Episode 11: The Resistance

Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode Eleven: “The Resistance”

Written by Jim Ambuske
Published 10/22/2024

AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is supported by the McCormick Center for the Study of the American Revolution at Siena College. Learn how you can support the series at rstudios.org. 

AMBUSKE: The dawn of a new day broke on the morning of May 21, 1766 to the sound of church bells ringing throughout New York City. Only a day earlier, news had arrived from Boston and Philadelphia of the Stamp Act’s repeal, sending young boys racing through the streets wielding poles affixed with handkerchiefs, to the delight and huzzahs of the crowd. 

AMBUSKE: At 1:00 o’clock in the afternoon a crowd led by the Sons of Liberty assembled on the city’s Commons, and fired a twenty-one gun salute in honor of Joseph Allicocke, whom they called their general. 

AMBUSKE: Allicocke’s origins are as confusing as the chaos that reigned in British America in the months prior to the Stamp Act’s repeal. He may have been born in Antigua to a mixed race mother, though in later years he would claim he was Irish by birth. Whatever his story, by the early 1760s Allicocke had found work as a clerk provisioning British soldiers stationed in the city, only to become a merchant in his own right, and one of the leaders of the Sons of Liberty. 

AMBUSKE: Like the Loyal Nine in Boston, the Sons of Liberty in New York had led the resistance movement against the Stamp Act, to Parliament’s claim of supreme authority, and its alleged right to tax the colonies without their consent. The ashes of effigies, rioting, and boycotts attested to their fury. But Parliament had recovered its senses. It had repealed the hated act. British Americans lived in an empire of liberty after all. 

AMBUSKE: As two bonfires – one to honor the city, one to honor themselves – warmed the already humid air, the Sons of Liberty hoisted a tall pole made of pine on the Commons, within sight of the Upper Barracks, the home to British soldiers stationed in the city. A British officer named John Montresor simply called it a “flag staff.” To New Yorkers, it would soon become a “liberty pole.” 

AMBUSKE: To the pine mast, Liberty’s sons attached a board bearing the worlds “George 3rd, Pitt – and Liberty,” to honor the king who had consented to the Stamp Act’s repeal, the politician who had urged its demise in Parliament, and the ideal that bound British subjects together across the king’s dominions. 

AMBUSKE: With their monument raised, and with grand illuminations casting shadows in the city, as church bells gave way to the celebratory sounds of fireworks and musket fire, the Sons of Liberty in all their drunken glee, drank 28 toasts in local taverns, including one to the King, one to William Pitt, one to a “Perpetual Union between G. Britain and her Colonies,” and one to “All true Sons of Liberty in America.” Warmed by wine, rum punch, and strong beer, they processed to the fort on the southern tip of Manhattan Island to congratulate the new governor Henry Moore and themselves on their successful defense of their English rights and liberties. 

AMBUSKE: Notwithstanding their inebriated state, three Sons of Liberty were admitted to the fort to pay their respects to the governor. 

AMBUSKE: For Thomas Gage, a sensible man and the commander-in-chief of British forces in North America:

THOMAS GAGE: “The Rejoicings on this Occasion have been remarkably great, beyond what Many Moderate People wished to see, but tho’ Some may have exulted as for a Victory, I am persuaded that the Majority meant only to testify their Joy and Thankfulness.”

AMBUSKE: But to some of Gage’s soldiers who were stationed in New York, the headquarters of the British Army in North America, the rejoicing was something else entirely. 

AMBUSKE: In the weeks that followed the celebrations and the planting of the Liberty Pole, the 28th Regiment of Foot arrived in New York City and went to quarters in the Upper Barracks. The regiment was an unwelcome sight. First in Montreal, and then in Quebec, it had gained a reputation for ill-temperament, ill-discipline, and even violence against civilians. 

AMBUSKE: As the regiment marched from Quebec to Albany and then south to Manhattan, it received orders to assist local sheriffs and civil magistrates in evicting squatters from the lands of the great river lords. This, the regiment did with vigor, leaving farms aflame and houses looted. 

AMBUSKE: Once quartered in the Upper Barracks, the soldiers could only grumble as they looked across the Commons to see the liberty pole and the crowd that frequently gathered around it. To them, it seemed as though New Yorkers were taunting them. In truth, many of them were. The city had long played host to soldiers, but only very few since the end of the Seven Years’ War. And new demands from Parliament that the colonists tax themselves to pay for the soldiers’ provisions only soured their impression of their fellow Britons. 

AMBUSKE: For some soldiers of the 28th Regiment, the liberty pole guarding the Commons was not a beacon of freedom, nor a tribute to their king, but an act of defiance and a symbol of sedition. 

AMBUSKE: Under cover of night on August 10, 1766, a party of soldiers slipped out of the barracks, and cut it down. 

AMBUSKE: On the following day, some 3,000 people – led by the Sons of Liberty – gathered on the Commons to mourn the remains of their Liberty Pole and erect a new one. Shouting between soldiers and civilians quickly turned to shoving, before the king’s subjects began pelting his soldiers with brickbats, and the redcoats brandished their bayonets. 

AMBUSKE: British officers managed to get their men back into the barracks, but not before one soldier slashed a civilian with a bayonet, another fired his weapon into the crowd, and the mistrust between the civilians and the soldiers living in their midst only deepened. 

AMBUSKE: In the days ahead, as the soldiers watched the Sons of Liberty raise yet another monument to mob rule, as their officers delivered 500-lashes to the soldier who had wounded the civilian, and as the colonial government struggled to restore order in one of the most important cities in the British Empire, it was becoming much harder to say who really ruled British Americans, and who had the power to rule them at home. 

AMBUSKE: I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down, a podcast about the history of the American Revolution. Episode 11: “The Resistance.” 

AMBUSKE: In the spring of 1766, British Americans widely celebrated the Stamp Act’s demise. In Boston, a published broadside reveled in this “Glorious News.”

BOSTON BROADSIDE: “It is impossible to express the Joy the Town is now in, on receiving the above, great, glorious, and important NEWS -- The Bells in all the Churches were immediately set a Ringing, and we hear the Day for a general Rejoicing will be the beginning of the next Week.

AMBUSKE: Philadelphian James Gordon reported to his friend in Grenada that:

JAMES GORDON: “to Morrow Evening the City is to be illuminated and next Day a great Dinner at the State House, where will be all the gentlemen in the Place; we are in hopes we shall carry on a greater Trade than ever, [even] in the best of times. ”

AMBUSKE: Colonists ended their boycott of British goods and ordered teapots from England inscribed with the words “No Stamp Act” and “American Liberty Restored.” For the king’s birthday in June, some colonists pledged to wear new suits made in England and give their homespun clothes to the poor.

AMBUSKE: Even in Jamaica, a colony that had obeyed Parliament’s will, merchants in Kingston marked the Stamp Act’s repeal by burning effigies of stamp distributor John Howell and George Grenville, the former prime minister who had inflicted the hated law on the colonies.

