Given all this popularity and good will on his arrival, what was it that
went wrong? How did William Cosby’s become “one of the most disturbed
administrations in New York Colonial history”? The transition was very
rapid. Within three months of his arrival the new Governor wrote to the
Duke of Newcastle:
I am sorry to inform your Grace that the example and spirit of the
Boston people begin to spread amongst these colonies in a most
prodigious manner. I had more trouble to manage these people than I
could have imagined; however for this time I have done pretty well
with them; I wish I may come off as well with them of the Jersies.[2]
That old bugbear of Colonial governors, trouble with the Assembly, was
not in question. Unlike many men better than himself, Cosby got along
very well with his legislature, his differences with it being hardly
more than the inevitable friction created by two forces in contact and
working toward ends that did not always coincide. The harmony was
striking because he insulted the Assembly after it had voted him a
present for his opposition to the sugar bill: the sum did not satisfy
him, and he snarled to Lewis Morris, “Damn them, why did they not add
shillings and pence? Do they think that I came from England for money?
I’ll make them know better.”[3]
This was a gratuitous affront, and typical of the small-minded
avaricious man who offered it, but it did not raise any political issue
that could cause a quarrel.
The quarrel began within the Governor’s Council, among the men who were
supposed to be his close intimate advisers. The predisposing condition
already existed there in the form of the Morris-Delancey feud, on the
smoldering embers of which Cosby proceeded to pour oil. From the
Council, ripples of animosity spread through the Colony, dividing the
people into two factions—the Court party of the Governor (which absorbed
the Delancey Interest), and the Popular party (formerly the Morris
Interest) of his enemies. It happened like this.
During the year that Cosby stayed on in England after his appointment,
the leadership of New York devolved on the president of the Council, the
ranking member, who happened to be a veteran of the old New Amsterdam
days named Rip Van Dam. He was a hard-headed, tight-fisted, honest
Dutchman, not very able, but extremely devoted to his duties and his
rights. During his tenure of office he was voted, and drew, the stipend
attached to it.
When Cosby finally arrived on the scene, he produced a royal decree
ordering Van Dam to divide the sum with him. Van Dam’s answer was a
shrewd reprisal. Knowing that Cosby had received many emoluments of the
governorship while in England, he suggested a division that would
include these, and he calculated that on this basis the Governor
actually owed him a substantial amount. The dictatorial proconsul
rejected the proposal with all the anger and contempt he usually
displayed when thwarted. He decided to sue.
Determined to keep the case away from a jury because of local sentiment
that favored a Colonial against a crown official, and unable to proceed
in chancery since he would be presiding as chancellor over his own suit,
Cosby hit on the idea of letting the justices of the Supreme Court
handle it as Barons of the Exchequer. He therefore named the Supreme
Court a court of equity, after which he brought suit against Van Dam.
The defendant’s lawyers were James Alexander and William Smith, two of
the foremost members of the New York bar, who had been advising him
throughout. When the suit began in the new court of equity, Alexander
and Smith adopted the bold course of denying the validity of the court
itself, arguing in particular that it was illegal for the Governor to
establish it of his own free will and without the consent of the
Assembly. This plea was more than an attack on the jurisdiction of a
court: it was a direct accusation that the Governor had overstepped the
limits of his authority and had violated the law.
The three justices of the Supreme Court were divided on the merits of
the plea. Two of them, James Delancey and Frederick Philipse, rejected
it out of hand. They belonged to the Governor’s faction. But the Chief
Justice was of another mind, and that was the critical thing, for he was
Lewis Morris. (Notice the names. We are back in the familiar atmosphere
of the Morris-Delancey feud, James being the son of old Stephen
Delancey.) Morris had opposed obnoxious governors in the past, and he
would not back down before Governor Cosby. There was this added point
about Lewis Morris, that he had functioned in the New Jersey Council as
did Van Dam in New York’s, so his pocketbook stood in the same kind of
jeopardy if Van Dam should be condemned.
