That evening, down in the cellar, he and Hudson looked over the household’s defenses. Master had two fowling pieces, which fired shot, a flintlock and three pistols. He had dry powder and ammunition. But none of these guns had been used for a long time, and so they spent an hour or more cleaning and oiling them. Master could only hope they would never be needed.

One ray of hope came from New York’s Provincial Assembly. There were still sensible fellows leading the colony, and Master was relieved when one of the Assembly men came to him in late summer and told him: “We’ve agreed that a congress of all the colonies shall meet in New York.”

The congress met in October. Twenty-seven men from nine of the colonies stayed in various lodgings in the town and met together for two weeks. He would see them in the street each day. They all seemed to be sober fellows. When they had completed their work, their conclusion was carefully framed but unequivocal. In petitions to Parliament, and to the king himself, they declared: “The Stamp Act is against the British Constitution.”

If John Master had hoped this would calm the situation, however, he was soon disappointed. Many of the merchants still weren’t satisfied, and Charlie White and his sort were spoiling for trouble. It didn’t help that the very day the congress finished, a ship arrived in the harbor carrying the first two tons of stamped paper to be used under the act. Old Governor Colden wisely smuggled the cargo into the fort under cover of darkness, but that didn’t get rid of the problem. Crowds swirled round the fort, threatening leaflets were printed, people hung flags at half mast all round the town. There was only a week to go before the act came into force and the stamped paper would be used. God knows what would happen then.

At the end of the month, Master attended a meeting of two hundred of the city’s leading merchants. Some, like himself, counseled patience, but the mood of the meeting was clean against them. When he got back he told Mercy: “They’ve decided on a non-importation agreement. We’ll refuse to import any more goods from Britain. That’s clever, of course, because it will hit the London merchants like Albion, and they in turn will put pressure on Parliament. But I wish we hadn’t done it, all the same.”

On the last night of October, he stood by the water’s edge under the stars. At the tip of Manhattan, the squat, black mass of Fort George, now armed with ninety cannon, silently guarded the stamped papers from England. Tomorrow those papers were due to be distributed. In five days’ time, it would be the Fifth of November—Pope’s Day, with its usual bonfires, no doubt. But what larger conflagration, he wondered, might be about to engulf the city before then?