Trading With The Enemy: How Irish merchants fanned the flames of revolution in America

However, the war had far-reaching, unforeseen consequences for the British. “America was also imbued with a heightened sense of independent political and economic strength and a vision of expansion and destiny. The colonies simply wanted to be left alone to run their own affairs and to grow and expand on their own…. Thus the Seven Years’ War laid the long fuse that would eventually splutter into revolution.”

So, perhaps every July 4, we should not only remember Ben Franklin and George Washington, but also Waddell Cunningham, William Kelly and Thomas Lynch. These were some of the merchants who – whether they knew it or not, whether they did it for independence or simply to make a buck – laid the groundwork for the American Revolution in New York in the 1760s.

Planning a Riot

The aforementioned riot of November 2, 1759 was actually planned the evening before by a group of Irish businessmen who met in the Merchants Coffee House, located not far from the East River docks in Manhattan.

As Thomas M. Truxes notes in his fascinating new book Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (Yale University Press), the Irish merchants had identified Spencer as a rat who had told British colonial authorities about lucrative trading the Irishmen were engaged in with France. Tensions between France and Britain had already exploded into full-blown war.

Thus, the Irishmen were not merely violating some commercial laws. In the eyes of British colonial authorities, this trade was treason.

Yet, it was also very lucrative. That’s why men such as William Kelly, Jonathan Lawrence, Thomas Lynch, James Thomspon, Thomas White and (as Truxes calls him in his book “the de facto leader of the city’s Irish merchants”) Waddell Cunningham met in the Merchants Coffee House. They knew that Spencer had informed.

“Rum and punch flowed,” Truxes writes, “as the group concocted an elaborate plan that would ‘render [Spencer] infamous and invalidate his testimony, and at the same time be a warning to others not to dare to make farther discovery for the fear of like treatment,’” writes Truxes, who teaches in the Irish Studies Department at New York University.

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Nster.com