New York's Radicals and the Coming of Independence

Abstract

HE British-American skirmishes at Lexington and Concord and the consequent siege of British forces in Boston were responsible for creating a Continental Army and the extralegal political machinery to direct a military defense of individual liberty and freedom. Lexington and Concord also placed new and heavy responsibilities upon Whigs everywhere: manpower had to be mobilized, supplies and money obtained, and time given to the myriad details of war. With the emergence in each colony of a quasi-revolutionary government by the spring of 1775, the older tactics of the Sons of Liberty became obsolete and the radical Whig leaders were put to a severe test. In most cases unprepared by training or experience for anything more than managing newspaper propaganda, mass meetings, and street brawling, their continued usefulness would depend upon their adaptation to the changing times which they had in part created. What happened to these radical leaders, whether they continued to shape the future as they had the past, varied in each colony. The response of New York's radical triumvirate of Isaac Sears, John Lamb, and Alexander McDougall was perhaps uniquely different from developments elsewhere. Identified since 1765 as leaders of New York's Sons of Liberty, Sears, Lamb, and McDougall, merchants of modest fortune and middle age, had an off again-on again personal relationship that was largely determined by their involvement in the rivalry of the Livingston and DeLancey factions for political power in the colony. Coming together under the Livingston banner in late 1769 during New York's political crisis over the Quartering Act, the popular trio was firmly joined in the American defense as the critical year of 1775 opened.1 They soon found themselves,