The Chief Justice therefore agreed with the counsel for the defense that
the court of equity was no true court, and he openly defied the Governor
with these words:
I take it the giving of a new jurisdiction in Equity by letters patent
to an old Court that never had such jurisdiction before, or erecting a
new Court of Equity by letters patent or ordinances of the Governor
and Council, without assent of the legislature, are equally unlawful,
and not a sufficient warrant to justify this Court to proceed in a
course of Equity. And therefore by the grace of God, I, as Chief
Justice of this Province, shall not pay any obedience to them in that
point.[4]
The Governor was away in New Jersey at the time but, hearing what had
happened, he wrote Morris a furious and insulting letter, and demanded a
copy of the remarks he had made in court. The Chief Justice complied, at
the same time publishing the remarks (through the Zenger press) as a
gesture of studied contempt for all the Colony to see. This was more
than Cosby was willing to stand. On May 3, 1733, he wrote to the Duke of
Newcastle:
Things are now gone that length that I must either discipline Morris
or suffer myself to be affronted, or, what is still worse, see the
King’s authority trampled on and disrespect and irreverence to it
taught from the Bench to the people by him who, by his oath and his
office, is obliged to support it. This is neither consistent with my
duty nor my inclination to bear, and therefore when I return to New
York I shall displace him and make Judge Delancey Chief Justice in his
room.[5]
In August, Cosby made good his threat. At one Council meeting, and
without notifying Morris in advance, he announced that henceforth
Delancey was chief justice of the Supreme Court of New York, with
Philipse advancing to the second place. Cadwallader Colden, who was
present in his capacity of councillor, tells us that he disapproved of
the Governor’s action, and that Cosby resented his saying so. Colden’s
account of the episode is so revealing of Cosby’s character that it is
worth quoting in full:
I had been sent for to town a few days before under pretense of some
affairs in my office of Surveyor General. When I came into the
Governor’s house he received me into his arms with, “My dear Colden, I
am glad to see you.” I was caressed for two or three days by every one
of the family. Just before I went to Council he took me upon the couch
and seemed to entertain me in the most friendly manner, but spoke not
one word of removing the Chief Justice and appointing another till we
were sitting in Council, when he said that he had removed Mr Morris
and appointed James Delancey in his room, and thought this the most
proper place to give the first notice of it. Upon which I said, “Then
Your Excellency only tells us what you have already done?” To which he
answered, “Yes.” I replied, “It is not what I would have advised.” And
he very briskly returned to it, “I do not ask your advice.” This put
his having the consent of the Council out of the question and defeated
the whole design he had been put upon of cajoling me (for I do not
think he was capable of forming any design himself that had any
reach). However he never forgave me.[6]
Morris soon learned what had taken place at the meeting, and in a letter
of protest he passed the information on to London:
I believe I am well informed that, on the delivery of the Commissions
to the Judges in Council, Doctor Colden asked the Governor whether the
Council was summoned to be advised on that head? If they were, he
would advise against it as being prejudicial to His Majesty’s service.
To which the Governor replied that he did not, nor ever intended to,
consult them about it; he thought fit to do it, and was not
accountable to them; or words to that effect.[7]
From this time on there was no mollifying Lewis Morris. Implacably
revengeful, he never lowered his sights from two main goals, to regain
the office of chief justice, and to get William Cosby removed from the
governorship of New York. He achieved neither of these, but he did
achieve the leadership of the antiadministration faction—the Popular
party—that gave Cosby no peace.
The Governor had really stirred up a hornets’ nest. Not only was New
York already disgusted with him as a man and an executive, his private
arrogance and public avarice being notorious, but he had openly adopted
the pattern of behavior that had made Colonial governors unpopular in
the past. Before he finished he had insulted the Assembly, tampered with
the courts, divided his Council into venomous cliques, frightened
property owners with his claims to land, and treated leading citizens
with cavalier disdain. He practiced nepotism, tried to rig elections,
and violated his instructions from London.
He committed a blunder as well as a crime when he alienated some of the
most powerful men in his Colony—especially Lewis Morris, Rip Van Dam,
and James Alexander, the last of whom became the mastermind of the
Popular party. Working with them were Colden, William Smith, Lewis
Morris, Junior, and many others down the scale into the anonymous mass
of the population. The opposition to Governor Cosby soon turned from a
matter of sporadic pinpricks into a concerted conspiracy bent on his
political destruction.
The Governor’s friends rallied around him, led by Chief Justice James
Delancey (the only man of real ability among them), but they suffered in
the contest for public opinion because they had to defend Cosby at a
time when New Yorkers generally had made up their minds that he was
indefensible. However, the Court party was strong in this, that it
possessed the governmental machinery that could be brought to bear at a
dozen different points of the battlefield, for example in the
magistracies and at the bar.