Today, the Constitution Commemorative Silver Dollar Coin remembers the mob attack on the printing shop of Thomas Greenleaf, who printed articles against the new federal government.
From the History of the City of New York by Mary Louise Booth, published in 1859:
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Notwithstanding the obvious need of a consolidated government, the proposed Constitution was opposed by a large portion of the inhabitants, who averred that it placed too much power in the hands of the Executive; and the States came slowly into the Union.
Since the restoration of peace, two political parties had sprung into existence in New York.
One of the primary causes of this division was the bill disfranchising all who had adhered to the British government during the war, which had passed the Assembly of 1784, chiefly through the efforts of the Sons of Liberty who composed the New York representation.
This act bore heavily upon the loyalists, many of whom were also attainted for treason, and their estates confiscated to the government; and urgent efforts were made by them to procure its repeal, which were stoutly opposed by the Sons of Liberty, but were seconded by Hamilton and Schuyler.
Through the influence of these powerful friends, the act was finally repealed on the 3d of February, 1787, and the loyalists reinstated in their privileges of citizenship.
This act, denounced by the Liberty Boys as emanating from British influence, won the loyalists over to the side of Hamilton, and secured concurrence in his efforts for the adoption of the new Constitution.
The opposite party, meanwhile, known familiarly as the “French party,” for their sympathy with the struggle for independence now going on in France and their hatred of the opposing British influences, denounced the new Constitution in no measured terms, and exerted themselves to the utmost to prevent its acceptance by the people.
This new issue drew a marked line between the parties.
The federalists, comprising the refranchised royalists, endorsed the new Constitution; the anti-Federalists opposed it with all its adjuncts.
The Constitution had already been accepted by the nine States necessary for its adoption, beginning with Delaware and ending with Massachusetts; yet New York still held aloof.
On the 17th of June, 1788, the Convention of the State of New York assembled at Poughkeepsie to deliberate on the matter.
Governor Clinton, the president of the Convention, was a staunch anti-federalist; while Alexander Hamilton and John Jay assumed the leadership of the federalist party, which was in the minority in the Convention.
The State, at this time, was emphatically anti-federalist; the city, on the contrary, eminently federalist.
In the latter, a society had been organized some time before under the name of Federal-Republicans, with John Lamb as chairman and his son-in-law, Charles Tillinghast, as secretary, to concert measures to prevent the adoption of the Constitution with its opponents throughout the Union, and this party through their organ, Greenleaf’s Patriotic Register—the Holt’s Gazette of the Revolution—assailed the actions and motives of the federalists, and stimulated the opposition of their friends at Poughkeepsie.
The federalists, on their side, spared nothing that might forward the success of their design.
On the 23d of July, three days before the adoption of the Constitution, a thirty-two gun frigate, christened “the Federal Ship Hamilton,” and manned by thirty seamen and marines under the command of Commodore Nicholson, was drawn by ten horses through the streets in procession from the Bowling Green to Bayard’s Farm, in the vicinity of Grand street, where tables were spread in the open air, and a plentiful dinner provided for the whole company, consisting of four or five thousand persons.
This demonstration, the first procession of the kind ever witnessed in the city, excited the curiosity of the public to the highest degree, and thousands flocked to the town from the neighboring country to witness the spectacle.
The Patriotic Register, however, indulged freely in sarcastic remarks on the occasion, and so incensed the federalists, that, on the announcement on the 26th of the adoption of the Constitution, the spirit of mobocracy broke forth with violence, and a crowd of rioters, proceeding to the office of the paper in Pine street, broke open the door with axes, and demolished the press and types.
Greenleaf, with an apprentice, after vainly endeavoring to defend his property, made his escape at the rear of the building into Wall street.
Emboldened by this success, the rioters next made their way to the house of John Lamb in Wall street, about midway between Pearl and William streets; but, anticipating the attack, preparations had been made for defense.
The doors and windows were barred and the halls and stairways barricaded, and General Lamb, Colonel Oswald, and Major John Wiley, with two youths and a colored servant, were stationed in the second story with loaded muskets, while the youngest daughter of Gen. Lamb, with Miss Chapman, a visitor from Connecticut, and a colored servant, who had refused to quit the house, were stationed in the attic as a reserve force, with an ample supply of Dutch tiles and empty bottles to be launched at the heads of the rioters.
The mob, now increased to thousands, surrounded the house, yelling, shouting and threatening an attack, but to these the inmates made no reply; and at length the rioters, concluding the house to be either deserted or strongly garrisoned, held a council of war, and determined to withdraw.
The city soon subsided into a state of quiet, and the new constitution was gradually acquiesced in by the opposition.
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In the book Journalism in the United States, from 1690-1872, published in 1873, Frederic Hudson described Thomas Greenleaf:
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Soon after Greenleaf took possession of the Journal he made the establishment the foundation of two papers.
The paper intended for city circulation was called The New York Journal and Daily Patriotic Register; the other, with the same title, was published weekly, on Thursday, for the country.
The titles of these papers were afterward altered; the daily was called The Argus, or Greenleaf s New Daily Advertiser; and Greenleaf s New York Journal and Patriotic Register was published twice a week.
When the two great political parties were forming, the measures of Washington’s administration were attacked with virulence in Greenleaf’s paper.
It was, in fact, the first Democratic organ in the country.
Thomas Greenleaf was born in Abington, Massachusetts, and learned to set type of Isaiah Thomas.
He was the son of Joseph Greenleaf, who was a printer in Boston in 1774.
The Journal and Argus were published by Greenleaf in New York till 1798, when he died of yellow fever, at the age of forty-two.
He was a good printer, enterprising, and of an amiable character. He was elected one of the sachems of the Tammany Society in 1789.
He had been an editor on the Independent Chronicle, of Boston, prior to 1787.
That paper, on the 24th of September, 1798, in noticing his death, said:
“He was a steady, uniform, zealous supporter of the Rights of Humanity; a warm friend to civil and religious liberty, unawed by persecution or prosecution, both of which it has, not unfrequently, been his lot to experience. He loved his country; and if, at any time, as Editor of this paper, he dipped his pen in gall, and exercised it with unusual severity, it was occasioned by that strong abhorrence he felt against political apostacy, and the fervor of his wishes to preserve the Constitution from encroachment.”
Mrs. Greenleaf, his widow, published both the daily and semi-weekly papers for some time, but finally disposed of the establishment to James Cheetham, an Englishman.
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The Constitution Commemorative Silver Dollar Coin shows with an artist’s image of a print shop, circa mid-1700s.
