The result of Zenger’s trial established the freedom of the press in the colonies,[476] for it settled here the right of juries to find a general verdict in libel cases, as was done in England by a law of Parliament passed many years later, and it took out of the hands of judges appointed to serve during the king’s pleasure, and not during good behavior, as in England, the power to do mischief.[477] It also gave a finishing blow to the Court of Exchequer, which, after the case of Cosby versus Van Dam, never again exercised an equity jurisdiction, and it suppressed the royal prerogative in an assumed right to establish courts without consulting the legislature. The jurisdiction hitherto exercised by the Supreme Court as a Court of Exchequer—that is, in all matters relating to his majesty’s lands, rights, rents, profits, and revenues—had always been called in question by colonial lawyers, because no act of the general assembly countenanced it. It was, therefore, a relief to everybody in the province when the legislature, in 1742, passed an “Act for regulating the payment of the Quit-Rents,” which in effect, though not in name, established on a firm basis a branch of the Supreme Court as a Court of Exchequer. As then instituted, it passed into the courts of the state, and was only abolished in December, 1828.
The excitement over the Zenger trial had hardly had time to subside when Rip van Dam again disturbed the public mind by claiming, after Cosby’s death, that he as eldest councillor was entitled to be president of the council, and as such to be acting governor, although he had been removed from the council by Cosby. Before the quarrel could attain too threatening dimensions, Clarke’s commission as lieutenant-governor happily arrived, and Van Dam’s claim was set at rest. Clarke’s administration of the province was in the main a satisfactory one. He had lived nearly half a century in New York,[478] and was thoroughly conversant with its resources and its needs, and, assisted by a good education as a lawyer, he found little difficulty in managing the refractory assembly and in gaining most of his important legislative points. His greatest victory was that by certain concessions he induced the assembly of 1739 to grant again a revenue to the king equivalent to the civil list in England, which had been refused since 1736, but was continued during the whole of Clarke’s administration. Although perhaps never unmindful of his own interests, he had also the good of the province at heart, and it must be regretted that a plan, drawn up while he was yet secretary, for colonizing the Indian country was not fully carried out and bore no fruits. He proposed to buy from the Iroquois about 100,000 acres of land, the purchase money to be raised either by subscription or by the issue of bills of credit. Every Protestant family made acquainted with the conditions and wishing to settle was to have 200 acres at nominal quit-rents. All the officials who were entitled to fees from the issue of land patents agreed to surrender the same, so that it would have imposed upon the settlers only the cost of improvements. The neighboring colonies had industriously spread the report that there were few or no lands ungranted in the province of New York, and that the expense of purchasing the remainder from the Indians or obtaining a grant from the crown was greater than the price of land in Pennsylvania and other colonies. Advertisements were therefore to be scattered over Europe, giving intending emigrants a clear view of the advantages of settling in the backwoods of New York. The plan reads very much like a modern land-scheme. If it could, however, have been carried out in those days, with all the governmental machinery to help it, the country from the upper Mohawk to the Genesee would have been settled before the Revolution, and Sullivan’s expedition might have become unnecessary and a Cherry Valley massacre impossible.
The only great event of Clarke’s administration was the negro plot of 1741, which for a while cast the city of New York into a state of fear and attendant precautions, and these conditions were felt even throughout the colonies. A close examination of the testimony given at the trial of the alleged negro conspirators fails to convince the modern investigator that the slaves, who had been misled by the counsels of Roman Catholics, had really arranged a plan to murder all the whites and burn the city. Fires had occurred rather frequently, suspiciously so, during the spring of 1741, the negro riot of the earlier years of the century was remembered, reports of negro insurrections in the West Indies made slave-owners look askance at their ebony chattels, an invasion of the British colonies in America by France and Spain seemed imminent, and a rancorous hatred of the Church of Rome and its adherents prevailed among the English and Dutch inhabitants of New York, while tradition and the journal of the proceedings against the conspirators assure us that some sort of a plot existed; but we must still wonder at the panic occasioned among the ten or twelve thousand white inhabitants by what, after all, may have been only the revengeful acts of a few of the 20 whites and 154 negroes who were indicted on the most insufficient evidence. It is doubtful whether all who were indicted had anything to do with the fires or the intended murder, but the judicial proceedings were of a nature to implicate every one of the two thousand colored people in the county of New York, and two thirds of the accused were found guilty, and were either hanged, burnt at the stake, or transported.
