General Richard Montgomery and the American Revolution. Hal T. Shelton
Quartering Acts had resulted in the Boston Massacre, and the protracted series of restrictive trade and taxation acts culminated with the Boston Tea Party in late 1773 and the Intolerable or Coercive Acts of 1774. These last measures brought the closing of the port of Boston and the declaration of martial law in that colony. All of these points of contention contributed to unraveling the bonds of the parent British state with the American colonies. When colonial leaders gathered at the First Continental Congress in September 1774, the situation had reached crisis proportions. With the open hostilities between British troops and colonial militia at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, and the convening of the Second Continental Congress in May 1775, American patriots decided to secure a full redress of their grievances with Britain by armed rebellion.
The most publicized events that received the bulk of British reaction erupted in Massachusetts, which Parliament considered to be the seedbed of the revolt. Similar incidents, however, occurred throughout the colonies. New York produced its share of extralegal activities directed against British authority. Yet, avid patriots in other colonies occasionally faulted their fellow colony for demonstrating an apathetic zeal toward their cause. After returning home from a visit to New England in the summer of 1773, a Philadelphia enthusiast wrote to his friend in Boston that patriotism “seemed to have taken but shallow root in some places, particularly New York, where political principles are truly as unfixed as the wind. One year sees the New Yorkers champions for liberty, and the next hugging their chains.”17
The reputation thus acquired by New York was mostly unfair. The slow maturation of the patriot infrastructure in this province largely resulted because New York City functionally served as the capital of the British government in the colonies. Many New Yorkers, probably more than anywhere else, owed their livelihoods to the English bureaucracy. This widespread affiliation took some time to erode and generated a deceptive image of the colony. New York was slow in its revolutionary efforts only in contrast to the New England colonies, the crucible of the Revolution. The tortuous path of New York’s patriot movement concealed the depth of its commitment only to an unwary observer.
Six weeks before the Boston Massacre, New York City residents rioted against British troops. On January 19, 1770, strained civil-military relations in Manhattan led to two days of street fighting, referred to as the Battle of Golden Hill. Built-up animosity between royal military forces stationed in the city and the populace precipitated open fighting between British soldiers and New Yorkers in the Golden Hill area on John Street. Hostilities between the two factions resumed the next day with a second riot on Nassau Street before order returned.
A disturbance involving a felled liberty pole served as the provocation for this incident. In March 1766, New Yorkers joined most of the other colonies in erecting so-called liberty poles to celebrate the repeal of the unpopular Stamp Act, a major political victory over Parliament. These structures usually occupied a prominent location in the town. They functioned as patriotic symbols and rallying points for speeches and demonstrations espousing opposition to British policies in the colonies.
British troops, who considered themselves faithful agents of the Crown, regarded the liberty poles as a flagrant insult to imperial authority. Usually acting without specific orders while off duty, soldiers felt honor bound to cut the liberty poles down as quickly as they reappeared. The destruction of the fifth successive liberty pole in New York City resulted in the Golden Hill and Nassau Street riots, involving some sixty harassed troops and hundreds of angry civilians. During these brief but intense clashes, soldiers used bayonets against threatening crowds armed with weapons of opportunity. Although the participants suffered no fatalities and most casualties amounted to only cuts and bruises, the encounters underscored the combustibility of anti-British sentiment in New York.18
The reported case of Michael Smith glorified the individual action supposedly taken by some New York citizens in this affair. When word of the confrontation reached Smith, a Broadstreet chairmaker’s apprentice, he grabbed a leg of an unassembled chair and ran toward the commotion. Using the chair leg as a club, he attacked a British grenadier and captured the soldier’s weapon. Smith triumphantly returned to his shop after the fray with the musket and bayonet. He regarded the appropriated firearm as a trophy of his personal triumph over the British, and proudly displayed it while relating the circumstances of its acquisition on any occasion that presented itself. The New York Sons of Liberty seized upon these particular acts by New Yorkers to build the participants into folk heroes and strengthen the patriot rhetoric against ministerial government.
Some partisan commentators erroneously reported later that the troops killed one citizen during the New York riots and touted the skirmish as the “first blood shed” in the American Revolution. The Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770, however, with its confirmed fatalities, overshadowed the Battle of Golden Hill in the contemporary patriot mind.19
New York also participated in its own tea party. In May 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act to rescue the floundering British East India Company. Since the company represented the largest business establishment in the British Empire, this commercial enterprise was so vast that it influenced the national economy. Unfortunately, the tea trade had fallen into desperate economic straits that threatened the British financial climate. Colonial boycotts over previous British government revenue measures were responsible, in large part, for a large stockpile of unsold tea in England and the company’s possible bankruptcy. In passing the act, the government intended to give the East India Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. Parliament hoped that this marketing concession would relieve the company’s warehouses, which were burdened with 18 million pounds of surplus tea.
Even though the Tea Act would actually lower the price of tea for the consumer, it would eliminate colonial middlemen and errant tea-smuggling operations that especially flourished in the provinces of New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. Thus, powerful colonists engaged in this lucrative business stood to lose a part of their commercial domain, and they joined with popular patriot leaders to turn public opinion against the bill. The issue that emerged from these circumstances was that Parliament had devised yet another devious scheme to tax the colonies without representation, requiring the colonists to continue their vigilance against imperial slavery by resisting East India tea. When the tea ships arrived from England at the principal ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, hostile crowds awaited them. Boston Harbor became the site of the first encounter, resulting in the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, where a well-organized crowd destroyed the tea by dumping it into the water before it could be unloaded.
By the fall of 1773, the people of New York had become concerned over the tea tax as well. Constant public attention focused by local media and frequent rumors that the tea ships were approaching kept the populace agitated. The Sons of Liberty circulated an “association” pledge not to buy, sell, or use East India tea, and a wide cross section of New Yorkers signed. A clandestine patriot body, calling itself the “Mohawks,” published a notice in Rivington’s Gazetteer on December 2, 1773, that they were “prepared to pay an unwelcome visit” to any ship that arrived with the boycotted tea. News of the celebrated Boston Tea Party reached New York by December 21, 1773, to heighten dissension further.
Finally, on April 18, 1774, a tea ship anchored outside New York Harbor. After several days of heated negotiations with the patriot “committee of inspection,” the captain prudently decided not to risk the wrath of New Yorkers by trying to unload his consignment of tea, and he began to make preparations for a return to England. The master of another tea ship that arrived on April 22, 1774, was not as accommodating. He docked his vessel at a New York pier and attempted to conceal its cargo of tea while he devised a way to off-load it. The patriots suspected his plot, and their intelligence network soon confirmed their skepticism. Facing mounting animosity, the unnerved captain eventually broke down and admitted his cargo included East India tea.
Patriot activists immediately started to plan operations to prevent unloading of the tea. That night, a large crowd, under the influence of the Sons of Liberty, assembled at the wharf where the tea ship was docked. The “Mohawks” were expecting to do their duty by disposing of the tea at a prearranged time. However, the dockside crowd became so aroused and impatient by about eight o’clock that some of them took matters into their own hands. They boarded the ship and destroyed seventeen chests of tea,