Stephen Delancey stood for the ever-increasing authority of money. He was New York’s leading merchant prince, a self-made man who accumulated a fortune in trade with Canada. French by birth, he was a Huguenot by religion, with all the tenacious acquisitiveness and flinty Puritan morality of his sect. In the Assembly he spoke for the powerful mercantile clique, and that alone would have made him—hardly less than Lewis Morris—a dangerous man to cross.
Now Morris crossed Delancey, and did it in two peculiarly galling ways. First of all, from the floor of the Assembly he led an attack on the trade in which the entrepreneur had made his money. Under this commercial system, New York businessmen sent their wares directly to the French in Canada, who used the manufactured articles they received to carry on their fur trade with the Indians. The system was a very profitable one for many New Yorkers, but Governor William Burnet was anxious to end it because it strengthened the hand of the French with the Indians, making the latter reliant on Quebec instead of Albany. Morris acted as his manager in the Assembly during the furious controversy that followed, while Stephen Delancey naturally commanded the opposition. The struggle developed into a fierce personal rivalry that continued to move with its own momentum long after Delancey had triumphed over Morris in this case of the Canada trade.
Secondly, Morris seems to have instigated Governor Burnet to question Delancey’s right to sit in the Assembly on the ground that he was a foreigner, a purely personal attack of so little validity that the Governor had to back down and apologize to the Chamber for usurping one of its prerogatives, after which it put its seal of approval on Stephen Delancey.
There is no need to explain at length how the old plutocrat reacted to these insults. We simply note that the perspicacious Cadwallader Colden terms Delancey “a man of strong and lasting resentments” and adds that the Morris-Delancey clash gave rise to “violent party struggles.” Before long New York was disturbed by hostile groups known from their chiefs as the “Morris Interest” and the “Delancey Interest.” This is the background to the Zenger case. Party alignment was obviously dictated in many cases by motives other than personal allegiance—by political, social, and economic factors—but for our purposes the fundamental thing is the Morris-Delancey antithesis. During Burnet’s administration (1720-28) these embittered Interests were engaged in a constant struggle for power, with the Morrisites strong because they had the ear of the Governor, and the Delanceyites because the Assembly swung over to their side.
With the regime of Governor John Montgomerie (1728-31), the Delancey Interest definitely became paramount in New York because this executive made it the cornerstone of his policy to stay on good terms with the Assembly. Montgomerie maintained an uneasy peace (partly because he was himself a rather feckless individual), but the atmosphere in New York did not thereby cease to be explosive, for the Morris Interest, although temporarily checked, was still powerful, still ambitious, still hopeful, and still watching for the pendulum to swing its way.
Thus the scene was set for a violent climax whenever a sufficient cause should appear. It appeared on Montgomerie’s death in the person of the new governor, Colonel William Cosby.
III. Governor Cosby
If you look into Burke’s Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, you will find the following paragraph embedded in the genealogical history of “Cosby of Stradbally”:
William, brigadier-general, col. of the royal Irish, governor of New York and the Jersies, equerry to the Queen, and m. Grace, sister of George Montague Earl of Halifax, K.B., and left by that lady (who d. 25 Dec. 1767) at his decease, 10 March 1736, the following issue, William, an officer in the Army; Henry, R.N., d. 1753; Elizabeth, m. to Lord Augustus Fitzroy, 2nd son of Charles, Duke of Grafton; Anne, m. to —— Murray, Esq. of New York.
The entry enables us to form a pretty good idea of the background from which Governor Cosby came and explains much of his behavior as chief executive of New York. He was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, sprung from the notorious Ascendancy class that maintained its position through a whole series of penal laws designed to keep the majority of Irishmen in subjection. He had all the craving for place and pension, the haughtiness, and the venal devotion to the status quo that were common in the worst section of his class, and these vices merely perverted a strong will and a certain resourcefulness in meeting obstacles.