For most of the 18th century, all but the last 17 years in fact, New York operated under the Union Jack as a royal British colony. Unlike some other American colonies, which had been founded for religious ideals or other high-minded purposes, the city was seen from the start as a place to make a buck.
Having been settled by the Dutch as a trading post, and conquered not long after by the British in 1664, it had grown into a rough-and-tumble seaport, congregating densely around the lower tip of Manhattan. So port-dependent was the city, as the 18th century began, that it was more apt to expand into the East River and Hudson River by landfill than to push northward. Taverns, inns, dry dock repair shops and brothels catered to the needs of the transient seamen, who hailed from five continents and spoke more than 40 languages. New York was then also notoriously hospitable to pirates, smugglers and privateers who could outfit their ships and select crews from the out-of-work mariners and adventurous hooligans who hung around the waterfront. Captain Kidd, the famous buccaneer, lived on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan. Though Kidd was captured and hanged in 1701 as an object lesson because he robbed ships other than French and Spanish (legitimate targets because they were the enemies of England), merchants and other respectable speculators continued to invest in privateering expeditions — the oceanic equivalent of sanctioned highway robbery.
The population consisted mostly of middle-class tradesmen, their families and the working poor; but already there were extreme income disparities between the upper 5%, who controlled most of the wealth, and the vast majority. Land grants were given to the wealthier families, who settled estates uptown and leased their lots downtown to the working population. The British were intent on anglicizing the colony as much as possible, both by privileging the Anglican Church and English exports, and by diminishing the Dutch influence. The proudly patrician Dutch families continued to assert an aristocratic claim in New York society, but in time they too assimilated, spoke English and inter-married with the newcomers.
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What was the city like then? Imagine handsome brick houses trimmed in stone gracing streets crowded and dirty, with wild pigs and feral dogs foraging for scraps; bewigged pedestrians who had to look sharp or get trampled by horses or step into fecal puddles (no sewer system yet); fires and epidemic diseases sweeping periodically through neighborhoods, thanks to the lack of a reliable water delivery system; British redcoats drilling in Bowling Green; and abundant oysters, eaten by everyone, especially the poor.
The economy had been built initially around fur pelts, and then expanded to include shipbuilding, sugar (imported from the West Indies and refined here, then shipped to the mother country, which had developed a sweet tooth), loans and other financial transactions, and import-export of all manner of goods, lumber, flour, linen, human beings. Eighteenth-century New York was right in the middle of the slave trade.
Almost a fifth of the city’s population consisted of black slaves, usually one or two to a well-off household, who did heavy labor and domestic chores or trained as skilled artisans; in the outlying farms of Brooklyn, Queens and upstate New York, they performed agricultural work. They may not have had as harsh a life as plantation slaves in the southern states, but some encountered cruel masters and were routinely separated from their families, and all faced unremitting, unrewarded labor. Their owners, ever fearful of slave rebellions such as had erupted in the West Indies and Charleston, tended to panic at the first signs of rowdiness.
The year 1712 witnessed a small flare-up of resistance, and in 1741 there occurred the so-called “Great Negro Plot” when a series of mysterious fires were started, and a conspiracy alleged between black slaves and poor whites (with the fine hand of Roman Catholics and Spanish agents seen in the background) to burn the city. Though the evidence of a full-blown conspiracy remains dubious, there was undoubtedly some arson and pillaging, and in the end over a dozen people were executed, including a hapless Catholic schoolteacher, blamed as the ringmaster because someone had to be. As the century wore on, and abolitionist views from abroad became more vociferous and influential, New York began to wean itself slowly from the keeping of slaves, which in any case had lost some of its economic appeal.
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Intellectually and culturally, the city was still quite provincial, taking its cues from the European capitals. But the 18th century saw the establishment of New York’s first college, library and theatre, performing Shakespeare among other dramatists; musical societies played Handel and Haydn; merchants had their portraits painted in the style of Gainsborough and Reynolds; and several lively competing newspapers started up. The New-York Weekly Journal, edited by John Peter Zenger, got into trouble with the authorities for criticizing the British governor, who tried to jail Zenger on charges of libel and sedition. Zenger’s lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, convinced the jury that truth trumped libel, setting an important precedent for freedom of the press.
