A Meddling Royal Governor and a Famous Colonial Election: Eastchester, 1733

On October 29, 1733, an election for one open seat in the New York assembly was held on the village green in Eastchester, Westchester County — today St. Paul's Church National Historic Site in Mount Vernon. It became one of the best-known political events in colonial America, partly because the first issue of printer John Peter Zenger's New York Weekly Journal carried a long report on it — one of the few complete accounts of a colonial election. Historians still cite it: on the persistence of monarchy in colonial thinking, on the political awakening of New York artisans, and as a chapter in the story of Zenger, whose 1735 acquittal on seditious libel charges is seen as a foundation of America's free press.

The puzzle is the turnout. Why would nearly 500 men travel to a spot 20 miles north of New York City to fill a single seat?

A governor makes enemies

William Cosby arrived as royal governor in 1732, after governing the British island of Minorca. A former soldier with powerful connections — his wife was a first cousin of the Duke of Newcastle, the colonial secretary — he treated New York as a place to rebuild his fortune.

• He demanded half the salary that acting governor Rip Van Dam had drawn in the year before his arrival. When Van Dam refused, Cosby sued in the colony's Supreme Court, having it sit as an exchequer court — which should have favored him, since its three judges served at the governor's pleasure.
• Chief Justice Lewis Morris, a wealthy Westchester landowner who had gotten along with earlier governors, threw out the case, wrote a long opinion on the constitutional dangers of exchequer courts, and lectured his two junior colleagues, DeLancey and Philipse. Cosby had also sided against Morris's interests in a land dispute between New York and Connecticut.
• Van Dam's lawyers, James Alexander and William Smith, joined Morris, and one of their first moves was having Zenger print Morris's opinion as a pamphlet.
• Cosby didn't appeal, but in August 1733 he dismissed Morris, made DeLancey chief justice and drew closer to the DeLancey–Philipse faction. Freed from office, Morris threw himself into opposition.

A colony ripe for a fight

New York had an elected, colony-wide assembly since the 1690s, but turnout was usually modest: travel was hard, notices were often just nailed to a public building a few days ahead, and there were few burning issues — except in the decade after Leisler's Rebellion of 1689. By the 1730s, though, literacy was rising and New York City was growing, giving ambitious men a chance to build an organized opposition.

They borrowed ideas from England's Whig critics of the Walpole ministry, especially Cato's Letters by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, published in the early 1720s and widely read in the colonies. The essays stressed the natural equality of men, liberty, and government legitimized by the voice of the electorate, and offered a simple "Court versus Country" picture of politics that suited the Morris party. Its most important tool was a party newspaper, the well-funded and intelligently edited New York Weekly Journal, launched to give voice to opposition to a royal governor — perhaps the most radical and important development of the period in New York.

The election

Then Westchester's assemblyman, William Willett, died. With no fixed schedule for assembly elections, years could pass between them; now an unexpected contest gave Morris a chance to win back a platform. The governor's side ran William Forster, a teacher at a Society for the Propagation of the Gospel school in Eastchester and Cosby's appointee as county clerk.

20th century painting of the famous Election of 1733, held on the village green, at St. Paul's Church. NPS.

Several things favored a big turnout:

• Location: four major roads — the Boston Post Road and the roads to Westchester Square, Mile Square and White Plains — met at the Eastchester green.
• Timing: late October weather was mild, and in a farming county the harvest was in.
• Organization: Forster's voters came largely through the great manors along the Hudson, where tenants with long leases and improved land qualified as freeholders. Morris's supporters marched south on the Post Road from Harrison, gathering men in towns such as Pelham like a militia turning out.

On Monday morning both sides paraded around the green. According to Zenger's paper, Morris's column was led by two trumpeters and three violins, freeholders carrying a banner lettered "KING GEORGE" on one side and "LIBERTY & LAW" on the other, then Morris himself — followed by about 300 horsemen, more than had ever turned out for one man in the county. They rode three times around the green.

Morris clearly had more supporters on hand, but the sheriff, Nicholas Cooper, a Cosby appointee, ordered a formal poll requiring voters to swear an oath to their property qualification — a tactic aimed at Quakers, who favored Morris but for religious reasons would not swear on the Bible. Though Quakers had often been allowed to affirm instead, Cooper refused, and 37 Friends were turned away. Morris won comfortably anyway. The day ended with customary congratulations, and Morris got a hero's welcome back in New York City.

What the turnout meant

• Elections could draw large crowds when voters saw them as part of a larger struggle, and the organizing between Morris's August dismissal and October built a machine to bring them out.
• Royal governors rarely meddled directly in local politics. Cosby — self-serving and dismissive of colonists — was almost a caricature of the interfering outsider, and his hand-picking of Forster fed the popular cause. Opposition to him would later fuel a petition drive to remove him and helped win Zenger's acquittal.
• It wasn't modern democratic populism: Morris's allies came from the same elite as their rivals. But their "Catonic" slogans reflected a real search for legitimate ways to check an overreaching executive — an early, if faint, preview of the Whig strategies of the 1760s and 1770s that led to the American Revolution.

Sources

Based on "A Meddling Royal Official: Turnout at a Famous Colonial Election in Westchester County, New York," St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.