of the Crown, regarded the liberty poles as a flagrant insult to imperial authority. Usually acting without specific orders while off duty, soldiers felt honor bound to cut the liberty poles down as quickly as they reappeared. The destruction of the fifth successive liberty pole in New York City resulted in the Golden Hill and Nassau Street riots, involving some sixty harassed troops and hundreds of angry civilians. During these brief but intense clashes, soldiers used bayonets against threatening crowds armed with weapons of opportunity. Although the participants suffered no fatalities and most casualties amounted to only cuts and bruises, the encounters underscored the combustibility of anti-British sentiment in New York.18
The reported case of Michael Smith glorified the individual action supposedly taken by some New York citizens in this affair. When word of the confrontation reached Smith, a Broadstreet chairmaker’s apprentice, he grabbed a leg of an unassembled chair and ran toward the commotion. Using the chair leg as a club, he attacked a British grenadier and captured the soldier’s weapon. Smith triumphantly returned to his shop after the fray with the musket and bayonet. He regarded the appropriated firearm as a trophy of his personal triumph over the British, and proudly displayed it while relating the circumstances of its acquisition on any occasion that presented itself. The New York Sons of Liberty seized upon these particular acts by New Yorkers to build the participants into folk heroes and strengthen the patriot rhetoric against ministerial government.
Some partisan commentators erroneously reported later that the troops killed one citizen during the New York riots and touted the skirmish as the “first blood shed” in the American Revolution. The Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770, however, with its confirmed fatalities, overshadowed the Battle of Golden Hill in the contemporary patriot mind.19
New York also participated in its own tea party. In May 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act to rescue the floundering British East India Company. Since the company represented the largest business establishment in the British Empire, this commercial enterprise was so vast that it influenced the national economy. Unfortunately, the tea trade had fallen into desperate economic straits that threatened the British financial climate. Colonial boycotts over previous British government revenue measures were responsible, in large part, for a large stockpile of unsold tea in England and the company’s possible bankruptcy. In passing the act, the government intended to give the East India Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. Parliament hoped that this marketing concession would relieve the company’s warehouses, which were burdened with 18 million pounds of surplus tea.
Even though the Tea Act would actually lower the price of tea for the consumer, it would eliminate colonial middlemen and errant tea-smuggling operations that especially flourished in the provinces of New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. Thus, powerful colonists engaged in this lucrative business stood to lose a part of their commercial domain, and they joined with popular patriot leaders to turn public opinion against the bill. The issue that emerged from these circumstances was that Parliament had devised yet another devious scheme to tax the colonies without representation, requiring the colonists to continue their vigilance against imperial slavery by resisting East India tea. When the tea ships arrived from England at the principal ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, hostile crowds awaited them. Boston Harbor became the site of the first encounter, resulting in the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, where a well-organized crowd destroyed the tea by dumping it into the water before it could be unloaded.
By the fall of 1773, the people of New York had become concerned over the tea tax as well. Constant public attention focused by local media and frequent rumors that the tea ships were approaching kept the populace agitated. The Sons of Liberty circulated an “association” pledge not to buy, sell, or use East India tea, and a wide cross section of New Yorkers signed. A clandestine patriot body, calling itself the “Mohawks,” published a notice in Rivington’s Gazetteer on December 2, 1773, that they were “prepared to pay an unwelcome visit” to any ship that arrived with the boycotted tea. News of the celebrated Boston Tea Party reached New York by December 21, 1773, to heighten dissension further.
Finally, on April 18, 1774, a tea ship anchored outside New York Harbor. After several days of heated negotiations with the patriot “committee of inspection,” the captain prudently decided not to risk the wrath of New Yorkers by trying to unload his consignment of tea, and he began to make preparations for a return to England. The master of another tea ship that arrived on April 22, 1774, was not as accommodating. He docked his vessel at a New York pier and attempted to conceal its cargo of tea while he devised a way to off-load it. The patriots suspected his plot, and their intelligence network soon confirmed their skepticism. Facing mounting animosity, the unnerved captain eventually broke down and admitted his cargo included East India tea.
Patriot activists immediately started to plan operations to prevent unloading of the tea. That night, a large crowd, under the influence of the Sons of Liberty, assembled at the wharf where the tea ship was docked. The “Mohawks” were expecting to do their duty by disposing of the tea at a prearranged time. However, the dockside crowd became so aroused and impatient by about eight o’clock that some of them took matters into their own hands. They boarded the ship and destroyed seventeen chests of tea, valued at £2,000, by opening and throwing them into the harbor. This premature activity by the crowd took the “Mohawks” by surprise, as they were donning Indian disguises in a nearby tavern at the time, and preempted their planned event. The next morning, festive celebrants watched the two tea ships set sail for England— one with all of its tea plundered and ruined, and the other with a hold of undelivered tea. This was New York’s “Tea Party,” which approximated and reinforced that of Boston.20
All of these events formed the backdrop to Montgomery’s studied detachment from politics. Although he favored a simple existence of noninvolvement, his lifestyle was not reclusive. Montgomery must have confronted reports of these happenings on a regular basis as he went about the daily routine of managing his estate. Information concerning aggravated British-colonial relations dominated newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, rumors, and conversation of the time. In addition, Montgomery no doubt had firsthand knowledge of some of these incidents. He possessed an educated and inquiring mind, and these events begged analysis. The jarring conditions of the times were not conducive to prolonged stoicism. Compelling external forces intruded upon and altered the lives of the colonists. Like the rest of his contemporaries, Montgomery eventually felt the pressure to choose sides in the growing controversy. All alternatives had to be considered to resolve the dilemma in his own mind and arrive at a personal decision. Then, there was the Livingston connection.
The Livingston dynasty projected the family into a position of power in New York provincial politics. Yet, it did not enjoy absolute primacy in this respect. The De Lanceys paralleled the Livingstons in their evolution into prominent and influential families. As these two houses built ambitious and competitive commercial enterprises, it was natural that this contention be extended to the political front. Also, most of the socioeconomically advantaged colonists felt that it was an obligation of their social station to serve the community as political leaders. So, these two families were not the only members of the ruling elite involved in New York politics, but they were undoubtedly the most active. After a visit in early 1774, John Adams noted, “The two great families in this province, upon whose motions all their politics turn, are the De Lanceys and Livingstons.”21
The predominance of the Livingstons and De Lanceys in politics dated from the 1740s, and they competed on generally equal terms, with control of the provincial assembly alternating between the two for several decades. Additionally, the Livingston-De Lancey rivalry was not limited to kinship. Political activists of all sorts broadened the partisan system by lining up behind one family standard or the other. In opposing each other, the two factions amended their agendas as political expediency dictated. The Livingstons and De Lanceys engaged in a balancing act between currying favor from the governor and the Crown, and seeking cooperation with an emerging popular movement hostile to ministerial rule. Thus, if changes in the political system were inevitable, each side maneuvered to be well positioned in the new order that would follow. The