GRIFFIN: When the Stamp Act was passed. Americans are upset, but that's what happens with all provincials. Things are passed by the center. They get upset, they push back, they riot, they write things. There's nothing unusual about this. My name is Patrick Griffin. I'm the Madden-Hennebry Professor at the University of Notre Dame. The Scots did this kind of stuff. The Irish did this kind of stuff. This is just the way it is. And then you find is after the Stamp Act, the Americans are going to be euphoric, far from saying we're on the road to revolution or we're going to be breaking away, you know, like, let's just kind of sharpen our quills and get ready to sign that declaration. It's nothing like that. They're euphoric, and they say we have the best of all kings. This demonstrates that the process works, that they pass something in the center, we push back against it, and then cooler heads prevail, and everybody's happy. And isn't it great to be part of this? And. Empire, the greatest empire the world had ever seen.

LURIE: For most of the 1760s and into the early 1770s most white Anglo Americans would define the British Empire as an Empire of Liberty. This is how they viewed it, the freest empire in the world. Shira Lurie, Assistant Professor of American history at St Mary's University, located in Mi'kma'ki, colonially known as Nova Scotia. There is also this thread, this principle in Anglo American thought, of a theory of resistance, that individuals and communities have a right to challenge and attempt to correct government when it functioned improperly. They have a right to resist unjust authority. And to some people, this is sort of a critical check on power and a critical foundation for how the system should work. For some people, this was not a challenge to authority or the system, but sort of a necessary part of the system itself.

BELLION: Liberty is a complicated concept for this moment. My name is Wendy Bellion. I am a professor and the Sewell Biggs Chair of American Art History at the University of Delaware, where I'm also the Associate Dean for the Humanities. British colonists are inheriting a number of ideas from Europe, a number of definitions of liberty that include the idea of natural liberty, the condition of really living within nature, civil liberty, the idea that society is governed and protected by law, and then political liberty. And political liberty is one that the colonists really glom onto their everyday understandings of liberty, the ability to participate in political life, either as individuals or via consent that they understand to be granted to them by governing bodies. It's that idea of political liberty that the British colonists really understand. It's that idea that leads them to raise these things called Liberty polls to protest for their rights, to protest against taxation without representation.

LUIRE: They were proud and grateful to their government for recognizing their rights, for reversing course, repealing this hated tax, but it also signaled that the people can have an impact on the system that it was popular organizing by the colonists that had pressured parliament to repeal the Stamp Act. The poll attests to the colonists gratitude and their loyalty to the king and parliament, but it also attests to their own political strength and their ability to affect change.

KUKLA: But with the repeal, they also enact what's called the Declaratory Act, which says that pay no attention to the fact that we're repealing a Stamp Act. We have the authority, we Parliament have the authority to legislate a tax in all matters whatsoever and so on. And so it's a complete affirmation of parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies and the Americans exuberant over the repeal of Stamp Act. Pay very little attention to the fact that the Declaratory Act comes with it.

AMBUSKE: That's John Kukla, a historian of early America.

KUKLA: And that's not quite as sticking your head in the sand as it sounds, because one of the reasonable positions that people like William Pitt had taken during this whole debate was to say, yes, we have the authority, but it's not prudent to use it. It's not entirely willful or wishful thinking that the Americans ignore this. They just hope that this is a face saving measure for parliament, and we're done with the stamp duties. This is wonderful, and now we hope we go back to everything like it was in 1763, when the Empire was wonderful.

AMBUSKE: But as it would only become slowly and painfully clear to British Americans over the next 10 years, there would be no going back.

KUKLA: There's a very real sense in which grenvilles Stamp Act elevated the conflict between the colonies in Parliament elevated it to a level of constitutional abstraction from which it never retreated. And that the whole period from 1764 with the announcement that we might think about stamp duties, that whole period up to 1774 when the First Continental Congress was dealing with this was a period in which the Americans were trying to find some middle ground, and there wasn't any.

AMBUSKE: The almost universally reviled Stamp Act had made Parliament’s claim to legislate for British America “in all cases whatsoever,” a source of serious contention between the colonies and the Mother Country. It called into question the very foundations of the empire itself, what legitimate power Parliament did have over the colonies, what obligations colonists had to resist Parliament’s overreach, and how provincials could work within their own colonies to achieve the common imperial good.  

AMBUSKE: The euphoria surrounding the Stamp Act’s repeal only masked persistent questions that remained unanswered. And there were few places in the colonies where these problems were more evident than in the city that some historians have called the second most important city in the British Empire: New York. 

AMBUSKE: So, how did colonies and cities like New York navigate the turbulent politics of empire in the aftermath of the Stamp Act and its repeal. And how did those choices pit New Yorkers against the soldiers sent by Parliament to defend their empire of liberty?

AMBUSKE: To begin answering these questions, we’ll head first to New York, to walk the streets of Manhattan, a place  dominated by two rival political factions who agreed on much, and then very little. We’ll then head to London, where politicians arguing over how to quarter the king’s soldiers in British America arrived at an imperial compromise, before sailing back to New York, where the provincial assembly’s reluctance to support the British Army in the colony provoked a response from Parliament itself. 

AMBUSKE: In the mid-1760s, Manhattan was a far different world than the city it would become, and yet, it was a place strikingly familiar. 

CHRISTOPHER MINTY: New York City is the most important urban center in the colonies before the Revolution, and it's the second most important in the British Empire. My name is Christopher Minty. I'm a Project editor at The Center for Digital Editing at the University of Virginia. New York City is the base of the British Army in North America. So there's a lot of important figures, military figures, naval figures who have spent time in the city and who live in the city and in terms of trade. By the time of the American Revolution, New York is on the up. Where you look at places like Boston, like Philadelphia, they're declining in comparison to New York.

BELLION: New York City in this period is a thoroughly multicultural place. We know that European settlers are settling on indigenous land. We know that the Dutch originally settled what they call New Amsterdam, and then when the English begin to develop the city, they are still very much working within the spaces that the Dutch had settled in the 17th century. So for all intents and purposes, this is a small settlement today. When we talk about lower Manhattan, we often mean an area from, say, 14th Street, South Union Square, south. You have to think much further south when you're thinking about the 18th century city, you need to think about Wall Street, and south of Wall Street, with a little bit of settlement above that area, it's a densely settled city. Architecturally, it still looks like a Dutch port city, because much of the architecture would have remained from the 17th century.

AMBUSKE: What did this 17th century Dutch port city look like in 18th century British America?

BELLION: Think tall gabled buildings, and by gables, I mean the kind of large triangular shapes that you see at the very top of buildings. Even today, we have some 18th century prints that will show us two to three story buildings. We still have a lot of timber construction, but we might also have brick construction.

MINTY: I loved thinking about what New York City must have been like then compared to what it is now. When I try to visualize New York, I think about, okay, New York was just basically the tip of Manhattan Island, 42nd street where the New York Public Library is, that's uptown. That's far up. So if you can imagine walking from somewhere like the Bowling Green or Francis tavern, both still there, all the way to the New York Public Library, it's quite a long walk. But once you get down to the Bowling Green and Fraunces Tavern, the whole layout of the city kind of changes. The streets aren't as rigid and structured as they are further up. They're all kind of mish mashed together. Everything's on top of one another.

