The New York Society Library: books, authority, and publics in colonial and early republican New York.

The New York Society Library was founded in 1754. At its founding it became embroiled in the politics of the city's Whig faction, and through the latter half of the eighteenth century it embodied the republican ideals of its founders. The collection was developed as a means of educating and refining the entire community. During the early nineteenth century the library entered a period of relative inactivity. Although the collection continued to grow, the Society itself became increasingly removed from the cultural and intellectual life of the city. After a bitterly contested election in 1838 the trustees made some effort to reinvigorate the Society Library, but they failed to create a truly popular institution.

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In 1754 a group of earnest young men founded the New York Society Library to advance the cause of learning and refinement in a small seaport town on the fringes of the British Empire. It was the first successful "public library" in the colony and one of the first in North America. As a public institution, its history from the colonial era through the early republican period mirrors changes in the ways that the public as well as public and private activity were conceived during these years. As a public collection, its development and use trace shifts in attitudes toward the kinds of knowledge that were regarded as socially useful and the bases of authority for disseminating such knowledge. The history of the New York Society Library through the 1840s thus sheds light on issues that were critical to the development of the United States as a modern, liberal society. Generally, it reflects a trend toward a broader, more inclusive conception of the public and a more democratic conception of public authority. Just as important, the history of the library shows the ambiguities and tensions that arose as elite New Yorkers struggled to come to grips with these new ideas.

The Society Library's founding and early years were imbued with the ideals of republicanism. Republicanism was and is a term that defies any precise definition. (1) It is best understood not as a formally articulated political philosophy but rather as a constellation of mutually reinforcing values. (2) The republican founders of the library believed in the division of civil and religious authority, in the separation of church and state, and in the power of rationalism to dispel myth and dogma. They sought, to varying degrees, to break the bonds of hierarchy that tied individuals in a monarchical society so that they were judged on personal merit rather than the accident of birth. Above all, the founders sought to promote and safeguard the commonweal. They valued a public good that transcended selfish private interests and believed the Society Library served the public good by educating and refining a republican society.

Although they were closely related in certain respects, republicanism and democracy, particularly for the founders of the library, were not the same. Democracy was linked to liberalism, which celebrated equality rather than independence, individualism rather than the commonweal. During the complex process by which the country shifted from a republican to a liberal society, the character of the New York Society Library was transformed as well. After the Revolution, as republican enthusiasm cooled, it became progressively more exclusive. Although it had never been quite as inclusive as the founders' republican rhetoric had suggested, in the nineteenth century the library was increasingly at odds with and less relevant to the liberal democratic society around it. Its largely patrician membership steadily withdrew from the active role it had played in the cultural and intellectual life of the city.

The idea of a public library as it is currently understood--a tax-supported, circulating collection freely available to everyone in a community--is a relatively recent development. It was not until the 1840s that states began to pass laws that permitted municipalities to levy taxes to fund libraries, and many towns and cities, including the city of New York, did not establish a public library system until much later in the century. (3) In the eighteenth century and for much of the nineteenth century a public library was public in the same sense that a public house or public conveyance was public. The term meant not that the collection was free but simply that it was available ostensibly to any member of the public, as opposed to one belonging to an individual or a closed private organization such as a school or a learned society. (4) Moreover, in this monarchical society, as Gordon Wood has made clear, the "modern distinctions between state and society, public and private, were just emerging." Aside from the military and the courts, government in North America and in the mother country largely acted passively, granting private individuals or organizations the authority to pursue public ends. (5) This was, in fact, how all the colonies were settled. In the eighteenth-century sense of the term the first person to attempt to found a public library in the city of New York was Thomas Bray, a minister and missionary of the Church of England. A brief history of Bray's library suggests by contrast the degree to which the New York Society Library represented a break from this premodern monarchical world.

