New York - The Novel

quite capable of responding in kind. His finely chiseled face set hard, and he fixed the merchant with a steely gaze.
    “What I find unseemly about New York, sir,” he said coldly, “is that despite the fact that we fought a war of independence, this city is chiefly populated by Tories.”
    There he had a point. If the war had brought all sorts of Patriots and low fellows into prominence, it was quite remarkable how well the city’s old guard—and many of them were indeed Tories—had managed to survive. When you looked at the people who had bought up the houses and lands of the great landowners who’d fled or been dispossessed, the names spoke for themselves: Beekman, Gouverneur, Roosevelt, Livingston—rich merchant gentlemen like himself.
    But did that make the city unfit to be America’s capital?
    No, it was all jealousy, Master reckoned. Jealousy, pure and simple. It was one thing that Philadelphia was angling to be the capital—that he could understand. Every city looks for its own advantage—though now that Ben Franklin was dead, Master suspected that Philadelphia might be a less lively place. But the real pressure wasn’t coming from Philadelphia.
    It was coming from the South. They might call him a damn Yankee, but it seemed to Master that he’d heard enough from the Southern states. In his view, the South should be satisfied with the Constitution. If many Northern Patriots were becoming uncertain about the morality of owning slaves, they’d still agreed to guarantee the institution of slavery for another generation. And when the South had negotiated that every three slaves should count as two white people in calculating the population of each state, hadn’t that neatly boosted the number of representatives the Southern states would be allotted in Congress?
    Their latest complaint was typical.
    Master liked young Alexander Hamilton. There he could agree with James, who’d served with him in Washington’s army. Hamilton was a clever fellow, with a lot of go in him—born illegitimate, of course, though his father was a gentleman. But illegitimacy often spurred men to great deeds. And now that he was appointed Secretary to the Treasury, young Hamilton had made a perfectly sensible proposition. He wanted to take all the vast overhang of war debt—the worthless Continental paper—and bundle it all up into a new government debt, backed by tax revenues that would stabilize the nation’s finances.
    Of course, these arrangements were never entirely fair. Some Southern states had already paid off their debts. “So why should we pay taxes to bail out the others?” they demanded. But the real bone of contention, the thing that drove the South wild, was the role of New York.
    For before Hamilton announced his plan, he’d had to consider one big question. By the end of the war, the promissory notes issued by Congress, and the individual states, had become almost worthless. So how much of the good new paper would you get for them? Ten pounds for every hundred of the old notes? Twenty? How generous should the government be?
    Just as Master had done a few years before, some brave speculators had bought up quite a bit of the old debt at huge discounts, from men who needed the cash and were glad enough to get something for their worthless notes. Many of these sellers were from the South. Of course, if a speculator could have got inside information about what the conversion rate was going to be, he’d make a killing. Quite properly, until the public announcement, Hamilton hadn’t breathed a word.
    Not so his deputy. A New York man, of course. He told his friends.
    And the word was—astoundingly—that the debt would be redeemed at par. Full price. Any speculator who could get his hands on the paper cheap could make a fortune.
    Among the lucky merchants of New York, therefore, a feeding frenzy had developed. Southern gentlemen, not privy to what was afoot, were glad to find eager takers for any paper they cared to sell. Until they discovered the truth. Then there was an outcry.
    “You accursed New York Yankees—you’re feasting upon the sorrows of the South.”
    “If you weren’t short of cash, or understood the market, you wouldn’t be in this mess,” the New York insiders cruelly responded.
    Such insider dealing might still be legal, but one thing was certain:New York was hated. And not only by the South. Anyone who’d sold their paper cheap felt aggrieved. As for Jefferson, as a Virginia