BELLION: It is a space that you walk from Bowling Green, which is a small green space at the very tip of Manhattan, surrounded by a British fort and the governor's mansion, moving north up Broadway, which is even by the 18th century, a major conduit of traffic, foot traffic and carriage traffic, moving north up to the space called the commons. We're talking about an area of one Geographic mile, a straight shot north and south, bounded on the north by this open green space, sometimes simply called the green or the fields, more often called the commons, as it appears on maps of the day, we can think about a city that's also very much oriented toward the water. The major ports of the city at that point would have been on the East River, the North River, which today we call the Hudson River, wasn't so much a site of traffic. You

MINTY: You can walk from one end the East River to the Hudson River. Take you a while. Take you a wee while, but you could do it. And you're walking around, you're seeing all the shops, all the stores, all the marketplaces, all the coffee houses and the taverns. You're seeing a lot of people walking around. There's a water pump where people go to get water. People congregate there. It's a very social city where there's a lot of activity. There's a lot of people like it is today, put into a small space almost on top of one another.

AMBUSKE: Manhattan was home to a constellation of cultures, peoples and religions.

MINTY: New York, like it is now, was then a diverse city, lots of different religions, lots of different churches. If you looked at the skyline of New York, you can see the skyline being punctured by all of these church steeples.

AMBUSKE: As they walked through this densely settled space visitors would have seen and heard many different peoples, English, indigenous, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, French, Huguenots, West African, West Indian, free and enslaved.

BELLION: There is a sizable concentration of people of African descent within this confined geography of lower Manhattan, the story of enslavement in New York at this time looks quite different than the the understandings that many of us have of plantation slavery in the American colonial south. So over the course of the 18th century, about 5000 people of African descent are forcibly brought to Manhattan. This peaks during the 1740s where the population of enslaved people is at about 20% and most of those enslaved individuals are being brought from the British plantation colonies of the West, Indies. After that time, we have a larger population of enslaved people coming directly from West and Central Africa. By the period of the Seven Years War, enslaved people account for about 17% of New York's urban population, and by the time that the Liberty polls go up at the commons, there's about more than 3000 people who are enslaved living in Manhattan, about 14% of that population prior to the revolution, only a small proportion of New York's black population is free, and black and white, New Yorkers are living in fairly close proximity. So in contrast to southern plantations, where many enslaved people are living and laboring at some distance from the mansions of white people on the plantations. The free and enslaved populations of New York are encountering each other with some degree of frequency in domestic spaces, in shops, in the streets and in the kitchens, and especially at places like the docks on the East River, where enslaved men are crossing paths with black sailors who had traveled across the globe. We need to understand, though, that New Yorkers are not generous slave holders just because the conditions of slavery look different than they did in the plantation south. This does not mean that New Yorkers did not respond brutally and violently to any threat of resistance by enslaved people. The colony introduces what's called a Black Code very early in the 18th century and 1712 that's intended to regulate the movements of enslaved people around the city. That said black New Yorkers do find ways to resist the surveillance of white new yorkers. One of those spaces in which that happens is a space that, in the 18th century, was known as the African Burial Ground, and the burial ground was just what it sounds like. It was an active cemetery, but it was also a space of ritual practice for many enslaved people in the city.

AMBUSKE: In many ways, Manhattan's urban geography reflected the colony's social order.

BELLION: The British Crown very deliberately decides to establish a fort at the very tip of the island because it's as much for purposes of monitoring commerce. It's for defensive purposes. It's a grand space, and it's a space that they can control geographically. Much of the city does develop organically. That's why, if you look at very early maps of the city, you do see these short streets kind of criss crossing along a plan that looks more like an old European city than the grid likes. That we get in the 19th century in Manhattan. So the settlement really moves from south to north, and very early on, the various wards that divide up the civic spaces of New York City become associated with different things. So a crown government presence, a residential area, this open space of the commons, and beyond that, spaces that were settled by both free and enslaved people of African descent, and then a commercial district, which is really the area of Wall Street and the East River docks. That has really been consistent since the 18th century. When we think about that area of lower Manhattan. We still think about global commerce today, and that was true even in the 18th century.

MINTY: New York City, as a commercial city, is really sort of central to its identity. And for merchants who are dealing in trade and places in the Caribbean, places in Europe, particularly London or the East Indies, that's part of their identity as part of who they are. Like they see New York as a commercial city, and it fits within the British Empire. And the British Empire can work for them because it opens up doors for them to trade with places pretty much all over the world, and they have access to economies that they wouldn't otherwise be able to have access to.

AMBUSKE: The circulation of newspapers throughout the Atlantic world only reinforced New York's connection to the Empire and a sense of Britishness, of a common British identity.

BRAD JONES: It helps that by the 1730s and 40s, 1000 or more ships are crossing the Atlantic, carrying goods and prints and newspapers to and from virtually every major port city in the North Atlantic. There's also efforts by the government to establish a packet service, an actual formal network of communication. This is hugely important during all these wars against France and Spain, but on these ships, they're carrying newspapers. My name is Brad Jones. I'm a professor of history at California State University, Fresno, in any port city, say, New York or Philadelphia or Boston, virtually every week, a ship surviving from somewhere across the North Atlantic, bringing not just goods and other things and people, but it's also bringing newspapers from those places. So 18th century newspaper printers would take those newspapers, they would pull stories out of those newspapers and publish them in their own It's remarkable. We start to see by the middle of the 18th century, news and information being shared across the Atlantic. The very same stories are being read by a Glaswegian, a person living in Glasgow or a Haligonian, and person living in Halifax or Kingston or New York or they're all reading the same stories, sometimes weeks or maybe a month or more apart, because it's still, you know, a fair distance to cover here. This has a profound impact on how they conceive of themselves.

AMBUSKE: High literacy rates, especially in the northern colonies, allowed New Yorkers and other British Americans to imagine themselves as part of a much larger British community.

JONES: But here's the thing, literacy ultimately mattered very little in the context of accessing news. This is something really lost, I think, on us today. This is really still a largely oral culture in which it was perfectly common and ordinary for people to read things aloud. In Glasgow, New York and Halifax, I know of actual places in the cities where people would gather to hear the news read. We know that in taverns and coffee houses that travelers and people frequent in these places would write about hearing people reading newspapers. If you weren't literate, you could actually go every, you know, once a week, or once every two weeks, to this place as newspapers came in, or your local newspapers are published, and there would be somebody actually reading the news to you

AMBUSKE: In New York, taverns were a place to gather, to drink, to debate, to read or hear the news and to mobilize. Christopher Minty explains:

MINTY: Tavern culture is central to political mobilization, building social bonds, building political bonds. In New York, there are more taverns in New York than anywhere else in the colonies. Now, I think that might be because there were so many British soldiers there in the 1750s and early 1760s and many of them just stuck around. And New Yorkers like to drink. And the British, the British Army, the regiments who were still there, they also liked to drink. So there's a lot of taverns. You had a lot of opportunities to go somewhere and have a drink. People would go to one of the many taverns to drink, to talk to their friends, to learn about what was happening, not just in New York, but across the colonies and the British Empire.

