New York was the town the British called home, the town they liked, where they did not have to follow an austere Puritan frontier existence. There they had urban pleasures and weekends in the country and good taverns and, not least for eighteenth-century Englishmen, good oysters. New York was the only one of the thirteen colonies that had a permanent British military presence during most of the colonial period. They were there to guard the port and to keep an eye on the Iroquois. New York City was their command base—their city. The heads of the British command, General William Howe and Admiral Richard Howe, liked America and Americans. Massachusetts had built a statue of their older brother, who had commanded in the Seven Years’ War. The Howes were convinced that most New Yorkers were Loyalists and would happily hand over their city.
But apparently they were not completely convinced of this because the force they brought to New York was the largest invasion force ever assembled by Great Britain until the World Wars. This included 420 ships carrying thirty-four thousand soldiers, at a time when the total New York City population was about twenty-four thousand. General George Washington was defeated in five disastrous days. The British then spent the rest of the summer chasing and battering the Continental Army, but failing to encircle and capture them, which would have ended the Revolution. Instead they achieved their initial goal, taking Manhattan and New York Harbor, and settled in for a much longer war.
New York City did have more Loyalists than any of the other rebelling colonies. In fact, the New York delegation chose to abstain on the vote on the Declaration of Independence and did not sign. And before the Howes had arrived, a plot by more than seven hundred New Yorkers, including the mayor, David Mathews, to kidnap Washington and trap the Continental Army on Manhattan was uncovered.
If many New Yorkers were Loyalists, Staten Island oystermen went back and forth. They were not as concerned about the British as they were about the New Jersey oystermen on the opposite shore. When the New Jersey oystermen were Loyalists, they became revolutionaries. But when their New Jersey counterparts took up the revolutionary cause, Staten Islanders were Loyalists. Their war was with New Jersey, not the British. In 1700, the provincial government had tried to resolve the issue by drawing a boundary line through Raritan Bay that gave about half the beds to each side. But the conflict continued and the Revolutionary War provided the means to make it an armed conflict.
In Manhattan, an active minority of revolutionaries rioted, pulled down the statue of George III, and, according to legend, melted the metal into musket balls. They were able to stage enough such events to make the British feel unwelcome. The British responded with both brutality and corruption. Occupied New York became an example of the worst in British rule. New Yorkers anticipated this. In June, when Admiral Richard Howe sailed into New York Harbor and General William Howe landed and encamped a large force on Staten Island, both carrying a conciliatory message to the locals, New Yorkers began to evacuate their occupied city. Many of Manhattan’s houses were dark and empty.
Under colonial rule the city had established a fairly effective fire department. The first fire engine was imported from England in 1731, and by 1737, New York had an organized volunteer fire department. In 1740, they were issued new leather helmets designed to let water run down the back or, reversing the headgear, shield the face from the heat of flames. Now the 170-man fire department fell into disarray, and the Royal Navy attempted to replace them as firefighters. A series of fires in a pattern suggesting arson swept through lower Manhattan, destroying 493 houses—about a third of Manhattan. Two years later, in 1778, another fire destroyed more than sixty buildings along the East River. While the city’s population dwindled to only twelve thousand, large numbers of blacks, escaped slaves, were flowing in believing that the British, despite their history of slavery and their brutal sugar colonies in the Caribbean, would be more likely to grant their freedom than would the new Americans.
Manhattan remained a charred, half-empty city until the British withdrew in 1783. There was no trade in wheat or pickled oysters or anything else. The harbor was used for mooring the British fleet and for mistreating prisoners of war on prison ships docked off Brooklyn and in the Hudson and East River. Eighty percent of the prisoners held on those ships in New York Harbor died.
New York served the British military as a military, not a commercial, harbor. As it turned out, it was not a particularly good one. A series of sandbars close off the lower harbor between Sandy Hook and Brooklyn. This protects the harbor, and experienced navigators find the trenches between the sandbars. But this means that a large fleet becomes bottled up when it needs to sail out quickly, which kept the great British navy from being available for numerous engagements during the war.