Thomas Bray was born in Shropshire in 1656 and graduated from Oxford's All Souls College in 1678. He was ordained an Anglican minister in 1681 and appointed the bishop of London's commissary, or agent, to the colony of Maryland in 1695. Bray's influence, however, extended to all of the colonies in North America. In 1699 he founded the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and in 1701 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The aim of these complementary organizations was to foster piety and learning and thereby reassert the authority of the Church of England overseas. (6) New York in particular was considered rife with ignorance and dissent. Although the Anglican Church was legally established, it was far out-numbered by the Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed Churches. (7)

At the heart of Bray's mission to bring Christian enlightenment to the overseas plantations was an ambitious plan to establish a system of public libraries in every colony. Each was to be provided with three kinds of collections, organized by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and financed by pious and public-spirited clergy, gentry, and merchants. First, Bray promoted the founding of parochial libraries, comprised mostly of theological works and intended for the private use of the minister in each parish. He considered these an essential means of encouraging poor clergymen to serve in the American wilderness. (8) Next there were to be "layman's libraries" located in towns throughout the provinces, circulating collections of books designed to promote morality and piety, entrusted to the care of the local minister. (9) Finally, in its capital each colony was to have a noncirculating "Library of more Universal Learning, for the Service and Encouragement of those who shall launch out farther in the pursuit of Useful Knowledge, as well Natural as Divine." (10) The first consignment of 220 volumes for New York arrived in 1698 and was kept in the vestry of Trinity Church, the first Anglican church in the city. (11)

Bray's extensive writings to promote his library plan, in particular his enthusiasm for collections of "universal learning," at times seem to mirror the expansive, critical spirit of eighteenth-century thought. In an unpublished manuscript entitled "Bibliothecae Americanae Quadrapartitae, or, Catalogues of the Libraries Sent into the Several Provinces," he explained that the purpose of the collections was to "give Requisite Helps to Considerable Attainments in all the parts of necessary and usefull knowledge,... that great Perfection of the Rational Nature." Prefaced to the catalogs is an extensive outline of all knowledge, divine and human, and brief descriptions of the types of books to be found in each type of library, including the bibliothecae provincialis. The collections in New York and the other provincial capitals were to be "more than ordinarily furnished with books" on all of the most useful of the human sciences. (12) In reality, all of the Bray libraries were predominantly theological. In New York, of the 156 titles in the original consignment, 117, or 75 percent, were works of theology. The proportions were similar in the four other provincial libraries. (13)

There are also suggestions in Bray's writings of a more modern, inclusive notion of the public that his libraries would serve and a more modern, meritocratic conception of authority over books and knowledge. In "Bibliothecae Americanae" he explained that the libraries of universal learning in the provincial capitals were intended for "the use and Improvement ... of the whole Country." In an essay "Promoting all Necessary and Useful Knowledge," he held that learning "does more [to] distinguish the Possessors of it, than Titles, Riches, or great Places," that "the Man of Understanding is ... [more] inwardly and truly respected" than he who "may command the Cap and the Knee." (14) In practice, however, Bray's libraries served an exclusive public and were part of a hierarchy in which authority was legitimated by titles. Bray stated repeatedly in his writings that the books sent to North America were necessary to enable the church's ministers to instruct the people, and this paternalistic relation is graphically illustrated in the bookplate of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel that was affixed to them. It depicts a larger-than-life missionary on a ship preaching down to a horde of tiny but grateful colonists on the shore of the American wilderness. (15) Moreover, the hierarchy of the church was legally and theologically connected with the hierarchy of the Crown. In addition to the SPG bookplate, each of the books was also labeled on its cover, in capitals, "SUB AUSPICIIS WILHELMI III." (16) Further, the public that had access to the collections was by no means "the whole country." In New York, when the titles of the first consignment of books were entered into the vestry minutes of Trinity Church, as prescribed in Bray's instructions, it was stipulated that they were "for the use Of the Ministers." There is no evidence that any layperson ever used the collection, and it appears likely that the books were kept under lock and key. Most of the other provincial libraries were also used only by the clergy. (17)

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Bray's New York library was added to occasionally by local ministers and Crown officials and remained in the vestry of Trinity Church until the Revolution. (18) In September 1776 it was destroyed by fire when the British occupied the city. It was not a public library in any sense of the term, and the knowledge that it disseminated and the authority to control that knowledge emanated from and were circumscribed by the Crown and the church. The early history of the New York Society Library shows ways in which these accepted notions of knowledge, authority, and the public were contested in the colony in the decades before the Revolution.