AMBUSKE: New Yorkers also went to taverns to share a drink with like minded people. By the early 1760s two families, the Lvingstons and the De Lanceys, dominated New York politics.

MINTY: Both are families of immigrants. So the Livingstons are Scottish and Dutch. They moved to Dutch Republic 17th century, and then moved to New York. The De Lancies fled France in the late 17th century, went to London very briefly, and then came over to New York. The Livingstons, they were primarily based north of the city in Livingston Manor, because New York was divided into these manorial estates, and they were absolutely ginormous, like well over 100,000 acres, so very large, they had a lot of tenants, and that's how they earned a lot of money from the people who were living on their land. Their estate was divided up in the 18th century just into another manorial estate called Claremont. It's still there. Livingston Manor is now, is a town in New York now. Livingston, New York, is on the original patent for where they were, because they're a little bit further north. Their trade is primarily domestic, and that's how they make their money. The De Lancies are primarily based in the city. They have a lot of commercial dealings going out of the city into the British Empire, and merchants who feed into that. And the first prominent Delancey family member in New York was someone called Etienne De Lancey, and when he moved he anglicized his name from Etienne to Stephen, so he fully embraced life in the British Empire, and he went on to become a very prominent member of society. He married well into the Van Cortlandt family. Became a member of the assembly, a prominent member his son, James Sr, solidified the delances within sort of New York and New York City's political fabric. Serving as Chief Justice, Lieutenant Governor. He was governor, he was probably one of the most powerful people in all of colonial North America, and he really established the family's fortune, buying a lot of land in what is now like the Lower East Side. So if you think of Manhattan today, there's De Lancey Street down there. The De Lancey family owned pretty much all of that, and as they start to become wealthier and get more prominent, members of each family start to serve in the assembly.

AMBUSKE: In 1765, when Parliament passed the Stamp Act, the Livingston’s controlled the colonial assembly. Like the De Lancy faction, they opposed Parliament’s presumed right to lay direct taxes on British Americans without their consent, believing that only provincial assemblies had such power. But they mobilized opposition against Parliament’s attempt to bind the colonies more closely to the Mother Country in very different ways.

MINTY: By this time, the Livingstons because they've been around for So long, and they're so powerful, and people live on their estates, and they have a lot of sway about how people can live their life, and they can make things harder for them if they wanted. They rely on sort of traditional modes of mobilization, which is primarily deference, like you should support us, because we are elites. We are essentially bit better than you, and you always have. So why would you change that? During the 1760s the De Lanceys tried to involve ordinary New Yorkers in the political process more than there had ever been, and the livingstons didn't do that. So the de Lancers were happy to go to taverns with New Yorkers, and they would pay for everything engage with one another, and they helped. Because of events like that, the delanceys were able to build a like minded political association that had people who were as elite as Eton Cambridge educated James De Lancey served in the British Army, absolutely loaded, while also with watchmakers, carpenters, blacksmiths, people who were very different to someone like James De Lancey, but they operated within the same political circle. And because the De Lanceys brought people who were politically like minded together, these people stuck together, and they realized that they actually quite like each other, and those political bonds that brought them together soon grew into social bonds.

AMBUSKE: A visit to Benjamin Stout’s tavern on Bowery Lane in 1768 helps us to understand just how the De Lancey’s used the power of the pub to great political effect.

MINTY: In the run up to the 1768 election, the delanceys had events in that Tavern on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and they paid for everything, and it's an open bar, and you can drink as much as you want. And when Benjamin stout presented James De Lancey with his what is essentially an invoice, it was like over 100 bottles of wine, lots of beer, lots of cider, lots of whiskey as well, or drams of whiskey, lots of food, and you could almost have as much as you want. And New Yorkers were like, Oh, well, I'm not going to turn that down. So you you can imagine that people having all of this drink, all of this food you're sat with, say, people who you might not know when you sat down, but when you were done. And, and you've had, maybe, I don't know, Five pints, some whiskey, some wine. You know them at the end, because you only had this great time with each other.

AMBUSKE: It was out of this coalition of clock makers and Cambridge-educated men that the Sons of Liberty emerged in 1765 to mobilize against the Stamp Act. Men like John Lamb, Isaac Sears, and Joseph Allicocke associated with the De Lanceys and the faction’s embrace of popular politics, even if the De Lancey family itself didn’t always agree with the Sons’ mob-like methods. They established a Committee of Correspondence to share information with like-minded people in other colonies to resist the Stamp Act, and when Parliament repealed it, they joined their friends in taverns to celebrate. 

AMBUSKE: But with the arrival of more British soldiers in New York beginning in 1766, and a mandate from Parliament for the colonies to provide for them, the Sons of Liberty once again turned to the friendships forged over pints and politics to rally the people against the standing army among them. While in the colonial assembly, the De Lancey’s and Livingston’s treaded carefully to defend New York’s rights and avoid Parliament’s wrath.

AMBUSKE: New York City was the headquarters of the British Army in North America. By the mid-1760s, soldiers had been a prominent fixture of the city’s urban landscape for more than a century.

JOHN MCCURDY: New York has this long history of soldiers. There have been British soldiers in New York City and Albany going back to 1664 I'm John McCurdy. I'm a professor of history at Eastern Michigan University in 1664 England seizes control of the New Netherlands, New Amsterdam, and sends in Colonel Richard Nichols with 300 troops, who take the city and rename it New York. And when they do so, of course, they arrive and they find there's no place to put all these soldiers. And so they just put them in people's houses. You have to have some place for these guys to sleep and live. And thereafter there was a permanent military presence in both New York and Albany, and so New Yorkers are very early on aware of what it means to have a permanent army in their presence.

AMBUSKE: In the century following the English conquest of New York, army officers and government officials dealt with a recurring problem in British America. Where to quarter soldiers?

MCCURDY: Quartering is literally where you're quartering the soldiers, where you're putting them, where they will sleep, where they will store their effects, and where they will even take command to go off to fight a battle. Quartering in colonial America before the Seven Years War is really an irregular practice. It's only during war time there is no standing army in most of colonial North America, there's no permanent military infrastructure. In the era before tanks and nukes, the deadliest weapon of war was the soldier, was the man carrying the gun. But like any weapon, you have to figure out where to store this, this deadly weapon, where should the weapon be allowed to go and not When can it be used? When is an inappropriate time to use it. There's not a lot written in terms of the law for the colonial law, because it's such an infrequent practice. There are English laws which most of the colonies will look to. If you're an officer who shows up with soldiers and you need to put them up for the night, you're supposed to produce a billet, literally, a bill saying that, because these people have stayed here the colony or some government official will later compensate you for your trouble and your time. That's what's supposed to happen. It doesn't always happen, but there aren't legal restrictions on where soldiers can go. There's only one place before the Seven Years' War that really states we want to have a control over quartering as a practice, and that's New York, partly because of the experience of having these English soldiers arrive in 1664.

AMBUSKE: The army's presence was more intrusive than we might first imagine.

