Smith, William (II)

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Smith, William (II)

SMITH, WILLIAM (II). (1728–1793). Jurist, historian, Loyalist. Eldest son of William Smith (I), he graduated from Yale in 1745, studied law in his father's office with William Livingston, was admitted to the bar in 1750, and in partnership with Livingston became a highly successful lawyer. At the request of the state authorities, he and Livingston compiled the Laws of New-York from the Year 1691 to 1751, Inclusive (1752) and Laws of New-York … 1752–1762 (1762); these were the first two digests of New York statutes. With Livingston and John Morin Scott, he wrote A Review of the Military Operations in North America: From … 1753, to … 1756 (1757); reprinted in 1801, this was a defense of Governor William Shirley and a criticism of James De Lancey, Thomas Pownall, and Sir William Johnson. Smith is best-known for his History of the Late Province of New York (2 vols., 1829), which evolved from his History … of New-York to the Year 1732 (1757), and to which Smith subsequently added a continuation to the year 1762. His "Historical Memoirs," which extend to the year 1783 and exist in six manuscript volumes in the New York Public Library, have been said by the historian Richard B. Morris to be essential for comprehending New York's situation at the time of the Revolution.

The chief justice of New York from 1763 to 1782 (nominally), and his father's successor on the royal council in 1767, Smith had a career during the Revolution that Morris has described as politically unique. When in 1777 he refused to give the test oath, he was ordered to Livingston Manor on the Hudson, and when he again refused the next year, he was banished to British-occupied New York City.

Smith was the most original and subtle of the Loyalist political thinkers. From 1767 until 1778 he positioned himself as "a loyal Wigg, one of King William's Wiggs, for Liberty and the Constitution," knowing full well that in the colonies Whigs were, at the minimum, staunch opponents of taxation by Parliament and executive undermining of provincial self-government (Upton, p. 110). He pursued a two-pronged strategy to preserve both liberty and empire.

First, he devised and privately circulated a constitutional treatise proposing that the British Constitution, as applied to the colonies, "ought to bend and sooner or later will bend" to accommodate the political maturity and continental extent of British North America. Projecting from Benjamin Franklin's work on colonial demography and predicting that the American population would double every generation, he anticipated the moment, sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, when the capitol of the empire would move west from London to New York. Counseling patience, he argued for awaiting that eventual shift in the balance of power within the empire.

The second prong of his loyal Whiggery was to become, as a member of the royal council, the gray eminence behind New York's royal governor, William Tryon. In that role he detached Tryon from the De Lancey faction in the distribution of land grants and then guided Tryon through the Tea Act crisis without violence.

In January 1776 he admitted the collapse of both strategies. No colonial politician or British statesman embraced his proposals for constitutional reform of the empire. Smith's "Thoughts as a Rule for My Own Conduct at This Melancholy Hour of Approaching Distress" condemned both British policy and American rebelliousness. His behind-the-scenes role exhausted, he told his neighbors on the Haverstraw, New York, Committee of Safety on 4 July 1776 that he could not endorse the measures of the Second Continental Congress because "I persuade myself that Great Britain will discern the propriety of negotiating for a pacification."

Patriot officials in New York waited until 1778 to force the issue, and when the summons came to commit himself, Smith slipped quietly into the New York City garrison town where Lord North's negotiators on the Carlisle Peace Commission were sampling opinion on the subject of reconciliation. One of the commissioners took the measure of Smith's character and politics: "he is subtle, cool & persuasive [but] he may be secured [to the British side] by an application to his ambition."

General Henry Clinton tried, but Smith remained elusive. Nonetheless, and in contrast with his friend and fellow moderate, William Samuel Johnson, who made peace with the Connecticut state government in 1779, Smith had already burned his bridges. General Guy Carleton, Clinton's successor in 1782, shared Smith's hope for an eleventh-hour reconciliation, but nothing came of it, and in 1783 Smith went into exile in England. The ministry rewarded him with the chief justiceship of Quebec, where he died in 1793. Joshua Hett Smith was a brother of William (II).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benton, William A. The Whig-Loyalists: An Aspect of Political Ideology in the American Revolutionary Era. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965.

Smith, William. Historical Memoirs. 6 vols. New York Public Library, New York, N.Y.

Upton, L. F. S. The Loyal Whig: William Smith of New York and Quebec. University of Toronto Press, 1969.

revised by Robert M. Calhoon

Encyclopedia of the American Revolution: Library of Military History