Accommodation and retreat: politics in Anglo-Dutch New York City, 1700-1760

© 1982 Dr. Adrian HoweThis thesis began as a study of popular politics in pre-Revolutionary New York City. In the course of this inquiry into the antecedents of crowd activity in the revolutionary era, I discovered that in the first six decades of the eighteenth century popular political involvement in New York was minimal and sporadic. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of New York City politics in this period is the quiescence of the populace. Overt conflict involving large numbers of people is absent. Moreover, there is very little evidence of widespread involvement in election politics, and no evidence at all that the hegemony of the ruling elite was ever challenged from below. The focus of my analysis therefore shifted to a study of the social basis of New York’ s City's elite-dominated politics and also to the factors inhibiting the development of popular politics there. The hypothesis of my new enquiry was that if eighteenth century New York. City, unlike Boston, had a reputation for quiescence, even inertia, then that quiescence and inertia must have been essentially related to the social structure of the town. This was not an easy hypothesis to test, as few sources have survived to illuminate the nature of colonial New York City society. Nevertheless, an examination of those sources which are susceptible to quantitative analysis revealed something as yet undiscovered about the town: the Dutch townsfolk, most of whom were descendants of the original settlers of New Netherland, formed a cohesive and self-recognizing community until mid-century. This finding suggested another hypothesis: it was that if we can establish that the Dutch and Dutch-identified townsmen of New York City were less inclined than the English townsmen to become involved in adversary politics, then the persistence of the Dutch needs to be considered as an important factor inhibiting both the escalation of political conflict and the radicalization of the town's politics. Testing this hypothesis proved to be a difficult task. The first problem was to determine just who were Dutch or Dutch identified in eighteenth century New York City. The second was to ascertain whether the Dutch - as Dutch - played a role in the town's politics after 1700. This involved determining whether Dutch-identified townsmen had a distinctively different political orientation from the English. Positive proofs that they did are hard to come by, but negative evidence - such as their failure to organize at the polls - suggests strongly that the Dutch were indeed disinclined to become involved in the adversary politics at which the English and English identified excelled. In fact, the Dutch in eighteenth century New York City avoided or retreated from conflictual situations. The impact which this disinclination had on the evolution of New York City politics is examined in this thesis. More broadly, this thesis challenges the recently established paradigm of analysis emphasizing the modernity and increasingly democratic nature of eighteenth century New York City politics. The main problem with this model is that it creates the erroneous impression that in the six decades prior to the Stamp Act riots, New York politics moved relentlessly forward towards the Revolution and the modern era. Much of my analysis may seem negative. Much of it is. I am concerned to show that the evidence for an evolutionary view of colonial New York politics does not exist for New York City in the period 1700 to 1760. The history of the town in that period is rather the history of what did not occur. More particularly, it is the history of the non-evolution of a democratically-orientated or radical mode of politics