MCCURDY: Most houses in the colonies before middle of the 18th century are pretty small, probably two room structures. This is the air in which everyone sleeps together in the same bed, mother, father, kids, servants, slaves, even soldiers might even go into the same bed with the family, or probably more likely, they're on the floor, which would not be unusual for people in a household in this era, they'd eat at the family table. Families usually are expected to feed the soldiers along with the rest of their family. The idea is the homeowner will be compensated for their space and for their food, for their efforts during this time.

AMBUSKE: During the Seven Years’ War, as tens of thousands of British soldiers poured into the colonies to fight the French and their Indigenous allies, colonial assemblies clashed with British commanders-in-chief over where to quarter the king’s troops, and how to pay for it. To keep soldiers out of civilian homes, and to exercise some measure of control over their presence among civilian populations, provincial governments began building barracks in cities like Philadelphia, Charleston, and New York.

MCCURDY: If you know where City Hall is in New York today, that's where a massive barracks is built a barracks capable of holding 2000 men. It's about a city block long. It'd be larger than the city hall that stands here today, that at the time, was the comment for the city of New York, where you could raise your animals, where militia musters would take place, where George Whitefield gave sermons during the Great Awakening, with the most public of spaces. And this land is taken over and a barracks is built there. Of course, once you build a barracks, you change everything around it, because if you do have 500 men or 1000 men in uniform with weapons, that changes how people feel about that neighborhood. It also causes the erection of new businesses. In New York, for example, a series of public houses, or basically cheap taverns open up all around the barracks to supply the men with alcohol, but also to supply them in with prostitutes. We know prostitution really takes off in these places, right around the barracks.

AMBUSKE: When the war ended, however, George III and his ministers believed that the next one with France was just over the horizon. Prime Minister George Grenville intended his Stamp Act to pay for a standing army of over 10,000 soldiers in the colonies to defend against French perfidy. From the army’s headquarters in New York City, British officers planned the defense of British America in conjunction with the king and his ministers in London. In the colonies, that task fell to Thomas Gage, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America. 

AMBUSKE: As a young army captain, the English-born Gage had survived Major General Edward Braddox’s disastrous defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela in 1755. Gage married a New Jersey woman named Margaret Kemble in 1758, and he rose through the army’s ranks to become military governor of Montreal after the city’s surrender in 1760. Three years later, Major General Jeffrey Amherst’s failure to quell an Indigenous uprising led in part by the Odawa warrior Pontiac cost him his command. The king appointed Gage to replace Amherst as commander-in-chief. 

AMBUSKE: Gage was responsible for the 10 regiments the British planned to station in the colonies after the Seven Years’ War, in addition to the regiments already there. And it was his struggles to quarter British soldiers in New York that brought the colony to Parliament’s attention.

MCCURDY: Gage is overseeing a massive army. At the end of the Seven Years' War, Britain decides to leave 15 regiments of troops, of regular army troops in North America, and they scatter these troops from St Augustine out to Illinois, up to Quebec, over to Newfoundland, some in the American colonies like New York and Philadelphia. Gage is responsible for all of them. He's receiving communications from governors, from assemblies, of course, from the Ministry back in Britain, and trying to coordinate all of this. And a big issue is often for him ordering what to do with the soldiers, how to make sure they get fed, how to make sure they have utensils they need, and other supplies they need to live. And so it's Gage who sort of is on the front line of this issue, because Americans, especially once the Seven Years' War ends, the Americans start pushing back and saying, Well, why are the soldiers still here? I thought the war was over. What are we paying for? Why are these guys in the middle of the public common what's going on? And so it's Gage who tries to start figuring a solution to that.

AMBUSKE: British Americans in New York and elsewhere were as wary of standing armies as their fellow subjects in Great Britain, where a strict law called the “Mutiny Act” offered them constitutional protections by governing where soldiers could and could not be quartered.

MCCURDY: Gage wants, initially, the English Mutiny Act to be expanded to North America and simply include that as well. And the Mutiny Act lays out the rules for quartering that when troops come to town, the city or the local authorities have to find a place for these soldiers to live. They also have to provide basic accouterments to the men, utensils, alcohol, in some instances, vinegar, other items like that. They need to pay for transporting troops and also their supplies from place to place. Gage says we should expand this to North America. However, in England, the troops can only go into public houses or barracks. They're not allowed to go into private houses. Engage says, Well, this would be impractical in America, because we don't still have a lot of barracks, especially as you go outside of the major cities, we don't have a lot of public houses. Engage says we want to write a law for America, but we're going to need to include that the troops will have the right to go into private houses. This is how it's originally written and sent off to Parliament to be considered for passage in what becomes the Quartering Act.

AMBUSKE: But for the king, as well as many members of Parliament, quartering troops in private homes was a breach of the colonists' rights and liberties.

MCCURDY: It's actually George the Third who says, "Well, this will never fly. I can't believe anyone's got ever going to approve this in Parliament. This is a clear violation of English constitution to not have soldiers in your private houses." And he's right. This bill goes to Parliament in early 1765 and it's voted down. It's handily defeated because people think the idea of forcing Americans to accept troops in their houses is unconstitutional.

AMBUSKE: In London, members of Parliament turned to Benjamin Franklin, the crown-appointed postmaster general for North America and agent for the colony of Pennsylvania for advice on how to revise the defeated Quartering Act.

MCCURDY: Franklin is living in London at the time as the agent for Pennsylvania. He's basically a lobbyist. And Franklin gets wind of what's going on and works out a compromise. And he says, Well, okay, I can assure you, the Americans don't mind paying for troops. They don't mind paying to quarter them. They do not want them in their private houses. And so the Quartering Act is rewritten. And so it states emphatically that soldiers, when they come to your town, they will either go to barracks or to public houses or to an empty, uninhabited building. It doesn't say it specifically, but it is expressly implied the troops will not go into private houses. And it lays out these rules, where will soldiers go? It lays out compensation. The property owners will be compensated if soldiers are on their property. If someone chooses to rent an empty building, it gives local control to quartering soldiers. So when soldiers come to town, it's the local magistrates that decide where they're going to go and how many will go into which place. The Americans are way on the hook for of course, paying for this. They'll pay this to their taxes.

AMBUSKE: Parliament passed the new Quartering Act in May 1765, one week before it passed the Stamp Act. The two were meant to work together to support the army and the colonies, one to fund it, the other to house it. Yet British Americans felt the collective weight of one act much more than they felt the other.

MCCURDY: Americans, I would never say they love the Quartering Act. By comparison to the Stamp Act, they kind of ignore it. There's a couple ways of thinking about this. One. Unlike the Stamp Act, the Americans get something for the Quartering Act. They've received this guarantee, and the British Army lives up to it, with very few exceptions. In the colonies, in what becomes United States, there's very, very few instances where troops ever go into private houses again, and when that happens, they are reprimanded. The Americans do get that guarantee in exchange for their money. It's also uneven. Stamp acts don't apply to everybody. Anyone who touches paper is going to have to pay the Stamp Act. The Quartering Act only comes in when soldiers are in town, soldiers aren't in most colonies, so most Americans aren't having to deal with the presence of soldiers, nor are they having to deal with the cost of quartering soldiers. Through my research, I was able to find that at least eight provincial assemblies appropriated money for the Quartering Act without much objection. In fact, opposition arises in two places. One is New York, and the other is Boston.

