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6. A Class Struggle in New York?
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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6 A Class Struggle in New York? Simon Middleton In April 1689 news of the Glorious Revolution in Europe and the overthrow of the Dominion of New England in Boston reached New York City, prompting fears of a pro-Stuart backlash and a renewed war with the French and Indians to the north. Francis Nicholson, the province’s unpopular lieutenant governor, and his council of leading merchants met in the fort to consider the city’s situation and its restless population. In Suffolk County, Long Island, militiamen mustered and marched on the city intent upon defending their“English nation’s liberties and properties from Popery and Slavery .”1 To quell the unrest and prepare for a possible French attack, Nicholson ordered the city’s militia to supplement the guard at the fort and commence repairs on the dilapidated defenses. In the weeks that followed, delays in the work prompted suspicions concerning the lieutenant governor’s commitment to defend New York. Beginning on the evening of May 30, a series of confrontations between Nicholson, the militia, and the inhabitants culminated with a row during which the lieutenant governor allegedly manhandled a respected militia officer and threatened to fire the town. Soon after, Mayor Stephen van Cortlandt later recounted,“We heard the drums beat and the Towne full of noise, and seeing the people rise and run together in armes . . . in 1 ⁄2 hour’s time the fort was full of men . . . [and] no word could be heard but they were sold betrayed and to be murdered, [and] it was time to look for themselves.”2 Thus began the only full-scale revolt in the history of New York City prior to the era of the American Revolution, which historians have named Leisler’s Rebellion for the merchant and zealous Calvinist who emerged as its leader. The sources concerning the breakdown in authority that led to the New York revolt are well known and well studied. While there has been broad agreement concerning the major protagonists and the course of events that led to the collapse of royal rule, interpretations differ concerning the rebels’ motives for seizing the fort and then backing the Leislerian administration of the city for the ensuing eighteen months. An earlier generation of scholars emphasized class conflicts arising from economic discontents created by a decade of declining trade, rising taxes, and the engrossing of urban wealth by a well-connected merchant elite.3 In his study of 1953, Jerome Reich credited the rebels with a struggle against a colonial aristocracy that figured in the development of popular rights and participatory democracy in New York.4 Elements of this view of the rebellion, as a contest pitting poor and beleaguered colonists against wealthy and arrogant leaders, and the challenge it implied to political and economic inequalities linger on in some accounts.5 In the intervening decades, however, others have been more skeptical of economic and socially-leveling motives. From the outset the rebels characterized their resistance as a defensive action, intended to save the city from the evil designs of local papist conspirators and their French allies, and for William and Mary and the Protestant cause. The rebels’ demands were conservative not radical: they aimed to preserve rather than alter the state; as they saw it, to sustain rather than challenge legitimate authority. Their primary objective was the restoration of “Loyall and faithfull persons fit for Government” and a return to what they considered a just administration and civic harmony. It is true that the majority of well-to-do merchants joined the anti-Leislerian opposition. But when popular violence erupted, the rebels targeted suspected conspirators rather than simply men of property who could be found on both sides.6 If a class interpretation of the outbreak of the revolt rests on rebel antipathies grounded in economic inequalities and discontent with social hierarchy, then Leisler’s Rebellion was clearly a different kind of struggle. Accordingly, other accounts have viewed events in terms of familial and ethnoreligious ends: disputes among elite merchant families in pursuit of power and prestige; Dutch and English antagonisms arising out of the transition to English rule and the struggle in 1683 to secure a chartered provincial government; a townspeople’s war in defense of municipal autonomy in the style of Baltic city-states and the Hanseatic League; and, finally, a preemptive strike by ardent Calvinists and admirers of William of Orange in support of the “one true religion” of the Protestant church.7 Each of...