NEW YORK TRANSFORMED: COMMITTEES, MILITIAS, AND THE SOCIAL EFFECTS OF POLITICAL MOBILIZATION IN REVOLUTIONARY NEW YORK by COLIN JAY WILLIAMS HAROLD E. SELESKY, COMMITTEE CHAIR HOWARD JONES TONY A. FREYER DANIEL RICHES EUGENIA KIESLING A DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of The University of Alabama TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA 2013 Copyright Colin Jay Williams 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT Social mobilization during the American Revolution rapidly, fundamentally, and permanently changed the way New Yorkers related to government. By forcing residents to choose sides and regulating their access to commodities such as salt and tea, local committees made government integral to how people lived their lives. Rebel campaigns against the British army in 1776 and 1777 furthered this involvement, giving state-formed commissions for detecting and defeating conspiracies the warrant to investigate individual conduct and define acceptable political behavior. With Tories expelled from central New York and the disaffected persuaded to support rebellion in the war’s later years, the rebel government redistributed loyalist property and enfranchised much of white society. By the 1788 Poughkeepsie Convention, New Yorkers – a people who had previously related to each other through their social class, religious affiliation, and position within a community – believed that government existed to expand political participation, provide citizens with economic opportunity, and protect the rights of the individual. ii DEDICATION To my parents iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Submitting a doctoral dissertation is a good occasion to pause and thank a few people. First, for sparking and sustaining my interest in history, I thank my parents. To them I dedicate this manuscript. Second, for his critical eye and dedication to my development as an historian, I thank Harold Selesky. I am indebted to you more than you know. Finally, for making everything in life worthwhile, I thank my wife. I love you, honey. iv CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………...……………… ii DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………………………... iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………….……………...…. iv INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………….. 1 1. The Structure of Political Authority in Colonial New York………………………………… 11 English Rule of a Dutch Colony…………………………………………………...…… 13 Attempts to Unify After Leisler…………………………..…………………………..… 26 The Rise of Local Government as the Primary Means of Social Organization………….40 2. Committee Formation and the Legitimization of the Rebel Cause, April 1775 – May 1776....65 Establishing a Committee Structure of Government………………..………………..… 66 Association-signing……..………………………………………………………………. 81 The Quest for Legitimacy …………....…………………………………….…………..105 3. The 1776 Campaign and the Increasing Authority of Committee System, June 1776 – October 1776……………………….……………………………………………………..…113 The British Advance in the North and Threaten the South…………………………..... 114 The British Stopped in the North and in Control of the South………………………... 127 Social Mobilization….……………………………………………………………….... 138 4. Adjusting to the Permanent Presence of British Forces, November 1776 – May 1777…… 150 Committees for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies …….…………...………...….. 151 Suppressing Internal Dissent ………………………………………………………….. 162 George Clinton and the Committee System…………………………………………… 178 v 5. The 1777 Campaign and the Establishment of a New Government, June 1777 – September 1779……..………………………………………………………………..……. 188 Three Prongs into Central New York ………………………………………...………. 189 The 1777 Constitution………………………………………………………….……… 200 Constitutional Governance in a Time of War…..…………………………..…………. 209 6. Legislating Social Change, October 1779 – July 1788………………………………..…… 224 Transformative Legislation……………………………………………………….…… 225 The Return of Contention to New York Politics…………………………………….... 233 The 1788 Poughkeepsie Convention……………………………………………..…… 244 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………... 255 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………... 261 APPENDIX: Paying for the War..............................………………………………………..... 273 vi Introduction As an advisor in Kirkuk, Iraq in 2011, I participated in a lunch attended by the commander of the nearby Iraqi army, the commander of the nearby Peshmerga brigade, and the provincial police chief. Hosting the lunch was the commander of a rapid response force composed of soldiers and policemen from all three organizations. The four men differed in ethnicity, background, and agenda; their commands contained members of antagonistic religious sects and opposing political parties. What had brought them together was a shared love for their city and a desire to live together in peace. These men, all respected leaders whose reputations elevated them beyond the importance of their position, were able to negotiate and make agreements that, at least until American troops departed at the end of the year, curtailed acts of recrimination and violence. Conditions, personalities, and environments differ for every situation, historical or current; nonetheless, the similarities between two points in time can sometimes be striking. When I was not advising the Peshmerga brigade commander, visiting the rapid response force commander, or facilitating meetings such as the lunch mentioned above, I spent my tour in Iraq writing and thinking about colonial and revolutionary New York. Although separated geographically and temporally, northern Iraq in 2011 and New York from 1664 to 1788 were both political entities defined more by their invasion histories and the presence of a dominant river basin than by the commonness of their inhabitants. Iraqis today interpret events through communal prospectives and relate to others according to the ethnicity, municipality, religion, and family into which they were born. Likewise, New York before the revolutionary crisis was a 1 premodern society in which people defined themselves locally and organized themselves hierarchically. How New Yorkers emerged from a class-based and socially stratified understanding of political existence is the general theme of the dissertation that follows. Its approach is premised on two observations made both in my exploration of the primary record of New York politics and during my experience advising military and political leaders in Kirkuk, Iraq. First, when a state government is weak and distant, influence is exerted and decisions are made locally. Second, in such environments, change occurs neither by distant leaders trying to impose a unified identity nor by masses agitating for freedom from but by local leaders negotiating with other local leaders in an attempt to advance the political standing of their constituencies. These ideas are not sui generis , having been applied in various ways to both colonial and revolutionary New York. Perhaps the most brilliant recognition of the importance of local factors in influencing political positions is John Shy’s assertion in “The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War” that militia service taught the ideals of the revolutionary movement to newly independent Americans.1 Shy presented his argument in an essay, a format that limited his ability to develop fully the implications of his claim. Although supporting his position with well-chosen examples, he argued for the importance of militias broadly, assuming that the “political education . by military means” of one militiaman was similar to that of every other militiaman. 2 Shy did not question who formed these local military organizations or how those who served in them were convinced of the need to separate from Britain, other than to suggest that exposure to British atrocities solidified residents’ desire for independence. In this 1 John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence , rev. ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 236. 2 Ibid. 2 observation Shy was correct – especially for those who took up arms to protect themselves from invasion – although incomplete. Atrocities themselves did not motivate men to take to the field; instead, it was the publication and propagandization of atrocities that convinced men to fight. This dissertation is written to explain how that persuasion occurred in New York, why it upended the way New Yorkers defined themselves, and what this transformation meant to the state’s post-revolutionary generation. It does not focus on why New Yorkers rebelled from the British or posit an answer to why that rebellion was successful. Residents entered into military conflict due to exogenous reasons: they did not choose war; war came to them as a result of Parliament’s repression of a restive Boston and the fear – publicized and magnified by rebel- minded instigators – that they would be treated similarly. In accepting the existence of something already in progress, New Yorkers with rebel agendas made use of the province’s axial geography and social composition to prosecute the war in a way that changed the norms of political society. Good studies of how the rebel elite and persuadable masses entered into a state of rebellion already exist. Daniel Hulsebosch, whose Constituting Empire is the most recent scholarly work on colonial and revolutionary New York, argues that geographic mobility transformed New York law from a system based on jurisdiction to one based on jurisprudence. 3 To him, the war against Britain was