AMBUSKE: In New York, as Christopher Minty explains, the Quartering Act was:

MINTY: Wildly unpopular. Many, if not most, New Yorkers were opposed to the Quartering Act. They didn't like having any troops in New York, they just they didn't like it. They wanted them gone. They didn't want a standing army.

AMBUSKE: For many New Yorkers, the Stamp Act and the Quartering Act were two sides of the same coin - the one an illegal attempt by Parliament to tax them, and the other lacking an express guarantee that the army would not billet troops in private homes.

JOHN WATTS: “This Billeting Bill on the Carpet is a new Matter of serious Speculation, People say they had rather part with their Money, tho’ rather unconstitutionally than to have a parcel of Military Masters put by Act of Parliament a bed [next to] their Wifes & Daughters.”

AMBUSKE: In December, another New Yorker exclaimed:

NEW YORKER: ”The Stamp Act and billeting act were hatched at once, and God grant they may be both repealed at once.”

AMBUSKE: In the summer and fall of 1765, as colonists rioted and burned effigies of Stamp distributors and prime ministers to protest the Stamp Act, General Gage wisely recognized that trying to enforce the Quartering Act would only make matters worse. He delayed its implementation by a year.

AMBUSKE: But the rioting also led Gage to see the Quartering Act’s potential in a new light. As Gage knew, quartering troops in the colonial backcountry was expensive. The British had to ship supplies to the Ohio and Illinois countries, and build barracks where none existed. As he told his superiors in London, it made good economic sense to redeploy soldiers to the east coast, to colonies with good infrastructure and shorter supply lines. 

AMBUSKE: Gage also believed that the presence of British soldiers would deter further civil disorder in major cities. The army had no formal powers to act as a police force, nor could it act as one without a direct request from civilian authorities. But with the Stamp Act crisis abating by May 1766, Gage argued that soldiers were needed to protect powder magazines in case of future “tumults” and offer “support to the civil government” should the rioting resume.

MCCURDY: By 1766 Gates has moved three regiments to New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, putting most of those in major cities.

AMBUSKE: The 28th Regiment of Foot arrived in New York city from Quebec that summer. They joined a contingent of Highland soldiers from Scotland, artillerymen, and the 46th Regiment in the city, about 1,500 soldiers in all. As the new arrivals took up residence in the Upper Barracks, built on the Commons, the city’s Liberty Pole, erected earlier that May, stood watch over them. 

AMBUSKE: Here’s Shira Lurie:

LURIE:  Colonists raised the first Liberty Poll, actually not as a method of resistance, but of celebration. People in New York had just received word that Parliament repealed the Stamp Tax, and they are very excited, so they have a party. Everyone goes down to the common sometimes called the fields. They light fireworks. They roast an ox, they drink heavily, they fire cannon. Salutes, and they raise this liberty pole, which was a ships mass, and they put a sign on it that says, George the third hit and liberty

AMBUSKE: As Wendy Bellion explains, Liberty Poles were no ordinary pieces of wood.

BELLION: Liberty poles don't get their name until the late 1760s and they're very early on associated with flag poles. They might have been about that height they derived from tall straight white pine trees, trees that were known as mast trees, and trees that were incredibly valuable to the British Navy, trees that could be logged and could be used for all manner of ship construction in the 18th century, and in particular masts. These were tall, straight timbers that were regulated and used specifically for logging by the British Navy, so that they could be used for all kinds of maritime purposes, commercial as well as martial. Many of these trees are farmed in upstate New England, New Hampshire and Maine, and they would have been very carefully logged, conveyed down these vast rivers, very dangerous work, as political tensions begin to heat up, in part caused by the Stamp Act and the many acts that would follow, a group of New Yorkers who begin to resist British taxation efforts, a group that begins to call themselves the Sons of Liberty begin to seize some of these logs, some of these mass trees from the ports on the East River, these are very long pieces of timber in excess of at least 50 sometimes 70 feet. So imagine trying to make your way through these tight corners and streets of lower Manhattan, conveying these enormous pieces of timber. And then imagine the sheer human power required to raise these things when you don't have something like a crane to help you do that, you have to imagine these men coming together to dig a hole, to raise this pole, to insert it into this space, to shore up all the foundations around this so this so this thing is not going to come down, and once it's raised, it could serve like a flagpole. You could literally raise flags and other signs and insignias up and down these flagpoles, but over time, these effectively become monuments. The Sons of Liberty understand themselves to be raising monuments to their own sense of liberty. When these things first go up, they are meant to be celebratory objects.

AMBUSKE: But in New York, as in other colonies, monuments to liberty for some cast long shadows that illuminated its absence for others.

BELLION: We have to think about the Commons as a space that is being crossed by white people of European descent as well as enslaved people of African descent every day as they went about their everyday business in New York City, we assume that it was white colonists who were raising the Liberty polls. We don't really know for sure, we don't have clear records of who did the labor. It's entirely conceivable that enslaved people of African descent were asked to help raise these poles into place, poles that paid tribute to liberties that only white free men could have enjoyed in the colonies. At this time, there's a terrible. Irony, there's a very cruel irony for many enslaved people seeing these Liberty poles within their midst, these Liberty poles broadcast a kind of political liberty that enslaved people could not have access to at this time period.

AMBUSKE: Even so, enslaved people might have found other meanings and other memories in the pine mast standing on the city's Commons.

BELLION: The forms of the Liberty pole may well have resonated with architectural forms that people in the African diaspora might have been familiar with. So this is where we need to think about cultural memory, about Memorial forms that enslaved people might have carried with them across the Atlantic. So, for example, the columnar form of the Liberty poles might have resembled forms like sacred trees and altars that were part of vernacular landscapes in West Africa as well as the colonial Americas. And some of these trees, and these were often trees that had a certain kind of significance, because they too, were tall and they were very old. Sometimes they were located in sacred groves. These are the kind of trees that would have carried spiritual resonance in Congo and Yoruba communities, some of the communities from which enslaved people in New York were drawn as well as the greater Caribbean plantations to which some enslaved people were transported.

AMBUSKE: For the British soldiers quartered in the Upper Barracks. The Liberty Poles were no ordinary pieces of wood either.

BELLION: Over time, they become contested objects, because what the Sons of Liberty decide to do in raising these Liberty poles at the Commons is to put them up in front of the very barracks that British troops are occupying on the Commons. So you can imagine that these become very antagonistic objects.

LURIE: The soldiers are clearly reading into some of those more subversive subtexts about popular power. New York colonists and these British soldiers in the city don't have the best relationship. Colonists are really upset generally about having this large standing army in the colonies following the Seven Years War. They think it's unnecessary, they think it's expensive, they think it's a potential threat to their liberty. There's a lot of tension between the colonists and these soldiers. The soldiers may have taken that also as kind of a provocation.

