Clinton’s message to the Assembly, October 6, was presented with high praises of Johnson, a vindication of himself, and an exhortation to act promptly and liberally, as the Iroquois sachems were waiting with Johnson in the city to see what would be done in their behalf. The conquest of Crown Point was still in view; and men, money, and supplies were asked for. It was intimated that the Crown (the mother country) had already done its full part, and that the colonies should now do theirs.
Still the Assemblymen, who thought the Indians ought to have been allowed to go on their hunting, ought to have been kept friendly, but not stirred up to fight the French or be sent to Canada, and ought to have stayed in New York to guard their own old men and squaws instead of having white men drafted to do it, distrusted the servant of the king and the tool of Colden, and doubted the fitness of the governor’s appointees to office. They questioned the wisdom of the governor’s general policy; and they intimated, with only too good reason, that the money so freely distributed for the Indians was not properly and publicly accounted for. They voted promptly all that was necessary for the expedition against Canada. They fully realized the necessity of holding firm the loyalty of the Six Nations; and to keep it, they offered at once to vote the sum of eight hundred pounds, provided the persons chosen to distribute the people’s money were such as they approved of. In regard to the forts on the distant frontier, so near Canada, they considered that the other colonies should share the expense of permanently guarding the king’s dominions.
In answer to these defiant resolutions, which practically impeached the governor, Clinton sent a curt and insulting note of less than one hundred words. The Dutchman’s ire now blazed fiercely. After the significant ceremony of locking the door and laying the key on the table, they proceeded to issue a manifesto, marshalling in review the whole proceedings since June 6, 1746. They censured him for removing the former commissioners of Indian affairs, and for practically making Dr. Colden the real administrator of affairs in the cabinet, and Colonel Johnson in the field. They sneered at the pretensions and vanity of the governor in his constant boasting of what he claimed to have done. They charged him with treating the people of the colony with contempt, and with insulting them by vile epithets. They complained of the many brief and inconvenient adjournments to which he had needlessly subjected them. Especially were they enraged in their feelings at the deference paid, at their expense, to the commissioners from Massachusetts and Connecticut. They claimed that they ought to have been kept in session, in order that they might have been advised with, and their opinions consulted from time to time as to the matters under consideration.
In this last point, especially, the Dutch blood was roused; for although in monarchical England the power of making treaties is vested in the sovereign, yet in the Dutch Republic, then a living reality before their eyes, the States-General, like the United States Senate, shared with the Stadtholder or President the right of treaty-making, and had the power of veto upon all compacts. Even in Great Britain, the exercise of the treaty-making power by the king was subject to parliamentary censure, and ministers negotiating a disadvantageous treaty were liable to impeachment. This right had been several times exercised in the sixteenth and even in the fifteenth century.
The address wound up by this declaration: “No treatment your Excellency can use toward us, no inconveniences how great soever that we may suffer in our own persons, shall ever prevail upon us to abandon, or deter us from steadily preserving the interest of our country.”
A committee waited upon the governor on the 9th of October, to present the address; but the angry executive would not hear it, nor receive a copy, and three days later replied with all the artillery of rhetoric and abuse which he and his secretary were able to load into the document. It was as full of vituperation as a carronade of later day was of langrage shot. As to their complaint that the money intended for Indian presents was not honestly distributed, he charged the House with telling “as bold a falsehood as ever came from a body of men.” He was in no way accountable to the Assembly for the manner in which he distributed the money of the Crown. He charged them with violating both the civil and military prerogatives of the king. “Nor will I,” he said, “give up the least branch of it [the military prerogative] on any consideration, however desirous you may be to have it, or to bear the whole command.” He also asserted, with some attempt at humour, that their farce of locking the door and placing the key upon the table—a symbolic act charging breach of privilege upon the executive—was a high insult to King George’s authority, and in so far, an act of disloyalty. He charged that they were assuming the rights and privileges of the House of Commons, and renouncing their subjection to the Crown and Parliament. He had his Majesty’s express command not to suffer them to bring some matters into the House, nor to debate upon them; and he intimated that he had a right to stop proceedings when they seemed to him improper or disorderly. After a tirade upon their insolence and unbecoming conduct, his peroration was a warning not to infringe upon the royal prerogative.
Safety-valves having thus been opened through the ink-bottles, the war of words ceased, and both governor and legislators proceeded to diligence in business. In expectation that Massachusetts and Connecticut would bear their quota of expense, the governor was requested, October 15, to carry out his plan of sending gunsmiths and other mechanics to live among and assist the tribes of the Confederacy westward of the Mohawks. Four days after, however, news came from England ordering the disbanding of all the levies for the expedition to Canada. This was disheartening alike to the governors and the people of the colonies; but some compromise measures were amicably agreed upon between Clinton and the Assembly.
Peace, in New York City at least, seemed almost at hand, when Clinton again attempted folly in trying to muzzle the press. The Assembly had ordered Parker, the public printer, to publish the address and remonstrance of the Assembly, in which they asserted the rights of the people. The governor commanded him to desist. Parker stood by the people and their Assembly, as against the king and his foolish governor. After Cosby’s ignominious failure to restrain the liberty of the press by imprisoning Zenger, this act of Clinton’s seemed like that of a madman or a man who had no memory. The Assembly ordered Parker to print their manifests, and to furnish each member with two copies, “that their constituents might know it was their firm resolution to preserve the liberty of the press.”
In a word, all this wrangle between colonial governor and Assembly was really the cause of popular liberty against monarchy, of ordered freedom under law against despotism. It was part of the chequered story of liberty, in which the people of New York were in no whit behind those of any of the colonies, but rather led them. Clinton, by his blunders, and Colden, by his toryism, helped grandly forward the American revolution, while the names of Parker and Zenger belong with those of the promoters of order and freedom. When on the 25th day of November, 1747,—significant date, for on that day, only thirty-six years later, King George’s troops and mercenaries evacuated that very city of New York, in which Clinton had illustrated the folly of monarchy,—after addressing, or rather berating, the people’s representatives, he concluded his address with the significant words:—
“Your continued grasping for power, with an evident tendency to the weakening of the dependency of the province on Great Britain, accompanied by such notorious and public disrespect to the character of your governor, and contempt of the king’s authority intrusted with him, cannot longer be hid from your superiors, but must come under their observation, and is of most dangerous example to your neighbours.”