Things are now gone that length that I must either discipline Morris or suffer myself to be affronted, or, what is still worse, see the King’s authority trampled on and disrespect and irreverence to it taught from the Bench to the people by him who, by his oath and his office, is obliged to support it. This is neither consistent with my duty nor my inclination to bear, and therefore when I return to New York I shall displace him and make Judge Delancey Chief Justice in his room.[5]
In August, Cosby made good his threat. At one Council meeting, and without notifying Morris in advance, he announced that henceforth Delancey was chief justice of the Supreme Court of New York, with Philipse advancing to the second place. Cadwallader Colden, who was present in his capacity of councillor, tells us that he disapproved of the Governor’s action, and that Cosby resented his saying so. Colden’s account of the episode is so revealing of Cosby’s character that it is worth quoting in full:
I had been sent for to town a few days before under pretense of some affairs in my office of Surveyor General. When I came into the Governor’s house he received me into his arms with, “My dear Colden, I am glad to see you.” I was caressed for two or three days by every one of the family. Just before I went to Council he took me upon the couch and seemed to entertain me in the most friendly manner, but spoke not one word of removing the Chief Justice and appointing another till we were sitting in Council, when he said that he had removed Mr Morris and appointed James Delancey in his room, and thought this the most proper place to give the first notice of it. Upon which I said, “Then Your Excellency only tells us what you have already done?” To which he answered, “Yes.” I replied, “It is not what I would have advised.” And he very briskly returned to it, “I do not ask your advice.” This put his having the consent of the Council out of the question and defeated the whole design he had been put upon of cajoling me (for I do not think he was capable of forming any design himself that had any reach). However he never forgave me.[6]
Morris soon learned what had taken place at the meeting, and in a letter of protest he passed the information on to London:
I believe I am well informed that, on the delivery of the Commissions to the Judges in Council, Doctor Colden asked the Governor whether the Council was summoned to be advised on that head? If they were, he would advise against it as being prejudicial to His Majesty’s service. To which the Governor replied that he did not, nor ever intended to, consult them about it; he thought fit to do it, and was not accountable to them; or words to that effect.[7]
From this time on there was no mollifying Lewis Morris. Implacably revengeful, he never lowered his sights from two main goals, to regain the office of chief justice, and to get William Cosby removed from the governorship of New York. He achieved neither of these, but he did achieve the leadership of the antiadministration faction—the Popular party—that gave Cosby no peace.
The Governor had really stirred up a hornets’ nest. Not only was New York already disgusted with him as a man and an executive, his private arrogance and public avarice being notorious, but he had openly adopted the pattern of behavior that had made Colonial governors unpopular in the past. Before he finished he had insulted the Assembly, tampered with the courts, divided his Council into venomous cliques, frightened property owners with his claims to land, and treated leading citizens with cavalier disdain. He practiced nepotism, tried to rig elections, and violated his instructions from London.
He committed a blunder as well as a crime when he alienated some of the most powerful men in his Colony—especially Lewis Morris, Rip Van Dam, and James Alexander, the last of whom became the mastermind of the Popular party. Working with them were Colden, William Smith, Lewis Morris, Junior, and many others down the scale into the anonymous mass of the population. The opposition to Governor Cosby soon turned from a matter of sporadic pinpricks into a concerted conspiracy bent on his political destruction.
The Governor’s friends rallied around him, led by Chief Justice James Delancey (the only man of real ability among them), but they suffered in the contest for public opinion because they had to defend Cosby at a time when New Yorkers generally had made up their minds that he was indefensible. However, the Court party was strong in this, that it possessed the governmental machinery that could be brought to bear at a dozen different points of the battlefield, for example in the magistracies and at the bar.