BELLION: What begins to happen is that the Liberty boys, as they're also known, begin to call their supporters to the Commons, and they do this by literally calling this becomes a very noisy space, a space of political language, a space of political action. But they also do that by printing and posting what were known as broadsides, effectively posters that are calling people to political action. We need to think about the Liberty poles as the center of an acoustic space, as the center of a sonic landscape. And it is also this broader sonic landscape reverberating outward from the center of the commons itself that is summoning people to action. If you think about when you hear a church bell, and you can hear a church bell for miles beyond where the bell is actually ringing in the tower, and it too, summons people to a center. It summons people to a social space. Summons people to do and perform a certain kind of ritual. That is precisely what begins to happen with the Liberty poles. It's not just the Liberty boys who are calling people to the commons. It's the pole itself. It's endowed with a kind of anthropomorphic presence, the presence of human agency to be able to summon people to its own defense and to declare the liberties of British colonists on their behalf.

LURIE: The pole was a celebration that they lived in an Empire of Liberty. But then, of course, that changed.

AMBUSKE: Called by the Sons of Liberty and by the Liberty Pole itself to the Commons, New Yorkers who were angry about the army’s very presence in the heart of the city rallied around the pine mast to celebrate the Stamp Act’s repeal and their commitment to liberty, all within sight of the soldiers in the barracks. 

AMBUSKE: When some of the soldiers, cloaked in darkness, cut the liberty pole down on August 10, 1766, they did so not as a means of disrespect to George III or William Pitt, whose names the Sons of Liberty had affixed to the pole as defenders of British American freedom, but as an act of resistance to what they saw as mob rule and seditious disorder. And yet by doing so, they transformed its meaning in ways they never intended.

LURIE: By tearing down the pole, they confer a lot more significance and meaning than if they had just allowed it to remain standing. And contemporaries say this one newspaper article says New Yorkers would have considered their pole quote a trifle and they wouldn't have mined it if it just sort of naturally fell to the ground over time. But after quote being destroyed by way of insult, we could not but consider it as a declaration of war against our freedom and property. End quote. So by attacking it, the soldiers really strip away the poles endorsement of the king and Parliament's authority, and they really transform it into this symbol of the colonists struggle against tyrannical exercises of imperial power, and crucially, they also marked it as an important symbol. This is worthy of an attack. This is worthy of destruction.

AMBUSKE: The nearly 3,000 people who descended on the Commons the following day found their liberty pole lying on the ground, with its meaning remade. Though they managed to erect a new one, the ensuing clash with British soldiers left two civilians wounded before General Gage and the regimental commanders could get their men back in the barracks. As Gage wrote to London:

GAGE: “The Mob afterwards in Presence of the Magistrates Surrounded the Barracks, and vented so much abuse and provoking Language, that some of the better Sort of People who had assembled there, did not think it possible that the Officers could command themselves, or restrain the Fury of their Men and pressed the Magistrates to Support their own Dignity and disperse the Mob. The Soldiers were however kept quiet and no Mischief ensued.”

AMBUSKE: They kept quiet until the night of September 23rd, when soldiers from the Twenty-Eighth Regiment cut down the Liberty pole’s replacement. Once again, the Sons of Liberty sallied forth from their taverns to erect a new pine mast pole. Once again, the soldiers cut it down. 

AMBUSKE: On March 19, 1767, New Yorkers awoke to find their latest liberty pole destroyed. The New-York Gazette played coy in its description of the perpetrators, but anyone in the city reading the newspaper would have known who had wielded the saw. 

NEW YORK GAZETTE: “Last Thursday Morning, the Pole erected as sacred to Liberty, on the City Parade, by a great Number of the principal Inhabitants of this City, and called the Liberty Pole, was found cut down by some evil-minded Persons unknown.”

AMBUSKE: Nor did the paper have any doubt about what master the malignant men served: 

NEW YORK GAZETTE: “This Pole has been cut down several Times before, by Persons who could never be discovered, and who could not have the least Temptation to such a malicious Job, there being neither Pleasure, Profit, or Honour in doing it, and can be done only by such as are actuated by an infernal Disposition, and are quite Volunteers to Satan, to serve him without Fee or Reward.”

AMBUSKE: The 2,000 people who assembled on the Commons on March 19th, the morning after the destruction of the latest pine mast, chose to reject Satan and all his works by erecting a new, armored liberty pole. They sunk a new mast deep into the ground. And then:

BELLION: Blacksmiths went to work. The Sons of Liberty realized that they almost need a protective framework around the pole itself. Part of the sonic landscape that is involved in raising these poles are the blacksmiths who are banging these pieces of iron into place to prevent those British saws and to prevent anyone really from getting close to these Liberty poles and messing with them.

AMBUSKE: The iron skin encasing this latest liberty pole and the constant vigilance of the Sons of Liberty deterred British soldiers from felling it, but it was not for lack of trying. As the New-York Gazette reported: 

NEW YORK GAZETTE: “[O]n Monday Evening last, a Number of the Soldiers armed, were seen around it, ‘tis said with a Ladder, to fell it above the Iron Work: When many of the Sons of Liberty took the Alarm; and it is more than probably if some of the Military Officers had not appeared, and commanded off the Soldiers, there would have been bloody Work.”

AMBUSKE: And then the paper issued a warning.

NEW YORK GAZETTE: “the Cutting this Post down can only be done with a Design to affront all the Sons of Liberty in this Place, the Perpetrators would do well to consider the Consequences; let their Motives for doing it be what it may: for they may know, that such a Body of People who would not yield to be enslaved by [Parliament], the most august Body on Earth, will not tamely submit to such a mean low-lived Insult on their Liberty, as this is”

AMBUSKE: Despite the soldiers’ best efforts, the iron liberty pole would remain standing like a sentinel on the Commons in front of the Upper Barracks. For now. 

AMBUSKE: While General Gage was struggling to prevent violence between the king’s troops and his subjects in New York city, he was also battling on a second front with the colony’s provincial assembly. 

AMBUSKE: By the summer of 1766, Gage could no longer afford to put off implementing the Quartering Act in New York and other colonies. The arrival of the soldiers who were quickly drawing the ire of the Sons of Liberty were in need of support. 

AMBUSKE: To provide for them, and to obey Parliament’s law, Gage invoked the Quartering Act. He sent requests to the colonies for funds to purchase supplies and housing for his men. In New York, the headquarters of the British Army in North America, the commander-in-chief met with a rather uncooperative colonial assembly. 

AMBUSKE: Here’s John McCurdy:

MCCURDY: New York starts complaining rightly so, that it's being over taxed, that is having to pay quarter soldiers in ways that other colonies don't. The New York assembly in the late 1760s start playing games. They send complaints to England. Why should we have to pay for this, they will appropriate colonial money to pay for quartering troops, but they won't acknowledge that they're doing so because the Quartering Act requires them to do so.

AMBUSKE: In June 1766, the New York assembly contributed nearly £4,800 that was left over from the Seven Years’ War to furnish

NEW YORK ASSEMBLY: “ the barracks in the cities of New York and Albany with beds, bedding, firewood, candles, and utensils for dressing of victuals.”

AMBUSKE: But the assembly didn’t mention the Quartering Act when it appropriated the funds. Nor did it agree to supply the soldiers “with salt, vinegar, and cider or beer,” also in violation of the act.

