But if many left, many others were returning. Some, like us, had come for the opportunity presented by a city in need of rebuilding. Many more were patriots who had been forced to leave because of the British population. Now faced with the shattered remnants of their businesses and homes, they came together into a vengeful crowd of discontent, greed, and resentment, determined to attack any of their neighbors reputed to harbor Tory sympathies.
The persecution was blatant, and shameless. I witnessed the effects myself. I often passed a small shop in the next street that specialized in writing paper and pens. The shop was owned by an older man who’d come to New York decades ago from Liverpool, and his wife, who had been born here. Alas, there were rumors that they’d survived the occupation only because they’d been protected by the army as Tories. One morning as I walked by, the shop was empty, the front window smashed, the door torn from its hinges. In the street before the shop were the blackened remnants of a fire, charred fragments of wooden boxes and furnishings and curling bits of singed paper like drifting leaves. I paused to look with concern, and asked another passerby what malady had happened to the poor proprietor.
“The old rascal got what he deserved last night,” he said bluntly, smirking. “Him and his wife, too. We’ve no use here for Tories who think they’re better’n the rest of us.”
I never learned what became of the shopkeeper or his wife, and never saw them again, either.
By March, matters had only grown worse. The legislature passed the Trespass Act, stating that good patriots had the right to sue any Tories responsible for damages to homes and properties left behind during the war. The Sons of Liberty, who had done so much to spur along the Revolution, re-emerged in a nefarious new form, and took the hatred another step further. Instead of espousing liberty and freedom as they once had, they promoted the persecution of Tories and Loyalists, and called for anyone who’d held Tory beliefs to be forced to leave the state by the first of May.
It was impossible to avoid the ugly uneasiness gathering the city. Alexander, of course, did not avoid it, but instead jumped directly into the middle of the conflict. He began writing essays for the newspapers again, this time under the Roman name of Phocion, and pleading for tolerance.
The pleas went unheard, as everyone except my husband had expected. But despite the pseudonym, everyone also knew that Alexander was Phocion, and he was accused of being a traitor, a sympathizer, a secret Tory in the pay of the British government—all harsh words for a man who’d served the cause of freedom so well.
But while I was indignant upon Alexander’s behalf, he was not. The criticisms only spurred him to work harder.
While his first cases in the city had been to settle the usual misunderstandings between businesses and bickering amongst families, he soon plunged into cases that defended the rights of Tories who’d remained, cases too prickly and unpopular for most other lawyers. As with all the cases he accepted (and unlike most other lawyers), he only took on those in which he believed the plaintiff was in the right; he cared far less about their ability to pay his fees, which meant that he wasn’t above accepting a pipe of wine or a side of beef in lieu of payment. For Alexander, it was the principle that mattered most, not the fee, and by the summer, those principles loomed large indeed to him.
His most prominent case of this nature was presented in late June, and pitted a wealthy patriot widow, Mrs. Rutgers, who had owned a brewery ruined in the war, against Mr. Waddington, a Loyalist, who repaired the ruin at his own cost under martial orders of the occupying army, and made the brewery once again profitable. Now Mrs. Rutgers was suing Mr. Waddington for the astronomical sum of eight thousand pounds, claiming that this was the rent owed her for the use of her property.
The fact that Alexander had accepted a case against a woman plaintiff showed me how important a case he considered it to be. He tended to be as gallant in his practice as he was in life, and often took cases for the sake of assisting a woman in difficulty, especially widows and spinsters who had no natural male champions.
As always, Alexander explained this all to me as a way for solidifying his own thoughts and arguments. As always, I listened, this time over a long supper.
We’d a small enclosed yard behind our house, and the two of us often dined there now that the spring had given way to warmer summer evenings. Like every other house in New York, our trees had been sacrificed to the war, and though I’d planted new saplings in the spring, for shade we relied upon a wide swath of striped canvas that we’d had strung from one wall to the next overhead: our Turkish tent, as Alexander cheerfully called it. In that spirit I’d put cushions on a bench beside the table, and when we’d no guests, we sat cozily side by side rather than with the table between us. We were informally dressed, too, I in a printed calico dressing gown and he in a chintz banyan, and both of us ready to discuss his most important case thus far.
For reasons of sentiment, it was clear to me that the plaintiff, the widowed patriot Mrs. Rutgers, would be favored to prevail, and that this would be a difficult case for any attorney to win. I didn’t state this opinion at first, however. Though I might never have formally studied the law, I had learned a few things about how best to present my opinions to my husband.
“How proud I am of you, dearest,” I began, smiling. “To take a case that every other lawyer in the city has avoided as being too prickly and difficult, and to champion poor beleaguered Mr. Waddington, too.”
He frowned a bit, and I realized perhaps I’d been a shade too effusive.
“It won’t be the swiftest case on the docket to be decided, no,” he said slowly, appraising me. “But then you knew that, Betsey, didn’t you?”
I concentrated on refilling his glass with more wine. “You have always been a gentleman remarkable for your charity and kindness, Alexander, especially where your defendants are concerned.”
He made a small disgruntled sound in his throat. “There’s more at stake than mere kindness, my dear.”
“Kindness is never ‘mere,’ Alexander,” I said. “Especially given the grievous manner in which many of New York’s residents are being treated.”
“Very well, then,” he said, raising the glass toward me in a salute before he drank. “There is more than charity at stake. A victorious country is judged by how it treats those whom it has vanquished. The treaty of peace that Congress signed stated that no former Loyalists were to suffer any further losses, not to their persons, liberty, or property.”
So this was how he’d begin, and a good beginning it was, too. “That’s all true,” I said.
“It is indeed,” he said firmly. “The sympathies of Britain and France, too, lie with the exiled Tories who have come to rest in their midst, telling their pitiful tales and making us out to be the ogres. If we wish to garner any respect in the greater world, we can’t behave like those ogres, which is exactly what is happening here in New York.”