tending to disunion.
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Thus began the conflict of two parties which
were to increase in importance and spread throughout the country.
The one held to what was established, and made changes only from necessity; the other welcomed reform, and went out to meet it. The one anchored on men of property; the other on the mass of the people; the one, mildly loving liberty, was ever anxious for order; the other, firmly attached to order which it never doubted its power to maintain, was anxious only for freedom; the one distrusted the multitude as capable of rashness; the other suspected the few as at heart the enemies to popular power.
During this strife in New York, the inhabitants of
South Carolina held in
Charleston a meeting which continued through three days. The merchants, among whom were factors for British houses, agreed with the planters in the necessity of a congress to which both parties, by way of compromise, referred the regulation of commerce.
As the election of deputies was to be contested, the name of each voter was registered, and the ballot kept open till midnight on the seventh.
It then appeared that the planters had carried
Gadsden,
Lynch, and
John Rutledge, the faithful members of the congress of 1765, with
Edward Rutledge and
Middleton.
The delegates elect were empowered to agree to a suspension of exports as well as imports.
In due time the house of assembly, meeting at eight in the morning, just half an hour before the governor could send to prorogue them, confirmed these proceedings and ratified the choice of delegates.
‘Don't pay for an ounce of the tea,’ was the reiterated message from
South Carolina.
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The convention of
Pennsylvania, which was but
an echo of the opinion of
Dickinson, recommended an indemnity to the East India company, dissuaded from suspending trade, and advised the gentler method of a firm and decent claim of redress.
The idea of independence they disowned and utterly abhorred.
If Britain on her side would repeal the obnoxious acts, they were ready to engage their obedience to the acts of navigation, and also to settle an annual revenue on the king, subject to the control of parliament.
These views, which were intended as instructions from the people to the men who might be chosen to represent them in congress,
Dickinson accompanied with a most elaborate argument, in which with chilling erudition the rights of the colonies were confirmed by citations from a long train of lawyers, philosophers, poets, statesmen, and divines, from the times of
Sophocles and Aristotle to Beccaria and
Blackstone.
Tenderly suceptible to the ideas of justice and right, he refused to believe that a British ministry or king could be deaf to his appeals.
Willing to sacrifice himself and his own estate, he shrunk only from perilling the fortunes and lives of millions.
His success in allaying the impassioned enthusiasm of patriotism went beyond his intentions.
The assembly of Pennsylvania, which was suddenly called together on the eighteenth of July, passed him over in electing their delegates to the continental congress, and preferred
Galloway their speaker, whose loyalty was unsuspected.
In
New Jersey,
Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister, president of Princeton college, and ‘as high
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a son of liberty as any man in
America,’ met the
committee at
New Brunswick; and with
William Livingston labored to instruct their delegates that the tea should not be paid for. The matter was left to the general congress, to which
William Livingston was chosen.
In
New Hampshire the members of its convention brought with them little stocks of money, contributed by the several towns to defray the expenses of a representation in congress.
The inhabitants of that province also solemnized their action by keeping a day of fasting and public prayer.
Massachusetts did the same; and
Gage, who looked with stupid indifference on the spectacle of thirteen colonies organizing themselves as one people, on occasion of the fast, issued a proclamation against ‘hypocrisy and sedition.’
Meantime New York had grown weary of dissensions.
The persons nominated for congress gave in writing a satisfactory profession of their zeal for liberty; and on the twenty-seventh of July, the nomination was unanimously ratified by the inhabitants.
Yet the delegation was lukewarm and divided, leaving
Virginia to give the example of energy and courage.
Dunmore had issued writs for an assembly; but the delegates from the different counties of
Virginia none the less assembled in provincial convention.
Illness detained
Jefferson on the road, but he sent for consideration a paper which expressed his convictions and distinctly foreshadowed the
declaration of independence.
Enumerating the grievances which affected all the colonies, he made a special complaint of a
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wrong to
Virginia.
‘For the most trifling reasons,’
said he, ‘and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, his majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency.
The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.
But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from
Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty's negative; thus preferring the immediate advantage of a few British corsairs, to the lasting interests of the
American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.’
The words of
Jefferson were universally approved; and the convention to which they were presented by
Peyton Randolph came to this resolution: ‘After the first day of November next, we will neither ourselves import, nor purchase any slave or slaves imported by any other person, either from
Africa, the
West Indies, or any other place.’
On the affairs of
Massachusetts the temper of the Virginians ran exceedingly high.
‘An innate spirit of freedom,’ such were the words of
Washington, ‘tells me that the measures which the administration are most violently pursuing, are opposed to every principle of natural justice.’
He was certain that it was neither the wish nor the interest of any government on the continent, separately or collectively, to set up independence, but he rejected indignantly the claim of parliament, and saw no ‘reason to expect
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anything from their justice.’
‘The crisis,’ he said,
‘is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us tame and abject slaves.’
From the first he was convinced that there was not ‘any thing to be expected from petitioning.’
‘Ought we not, then,’ he exclaimed, ‘to put our virtue and fortitude to the severest test?’
Thus
Washington reasoned privately with his friends.
In the convention,
Richard Henry Lee and
Patrick Henry were heard with such delight that the one was compared to
Cicero, the other to
Demosthenes.
But
Washington, who never was able to see distress without a desire to assuage it, made the most effective speech when he uttered the wish to ‘raise one thousand men, subsist them at his own expense, and march at their head for the relief of
Boston.’
The resolves and instructions of
Virginia corresponded to his spirit.
They demanded that the restrictions on navigation should themselves be restrained.
Especially were they incensed at the threat of
Gage to use the deadly weapon of constructive treason against such inhabitants of
Massachusetts as should assemble to consider of their grievances, and form associations for their common conduct; and they voted that ‘the attempt to execute this illegal and odious proclamation, would justify resistance and reprisal.’