Bernard Bailyn and others have noted that "there was no sharp break between a placid pre-Revolutionary era and the turmoil of the 1760's and 1770's." The conflict between the Tories, who supported the Crown, and the Whigs, who sought to place limits on the royal prerogative, increased sharply throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, and the arguments employed by each party were honed in innumerable attacks in pamphlets, newspapers, lawsuits, and personal correspondence. (19) The context of this conflict was distinctly local. Within each colony political divisions arose from a unique and complex combination of personal, familial, religious, and economic motives. The founding of the New York Society Library reflected and was part of prerevolutionary colonial politics.

The conflict between Whigs and Tories in New York escalated sharply in the 1730s. John Peter Zenger, a printer and the editor of the Weekly Journal, in the midst of the heated municipal elections of 1734 launched a spirited attack on the governor, William Cosby, the chief justice, James De Lancey, and members of the provincial government. Purposefully echoing the arguments and rhetoric used a decade earlier by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in the mother country in their savaging of the Walpole administration in the Independent Whig, Zenger accused the Crown officials of corruption, incompetence, and "tyrannically flouting the laws of England and New York." Cosby promptly had the most offensive issues of the Journal burned in public and had Zenger jailed for seditious libel. When the case came to trial Zenger was ably defended by James Alexander and William Smith, who successfully argued that he was guilty of nothing more than printing the truth. (20)

In the ensuing decades political conflict in the colony most often revolved around a bitter contest between the De Lanceys, representing the Crown, and the Livingstons, who led the "popular party." To an extent, their rivalry reflected conflicting economic interests. The De Lanceys were backed by wealthy merchants who wanted to shift the tax burden as much as possible to New York's landowners. The Livingstons represented the families with landed estates who wanted increased revenue from import and export duties, in part to finance a stronger military that could protect their isolated holdings in the north. The animosity between the two factions was also founded to an extent upon religious differences. The Church of England, nominally the established church, was the smallest but also the wealthiest and most powerful denomination in the colony, and De Lancey and most Crown officials belonged to it. The Livingstons led the dissenting congregations, including the Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed Churches, the two largest in New York City. (21)

Beginning in the early 1750s, the popular party's most effective polemicists were three young lawyers, William Livingston, John Morin Scott, and William Smith, Jr. All three were Presbyterians, and all three had studied for the bar in the office of William Smith, Sr. Known throughout the colonies as the "New York triumvirate," or to their enemies as the "wicked triumvirate" or the "vile and despicable Triumvirate," they led the attack in the local press on the De Lancey faction and on the royal prerogative generally. (22) Even one of their most implacable opponents, the Reverend Samuel Johnson of Trinity Church, grudgingly admitted that it was "indeed fencing against a flail to hold any dispute with them." (23) The triumvirate also promoted a variety of public enterprises designed to refine the cultural and moral climate of their city. In 1748 they organized an informal club called the Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge, which, unlike Bray's Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, welcomed members from every Protestant denomination. (24) In 1754 the triumvirate founded the New York Society Library.

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The founding of the Society Library was a controversy within a controversy. In 1746 the provincial Assembly had authorized a lottery to help establish a publicly supported college. (25) In 1754 Trinity Church donated fifty acres of land in New York City on the conditions that the presidents of the school be communicants of the Anglican faith and that Anglican prayers be used in the daily services. (26) William Livingston was one of only three non-Anglicans appointed to the school's ten-member board, and, like any good republican, he detected a conspiracy. He, Scott, and Smith were convinced that King's College (later Columbia University) was an Anglican plot to subvert the city's…