Enlightenment concepts about the free circulation of ideas and the right to resist tyrannical government, expressed contemporaneously by John Locke in England and Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Marquis de Condorcet in France, began to percolate within the larger cities on this side of the Atlantic, such as Boston, Philadelphia and New York. When George III decided to milk the American colonies with various new taxes to pay for England’s expanding empire, the stage was set for an opposition to the British Crown that would culminate in the War for Independence.
The role that New York played in the American Revolution, leading up to and during the war itself, was ambiguous and contradictory. On the one hand, some of the earliest street protests sprang up in the streets of New York, with angry mobs led by seamen rampaging against the authorities. The American seaman, epitomized as “Jack Tar,” was particularly incensed by the practice of impressment, whereby soldiers would swoop down on taverns and other places where able-bodied mariners might congregate, and seize them for naval service. (The British Navy was undermanned because too many seamen had been signing onto privateer ships, lured by the promise of plundered treasure). Support for greater independence also came from civic groups such as the Sons of Liberty, which erected a liberty pole and defended the principle of no taxation without representation.
On the other hand, the New York merchants, especially the well-off ones, did most of their business with England, and were inclined toward Tory politics, conservative and loyal to the crown. They were most interested in keeping their trade options open. Just as they had only tepidly supported the British effort in the French and Indian War, since the New York merchants conducted a good deal of business with the French in Montreal, so now they feared an interruption of trade, as local patriots agitated for a boycott of British goods until the new taxes were rolled back.
On their part, the British had long appreciated the strategic geographical importance of New York, and had made it their base of operations during the French and Indian War. In no other American colony had they poured so many resources and so much manpower.
It was inevitable, once fighting broke out, that the British would do all they could to hold onto New York. And indeed, they threw an impressive display of sea power and armed troops at the port. Several key engagements were fought here, including the battles of Brooklyn, Harlem Heights and Fort Washington. George Washington, the commanding general, knew he would probably be outmanned and forced to cede the city, but it was necessary at least to put up a good fight, which his raw American troops did, before prudently retreating.
The British retook possession of New York in 1776, placing it under martial law, and established it as the headquarters for the entire British army and the political center of operations in North America. Until the very end of the Revolutionary War, when the British evacuated the city in 1783, New York remained a British stronghold, where the redcoats paraded, drilled, held balls, drank and romanced the local women. Meanwhile, American colonists loyal to the British crown poured into New York, more than doubling its original population. Two damaging, suspicious fires occurred, some say set by pro-independence guerrillas; but in general New York society adjusted quite well to occupation by the enemy.
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Perhaps the sense of mistrust that the country has long felt toward New York City began then. Or perhaps it was engendered shortly after the Revolutionary War, when Alexander Hamilton, New York’s representative to the Continental Congress and first secretary of the Treasury, argued for a more centralized federal government and against the states’ powers, at the same time as he set up the first American bank and became the spokesman for New York banking and mercantile interests. New York was already mistrusted by Jeffersonian agrarians as urban, and doubly so as capitalism’s playground. It also had a reputation for dissipation and loose morals.
In any case, when it came time to pick a permanent seat for the national government, and New York seemed a logical choice (having already served as temporary capital), the southern states strongly objected. In 1790 Hamilton offered a compromise, whereby it was agreed that the federal government would absorb the debts incurred by the states while fighting the war (a proposition greatly in the northern states’ interests, but not the south’s), in return for the capital being established southward near the Potomac, in the buggy, marshy terrain that would become Washington, DC. By rejecting New York as the national capital, the country also did the city a favor, leaving it free to pursue its destiny as the fleet, opportunistic incubator of commerce, media and ideas, unencumbered by bureaucracy’s heavy hand or marmoreal architectural monumentality.
During the early years of the Republic, New York continued to welcome newcomers from the other states and immigrants from abroad. The city’s population swelled and, not coincidentally, its real estate became more expensive; rents went high and stayed high. A securities market was established at the Tontine Coffee House, the first incarnation of what would become Wall Street. Taking advantage of its deep, secure harbor and its connections to the interior, as well as its growing army of lawyers, insurers and investors, New York at last pulled decisively ahead of Philadelphia and Boston and became the nation’s premier city, in size and prosperity. With this expanded wealth came new appetites for luxury goods; European visitors who had expected to sneer were surprised at the elegant, well-appointed houses and fashionable attire of rich New Yorkers, almost the equal of London.
There were still pigs running in the streets, but the city was beginning to clean up its act.
Phillip Lopate is the author of “Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan,” which explores the city’s shoreline, and, most recently, “Notes on Sontag.”