Political astuteness, or perhaps a desire to enjoy in quiet his advancing years, had led Clarke to yield to the popular party on all important points. He had confined himself to wordy remonstrances in surrendering several of his prerogatives. His successor, Admiral George Clinton,—the second son of the Earl of Lincoln, and, as he acknowledged himself, a friend and cousin of Charles Clinton, father of Governor George Clinton of a later date,—found that the position of governor had ceased to be financially desirable. New Jersey had been again placed under a separate governor, thus reducing the income of the governor of New York by £1,000. “Former governors,” it is reported, “had the advantage of one of the four companies, besides the paying of all the four companies, which made at least £2,000 per annum;” but now the assembly had placed this in other hands.
GOVERNOR CLINTON.
From a plate in Valentine’s N. Y. City Manual, 1851.
They had also interfered with a former custom, according to which the governors drew one half of their salary from the date of their commissions; but under the new arrangement for raising and paying the salary he could only draw it from the date of his arrival. Clinton brought with him a prejudice against his lieutenant-governor which was perhaps justified, for he knew him to have led Cosby into all the errors which characterized the latter’s administration. But instead of maintaining an independent position apart from the two political parties, he threw himself into the arms of the cunning Chief Justice De Lancey, the leader of the popular faction. Acting under his advice, Clinton at first was as ready to yield every point to the assembly as Clarke had done, until he discovered that all the powers of a governor were gradually slipping into De Lancey’s hand, who hoped to tire out Clinton’s patience and induce him to resign, thus leaving the field free to him with a commission of lieutenant-governor.
Clinton, upon his arrival at New York, had found, as Clarke predicted, the province “in great tranquillity and in a flourishing condition, able to support the government in an ample and honorable manner.” He perhaps would have had no difficulty with the general assembly about money grants, if he had been less distrustful of Clarke and more willing to acknowledge the rights of the people in such matters. His first measures of dissolving the old assembly, calling a new one, and, perhaps for the first time in America, introducing a kind of civil service reform by continuing in place all officers who had been appointed by his predecessors, were received with great satisfaction throughout the province, but they failed to loosen the strings of the public purse, while the new assembly sought other measures to declare their independence. Clarke’s advice, given before Clinton’s arrival, that henceforth the assembly should allow the government a revenue for a term of years, was not acted upon; but instead they voted the usual appropriations for one year only. In voting salaries for officers, they did not recognize the incumbents by name, and the council pronounced this a device of the assembly to usurp the appointing power, and to change the stipends of the officers at any time.
Walpole had meanwhile turned over the government in England to his friend Pelham, a family connection of Governor Clinton. Macaulay describes Pelham as a man with an understanding like that of Walpole, “on a somewhat smaller scale.” During Pelham’s administration, a bill was considered in the House of Commons in 1744, news of which, upon reaching the colonies, did not fail to arouse their indignation. It forbade the American colonies to issue bills of credit or paper money. As these colonies had but little trade, and had to draw upon Europe for the tools and necessaries of life in the newly opened wilderness, the small amount of coin which they received from the West Indies and the Spanish main in exchange for bread-stuffs and lumber, their only articles of exportation, went across the ocean in part payment of their debts, leaving no “instrument of association,” no circulating medium, in their hands. To replace the coin, they had to have recourse to the issue of paper money, without which all intercolonial and internal trade would have been impossible. The parliamentary intention of depriving the colonies of these means of exchange led the New York assembly to declare that the bill was contrary to the constitution of Great Britain, inconsistent with the liberties and privileges of Englishmen, and subjected the British colonies in America to the absolute will of the crown and its officers.