Founding the Chamber > The First Meeting
"WHEREAS, mercantile societies have been found very usefull in tradeing cities for promoting and encouraging commerce, supporting industry, adjusting disputes relative to trade and navigation, and procuring such laws and regulations as may be found necessary for the benefit of trade in general;
For which purpose, and to establish such a society in the city of New York, the following persons convened on the first Tuesday in, and being the 5th day of, April, 1768…"
The men who thus gathered in Lower Manhattan to inaugurate the new organization did so out of necessity.
New York may have been a trading city, but it was not a particularly successful one; its commerce lagged behind that of Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston. In the mid-1760s, business was so depressed, residents said, “that you would have imagined that a plague had been here.” Industry was a shambles; local timber and flour – the most valuable provincial exports – had “got into a general Disrepute abroad, from its bad Quality.” Disputes with neighboring territories – over currency and land claims – were causing extensive “Loss and inconvenience.” As for laws and regulations, the Colonial Assembly had just been dissolved, and two recent edicts – the Stamp and Townshend acts – had nearly unbridled a revolution.
Facing this array of difficulties, the leading merchants of New York were ready to try just about anything. Even something unprecedented. La Chambre de Commerce de Marseilles had assembled off and on since the sixteenth century, and other European cities had also instituted such organizations, which had semi-official standing to print currency and pass legislation. But in the British Empire, where peripheral ports were intended to benefit the exchequer of the home country, the idea had not caught on. New York’s Chamber of Commerce was the first of its kind in the Colonies, and it long predated equivalent efforts in such metropolitan centers as Liverpool (1850) or London (1881).