In 1783, after the British surrendered, revolutionary New Yorkers returned to the city, many finding that their homes had been occupied by Loyalists who were now fleeing with the British. The black population also fled, believing that when they reached the Loyalist colony of Nova Scotia they would be set free. But once they arrived in Nova Scotia, few were set free and the British sent most of them back into slavery on sugar plantations in the West Indies, one of the cruelest fates for an African slave.
New Yorkers returned to a nearly destroyed city. The unused wharves, having seen no commerce, were covered with seaweed and barnacles. Most of Broadway between Wall Street and Bowling Green had been ruined by the two fires. George Washington’s thirty-four-year-old son, Philip, was placed in charge of redistributing the abandoned and confiscated Loyalist-held properties. There was little law enforcement, commercial activity, or even sources of revenue. But once the last British ship left in autumn 1783, New Yorkers displayed tremendous excitement about the future of their port and the new republic it could supply. The city’s first hero’s welcome was to George Washington and the troops of the Continental Army as they entered the city from the Bronx, marched down Manhattan to the Bowery, and paraded through the city to the Battery. The Union Jack was taken down and the new thirteen-starred American flag raised. The burned-out city celebrated for ten days.
There was a daunting list of things to be done. The city needed new buildings, a sewer system, a fire department, laws, courts. It began widening and paving streets, including one, now vanished, called Oyster Pasty Lane. They built a jail and an almshouse, and in 1784, a garish red structure resembling a Chinese pagoda was added between them. This was the gallows, where the convicted were sent for a rapidly lengthening list of capital crimes including treason, murder, rape, forcible detention of women, forgery, counterfeiting, robbing a church, housebreaking if the house was occupied, robbery, arson, and malicious maiming. The gallows was used with regularity. In 1789 alone, ten executions were carried out, five on the same October day. For lesser crimes, a whipping post and stocks were installed nearby.
A process, not entirely planned, of Manhattan increasing its land and narrowing its waterways had begun. Discarded trash would start to fill in around the piers and merchants, rather than cleaning it out, would extend the docks farther out and finish filling in the trash area with landfill until they had added several blocks to lower Manhattan at the expense of the East River, the harbor, and the Hudson. After nearly eight hundred people died in the yellow-fever epidemic of 1798, affluent New Yorkers fled downtown and settled in a newly landfilled area that became known as Greenwich Village.
New York had lost its leading market, including its leading oyster market, because the British barred the new nation from trading with their empire. But there was always the local market, as more and more people settled back in Manhattan. In 1785, John Thurman, a local merchant, wrote a description in many ways familiar to today’s New Yorkers:
Many of our new merchants and shopkeepers set up since the war have failed. We have nothing but complaints of bad times . . . . Yet labor is very high and all articles of produce very high. Very small are our exports. There is no ship building, but house building in abundance, and house rent remains high. Law in abun
dance, the Trespass Act is food for lawyers—yet we say there is no money. Feasting and every kind of extravagance go on—reconcile these things if you can.
New York, which created North America’s first bar association, became and has remained a city of lawyers. From 1700 to 1712, the number of lawyers doubled. Among the abundant new laws were several dealing with sanitation. Every Friday between May and December, every home owner was to gather the dirt, garbage, and refuse from around his house and pile it near the gutter before 10 A.M., when the city would pick it up. But many did not bother to put their trash out early in the morning.
The city’s sewage system consisted of a long line of black slaves carrying pots of sewage on their heads late at night to dump into the rivers, on top of the oyster beds. There were still some open ditches of sewage running to the rivers, as did the canal that had been covered over by the Dutch to build Broadway, leaving the waterway as a sewer underneath it. All of the dozen or so streams and brooks of the island of Manhattan were eventually turned into sewers and covered over. The landfill around the edges of lower Manhattan that expanded the area by more than sixty acres did not have proper drainage. Such waterfront neighborhoods as Water Street and Pearl Street frequently had flooded basements and sewage would back up and flood the yards. Houses had to keep their windows closed to keep out the smell. Finally, in 1796, at the insistence of the city health officer, Dr. Richard Bayley, the city’s first underground sewer pipes were laid.