MCCURDY: It's a way of sort of skirting parliamentary authority and possibly even questioning parliamentary authority. Or they will say, we'll pay for certain items, but not other items. New York is one of the places that says we won't pay for alcohol. We're not going to pay for soldiers to drink, because that just makes them reckless and destroys our town.

AMBUSKE: Governor Moore signed the bill anyway. Like Gage, the New York legislature’s brinkmanship frustrated the colony’s governor. And Moore was no stranger to colonial discontent. Before the king appointed him to New York, Moore had spent nearly a decade as Jamaica’s lieutenant governor. In 1760, he won much praise from white Jamaicans and British authorities for leading the suppression of Tacky’s Revolt, the uprising launched by the enslaved men Tacky and Apongo. 

AMBUSKE: Five years later, in November 1765, Moore sailed into New York amidst the Stamp Act crisis, where his willingness to listen to New Yorkers who were angry about the stamp duties reduced some of the tension in the colony. And he prudently decided against asking Gage for soldiers to suppress the liberty pole mobs in August 1766, fearing that would only make matters worse. 

AMBUSKE: Gage and Moore were both pragmatic men who understood colonial politics far better than the king’s ministers in London. Even if the New York assembly hadn't fully complied with the Quartering Act, or even acknowledged it, its members did authorize some provisions for His Majesty’s soldiers. The general and the governor recognized that in this moment, something was better than nothing. 

AMBUSKE: As Gage explained himself to London:

GAGE: “In my demand for quarters, it was necessary to manage matters.”

AMBUSKE: That wasn’t good enough for the Earl of Shelburne, the new Secretary of State for the Southern Department, who had oversight of the colonies. Shelburne ordered Governor Moore to enforce Parliament's will “in the full extent and meaning of the act.”

AMBUSKE: Facing pressure from London, the royal governor had little choice but to do as he was commanded. When New York’s House of Representatives reconvened in November 1766, it allocated £400 to buy candles and firewood for the soldiers in Fort George on Bowling Green. As they had done in June, the representatives complained of the burden imposed on New York compared to other colonies, and they declined to mention the Quartering Act in their bill. 

AMBUSKE: Governor Moore declined to sign it. Instead, he prorogued the assembly, sending the members home to think on their actions, and informed London that New York continued in its obstinance.

AMBUSKE: By early 1767, Parliament’s patience with New York’s non-compliance with the Quartering Act had run out. 

MCCURDY: It's this type of pushback that gets the attention of Charles Townsend, who's the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, but he is, in many ways, running the British government at this moment. In 1767, he decides we're gonna look at what's going on in the colonies. He looks at several of the colonies and finds that several are not living up to their obligations under the Quartering Act. Decides he's going to make an example of New York.

AMBUSKE: For Townshend, New York was playing games that went far beyond its failure to provide for the king’s soldiers. The Declaratory Act had made plain that Parliament could legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Either Parliament had supreme authority over British America, or it did not. 

AMBUSKE: In the late spring and summer of 1767, as Townshend was drawing up a new, grand vision to reform the empire in the wake of the Stamp Act’s repeal,the Chancellor of the Exchequer believed that New York ought to be made to do its duty, As he argued in the House of Commons:

TOWNSHEND: “The superiority of the mother country can at no time be better exerted than now.”

MCCURDY: And so the New York Restraining Act is passed by Parliament in July of 1767 and it disallows the New York law that had provided money under the Quartering Act, and also dissolves the assembly. The New York restraining act will then state that the New York assembly cannot reconvene until it is going to do so and approve the Quartering Act without any reservation. It's a really aggressive response to this colonial objection.

AMBUSKE: For it was in New York, a colony that Townsend believed had:

TOWNSHEND:  “boldly and insolently bid defiance to [Parliament’s] authority and threatened the whole legislative power of this country, obstinately, wickedly, and almost traitorously in an absolute denial of its authority”

AMBUSKE: That he saw everything wrong with British America.

AMBUSKE: On June 18, 1768, Major General Thomas Gage had his eyes fixed on the west. 

AMBUSKE: From the headquarters of the British Army in New York city, the commander in chief reported to the king’s ministers that a trade dispute between white settlers and Indigenous people had been resolved at Fort Niagara in western New York, a conference in Pittsburgh between British officials and delegates from the Haudenosaunee, Shawnee, and Delaware nations had preserved peace between them, and that seven companies of the Royal Regiment of Ireland were on their way to relieve soldiers stationed at Forts Pitt and de Chartres.      

AMBUSKE: Ten days later, Gage’s attention turned north. Since the early spring, Bostonians had been protesting new taxes on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea, and stewing over the creation of a new customs board to enforce them. Matters became much worse on June 10th, when customs officials seized a merchant ship owned by John Hancock under suspicion of smuggling. They began towing it toward the warship HMS Romney, anchored in Boston Harbor. Hancock had named his offending vessel Liberty. 

AMBUSKE: Rioting Bostonians  – some 3,000 in number - hunted for Joseph Harrison, the port’s collector of customs, but Harrison and other officials had already fled to the Romney. Harrison’s personal boat, however, was another matter. The mob dragged it out of the water, dumped it under the city’s Liberty Tree, and burned it. 

AMBUSKE: For Gage:

 GAGE: “The Reports spread in this Place of the Outrageous Behavior, the licentious and daring Menances, and Seditious Spirit of the People of all Degrees in Boston, are alarming; those of the lower Sort inflamed by Many, who should know, and act better.”

AMBUSKE: Gage offered to send Massachusetts Bay Governor Francis Bernard two regiments to support the civil government in his colony, but the governor politely declined. Though Bernard would have welcomed soldiers, his provincial council unanimously advised against it. 

AMBUSKE: But unbeknownst to both the general and the governor, London had made the decision for them. The king’s ministers, too, had grown tired of the disorder in one of Great Britain’s oldest colonies in North America. 

AMBUSKE: In August 1768, Gage received secret orders from the Earl of Hillsborough, only recently appointed to the new office of Secretary of State for the Colonies, to send soldiers stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia to the town of Boston.

AMBUSKE: Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. 

AMBUSKE:  I’m your host, Jim Ambuske.

AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is supported by the McCormick Center for the Study of the American Revolution at Siena College. Learn how you can support the series at rstudios.org, where you’ll also find a complete transcript of today’s episode and suggestions for further reading. 

AMBUSKE: Worlds is researched and written by me with additional research, writing, and script editing by Jeanette Patrick. 

AMBUSKE: Jeanette Patrick and I are the Executive Producers. Grace Mallon is our British Correspondent. 

AMBUSKE:  Our lead audio editor for this episode is Jeanette Patrick. Special thanks to Curt Dahl of CD Squared.

AMBUSKE:  Hayley Madl and Alexandra Miller are our graduate assistants. Special thanks also to Amber Pelham.

AMBUSKE: Our thanks to Wendy Bellion, Shira Lurie, Jon Kukla, Patrick Griffin, Brad Jones, Christopher Minty, and John McCurdy for sharing their expertise with us in this episode. 

AMBUSKE: Thanks also to our voice actors Adam Smith, Melissa Gismondi, Mills Kelly, Nate Sleeter, Anne Fertig, and Dan Howlett.

AMBUSKE:  Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.