A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3

by De Alva Stanwood Alexander

It was during these months of discord that Alexander Hamilton, then a lad of seventeen, astonished his listeners at the historic meeting "in the Fields,"[3] with the cogency of his arguments and the wonderful flights of an unpremeditated eloquence while denouncing the act of Parliament which closed the port of Boston. Hamilton had already been a year in America attending the Elizabethtown grammar school, conducted under the patronage of William Livingston, soon to become the famous war governor of New Jersey. This experience quickened the young man's insight into the vexed relations between the Colonies and the Crown, and shattered his English predilections in favour of the little minds that Burke thought so ill-suited to a great empire. A visit to Boston shortly after the "tea party" seems also to have had the effect of crowding his mind with thoughts, deeply and significantly freighted with the sentiment of liberty, which were soon to make memorable the occasion of their first utterance.

The remarkable parallel between Hamilton and the younger Pitt begins in this year, while both are in the schoolroom. Hamilton "in the Fields" recalls Pitt at the bar of the House of Lords, amazing his companions with the ripe intelligence and rare sagacity with which he followed the debate, and the readiness with which he skilfully formulated answers to the stately arguments of the wigged and powdered nobles. Pitt, under the tuition of his distinguished father, was fitted for the House of Commons as boys are fitted for college at Exeter and Andover, and he entered Parliament before becoming of age. Hamilton's preparation had been different. At twelve years of age he was a clerk in a counting house on the island of Nevis in the West Indies; at sixteen he entered a grammar school in New Jersey; at seventeen he became a sophomore at King's College. It is then that he spoke "in the Fields"—not as a sophomore, not as a precocious youth with unripe thoughts, not as a boy orator—but as a man speaking with the wisdom of genius.

After the meeting "in the Fields" patriotism proved stronger than prejudice, and in November, 1774, the Committee of Fifty-one gave place to a Committee of Sixty, charged with carrying out recommendations of the Continental Congress. Soon after a Committee of One Hundred, composed of members of the Committees of Fifty and Fifty-one, assumed the functions of a municipal government. Finally, in May, 1775, representatives were chosen from the several counties to organise a Provincial Congress to take the place of the long established legislature of the Colony, which had become so steeped in toryism that it refused to recognise the action of any body of men who resented the tyranny of Parliament. Thus, in the brief space of eighteen months, the government of the Crown had been turned into a government of the people.

For several months, however, the patriots of New York had desired a more complete state government. All admitted that the revolutionary committees were essentially local and temporary. Even the hottest Son of Liberty came to fear the licentiousness of the people on the one hand, and the danger from the army on the other. Nevertheless, the Provincial Congress, whose members had been trained by harsh experience to be stubborn in defence and sturdy in defiance, declined to assume the responsibility of forming such a government as the Continental Congress recommended. That body had itself come into existence as a revolutionary legislature after the Provincial Assembly had refused either to approve the proceedings of the first Continental Congress, or to appoint delegates to the second; and, although it did not hesitate to usurp temporarily the functions of the Tory Assembly, to its great credit it believed the right of creating and framing a new civil government belonged to the people; and, accordingly, on May 24, 1776, it recommended the election of new representatives who should be specially authorised to form a government for New York.

The members of this new body were conspicuous characters in New York's history for the next third of a century. Among them were John Jay, George Clinton, James Duane, Philip Livingston, Philip Schuyler, and Robert R. Livingston. The same men appeared in the Committee of Safety, at the birth of the state government, as witnesses of the helplessness of the Confederation, and as backers or backbiters of the Federal Constitution. Among those associated with them were James Clinton, Ezra L'Hommedieu, Marinus Willett, John Morin Scott, Alexander McDougall, John Sloss Hobart, the Yateses, Abraham, Richard and Robert; the Van Cortlandts, James, John and Philip; the Morrises, Richard, Lewis and Gouverneur, and all the Livingstons. Only two illustrious names are absent from these early patriotic lists, but already Alexander Hamilton had won the heart of the people by his wonderful eloquence and logic, and Aaron Burr, a comely lad of nineteen, slender and graceful as a girl, with the features of his beautiful mother and the refinement of his distinguished grandfather, had thrown away his books to join Arnold on his way to Quebec. These men passed into history in companies, but each left behind his own trail of light. Where danger called, or civic duties demanded prudence and profound sagacity, this band of patriots appeared in council and in the camp, ready to answer to the roll-call of their country, and by voice and vote set the pace which achieved independence.

The new Provincial Congress met at the courthouse in White Plains on July 9, 1776, and, as evidence of the change from the old institutions to the new, it adopted the name of the "Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York." As further evidence of the new order of things it declared that New York began its existence as a State on April 20, 1775. It also adopted as the law of the State such parts of the common and statute law of England as were in force in the Colony of New York on April 19, 1775.

By this time the British forces had become so active in the vicinity of New York that the convention thought it advisable to postpone the novel and romantic work of state-making until the threatened danger had passed; but, before its hasty adjournment, by requesting officers of justice to issue all processes and pleadings under the authority and in the name of the State of New York, it served notice that King and Parliament were no longer recognised as the source of political authority. This appears to have been the first official mention of the new title of the future government.[4] When the convention reassembled on the first day of the following August it appointed John Jay chairman of a committee to report the draft of a state constitution.

Jay was then thirty-one years old, a cautious, clever lawyer whose abilities were to make a great impression upon the history of his country. He belonged to a family of Huguenot merchants. The Jays lived at La Rochelle until the revocation of the Edict of Nantes drove the great-grandfather to England, where the family continued until 1686, when Augustus, the grandfather, settled in New York. It was not a family of aristocrats; but for more than a century the Jays had ranked among the gentry of New York City, intermarrying with the Bayards, the Stuyvesants, the Van Cortlandts and the Philipses. To these historic families John Jay added another, taking for his wife Sarah Livingston, the sister of Brockholst, who later adorned the Supreme Court of the United States, and the daughter of William, New Jersey's coming war governor, already famous as a writer of poems and essays.

Jay's public career had begun two years before in connection with the revolutionary Committee of Fifty-one. He did not accept office because he loved it. He went into politics as he might have travelled on a stage-coach at the invitation of a few congenial friends, for their sake, not for his own. When he took up the work of organisation, therefore, it was with no wish to become a leader; he simply desired to guide the spirit of resistance along orderly and forceful lines. But soon he held the reins and had his foot on the brake. In drafting a reply to resolutions from a Boston town meeting, he suggested a Congress of all the Colonies, to which should be referred the disturbing question of non-importation. This letter was not only the first serious suggestion of a general Congress, placing its author intellectually at the head of the Revolutionary leaders; but the plan—which meant broader organisation, more carefully concerted measures, an enlistment of all the conservative elements, and one official head for thirteen distinct and widely separated colonies—gradually found favour, and resulted in sending the young writer as a delegate to the first Continental Congress.

It was in this Congress that Jay won the right to become a constitution-maker. Of all the men of that busy and brilliant age, no one advanced more steadily in the general knowledge and favour. When he wrote the address to the people of Canada, his great ability was recognised at once; and after he composed the appeal to Ireland and to Jamaica, the famous circular letter to the Colonies, and the patriotic address to the people of his own State, his wisdom was more frequently drawn upon and more widely appreciated than ever; but he may be said to have leaped into national fame when he drafted the address to the people of Great Britain. While still ignorant of its authorship, Jefferson declared it "a production of the finest pen in America."