10. Reaction in New York

0:00Volume 3, Chapter 10, Reaction in New York Neither was New York laggard in protesting the molasses tax. The New York Assembly appointed a committee in September 1764 to draft a protest against infringing the right to be taxed only by consent. The assembly approved the committee's statement the following month and, unlike Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island made absolutely no concessions to a supposed expediency. The historian Bernhard Nolenberg justly called the New York Assembly's addresses, one each to the Houses of Commons and Lords and the King, among the great state papers of the Pre-Revolutionary Period Thus the assembly's remonstrance and petition to the commons took its stand against taxation without representation squarely on the natural right of private property.

1:08The exemption from such taxation was not simply a privilege but a natural right of The Petition expressly repudiated the artificial distinction between internal and external taxation, since all impositions, whether they be internal taxes or duties paid for what we consume, equally diminish the estates upon which they are charged.

1:45The New York Petitions were prepared by three New York City lawyers, the liberal leaders of New York, John Moran Scott, William Smith Jr., who wrote the drafts, and the eminent liberal William Livingston, the leading theoretician. As early as March, Livingston had written of his implacable hostility to the deep-formed and Steadily Prosecuted Plan of the British Ministry to Reduce Us by Degrees to Perfect Vassalage, a judiciary appointed by the Crown, a standing army among us, a measure absolutely inconsistent with civil liberty, and now the crushing the trade of North America in such essential articles as must reduce us to beggary.

2:39Did they also carry another favorite point, subjecting us to the payment of the national tax? We should certainly envy the superior political happiness of the French. The boldness and daring of New York's action was undoubtedly traced to the shock of a recent message by Governor Cadwallader Colden, ordered by the Board of Trade. Colden urged the unilateral Annulment of a huge land grant of 800,000 acres that had been given by Governor Cornberry to 13 grantees in 1708. Underlying Colden's urging was a threat of further parliamentary coercion to annul the grant.

3:26By 1764, ownership of this tract, the Cayo de Roseros grant, between the Hudson and Mohawk The question of the Kea der Rosaris grant was ostensible altruism in behalf of the probably The assembly defrauded Mohawk sellers of the land, but the assembly correctly suspected chicanery behind the altruistic mask. All the Crown officials involved stood to gain handsomely by the annulment. Governor Colden stood to earn 10,000 pounds, his fee for re-granting The Kea de Roseris Land, Cauldron's son, Alexander, £4,000 in fees as Surveyor General of land in New York for the re-granting. The Crown itself would gain from an increased annual quit-rent payment of over £1,500 for negotiating the lands, and Sir William Johnson, the Crown's Superintendant of the Northern Indians, who pushed the Mohawk claim, had received overlapping land grants from the Crown and from the Mohawks of over 100,000 acres in the same area.

5:05Colden agreed to back Johnson's highly dubious Indian claim after Johnson offered him 10,000 acres from the tract. The New York Assembly swiftly and angrily rejected the whole scheme and, no doubt, its reaction radicalized the Assemblymen into taking a firm, principled stand on the molasses and Business Tax.