look back for the origin of our present convention platforms. But it was not until the final election in the spring of the next year that the new method clearly assumed its first distinctive form — the formal public mass-meeting; by a glance at this election we may perceive how far the new method had developed before the Revolution.
The questions at issue in both elections were for the most part the same. At bottom was the old Livingston-De Lancey rivalry; on the side of Livingston were ranged the dissenters, the lawyers, and the radical anti-British party, while the Church, the merchants, and the compromisers stood by De Lancey. Nevertheless the old personal rivalries were giving way before the coming life-and-death questions of British control, which were cutting into the old factions and rapidly reorganizing parties on a basis of principle instead of on a basis of leadership. This tendency is clearly to be seen in the election of 1769, at the very time when the new methods in nomination are first coming prominently to the front.
The result of the bitter personal contest of 1768 was the election of one member of the Livingston party, Philip Livingston himself, and three of the De Lancey party, James De Lancey, James Jauncey, and Jacob Walton. As the election of 1769 approached, Livingston determined not to be a candidate at all unless there could be a "peaceful election." With other members of his party, therefore, he addressed a letter to De Lancey and Walton, deploring the religious dissensions and proposing a temporary union of the parties by the nomination of a joint ticket, each party naming two candidates.[1] This proposition was rejected, but on January 4 the De Lancey party held a meeting at the Exchange, where they nominated De Lancey, Jauncey, and Walton, and sent a messenger to Livingston offering to make him the fourth member.[2] Livingston having declined this proposal, the meeting proceeded to fill out their ticket with the name of John Cruger, the mayor.[3] The Livingston party had its meeting the very same day, and notwithstanding Livingston's refusal to stand as a candidate for either party unless a compromise could be arranged, proceeded to form a ticket of which he was the head, the others being Peter V. Livingston, Theodorus Van Wyck, and John Morin Scott.[4] These meetings, it is related, consisted of some hundreds of inhabitants.[5] They were of course
- ↑ Sedgwick, Memoir of William Livingston, 146, 147. The statement of Sedgwick is based upon a broadside in the New York Public Library. See also the statement of Philip Livingston, New York Mercury, Jan. 9, 1769.
- ↑ Memorial History of New York, II. 396; New York Mercury, Jan. 9, 1769.
- ↑ New York Mercury, Jan. 9, 1769.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Memorial History of New York, II. 396.