New York officials avoided discussion of these issues in 1789 when the city was in competition with a new District of Columbia to become the permanent capital of the United States. However, a notice in the Daily Advertizer on December 19, 1789, called upon New Yorkers to be more civic-minded about their trash disposal:
AWAKE THOU SLEEPER, let us have clean streets in this our peaceful seat of the happiest empire in the universe. That so our national rulers and their supporters may with convenience and decency celebrate a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
The New York argument, as in Hudson’s time, was the sweetness of the air and the healthiness of the city. It was pointed out that the Congress had met in New York for a three-month session and only one member had been sick in all that time. Dr. John Bard argued that New Yorkers were unusually healthy, and stated as one of the reasons the variety of fresh seafood that was available.
New York is justly esteemed one of the healthiest cities of the continent. Its vicinity to the ocean, fronted by a large and spacious bay: surrounded on every side by high and improved land covered with verdure and growing vegetables, which have a powerful influence in sweetening and salubrifying the air and which often in their season salute the inhabitants settled on the west side of the Broadway with fragrant odors from the apple orchards and buckwheat fields in blossom on the pleasant banks of the Jersey shore . . .
All of this may have been a bit too much of a sales pitch. In August of that year, during a heat wave, twenty New Yorkers dropped dead. But it was certainly as accurate as the opposing side, the District of Columbia promoters, who were claiming—with shades of John Smith and Henry Hudson—that the Potomac River connected with the Ohio and thus provided a waterway through the continent.
Six years after Washington said farewell to his troops in a warscarred and rebuilding New York, he was inaugurated president and New York was a thriving commercial city, well on its way to becoming the most important port in the new country. The tip of Manhattan had four thousand houses and twenty-nine thousand inhabitants, more than double its wartime population. Trinity Church had not yet been fully restored and the landmark Lutheran church on Rector Street and Broadway was still a blackened ruin, popularly known in acidic New York humor as the Burnt Lutheran Church. Not surprisingly, the first insurance company, founded with the help of Alexander Hamilton in 1789, specialized in fire—the Mutual Assistance Company Against Fire.
There were six food markets in lower Manhattan where oysters and fresh fish from the harbor, local fruit and produce, and meat were sold. The oldest was the Fly Market, started in 1699 on Maiden Lane between Pearl and Water streets. Soon all of these markets would be gone and replaced by newer ones. But these older markets had had very exacting government-enforced quality and health standards. In the nineteenth century, courts ruled that such market codes were an unlawful interference with free enterprise. An 1843 decision virtually ended consumer protection in New York City for one hundred years.
This map was included in the city directory of 1789, the third such directory. These books would be published annually until the twentieth century creation of telephone books. This was the first city directory in the United States to include a street map. The map shows the completion of Greenwich Street, a fifty-year landfill project along the Hudson River and also shows the Collect, marked “Fresh Water Pond.”
COLLECTION OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY
The city had an increasing number of taverns and oyster houses. In fact, the Bowery village, a suburb just north of the city where Peter Stuyvesant’s farm had been located near East Tenth Street, used an oyster house as its village post office.
The city did not become the capital of the new nation; it did not even become the capital of the state, losing out to Albany in 1797. But it continued to grow, and in the same year that it lost its seat to Albany, it became the leading port of the United States, surpassing Boston and Philadelphia.
Robert Fulton is often credited with having invented the steam engine, which he did not, and never remembered for inventing the submarine, which he did. That is because he was never able to sell the submarine, whereas his steamboats changed New York City.
The first steam-powered vessel in New York City was built by a man from Bristol, Connecticut, named John Fitch. In 1790, Fitch had built and operated a steam-powered ferry service between Philadelphia and Trenton. The venture had lost money, as did all his subsequent ventures, in part because he could not attract substantial investors. Few had been excited about the commercial possibilities of Fitch’s somewhat reduced crossing time from Philadelphia to Trenton and the service had never made a profit and had left many convinced that steamboats were not commercially viable. His last project was a steamboat with a screw-type propeller that in 1796 he demonstrated on the Collect, lower Manhattan’s increasingly defiled pond. Among the passengers aboard the experimental vessel were Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston, Fulton’s future patron. No one expressed interest in backing Fitch’s boat and it was never used. Fitch committed suicide.
Robert Fulton’s life, too, defies logical biography. He died at the age of fifty-one from not tending to a cold. He grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he studied art but became a gunsmith. Then, still only seventeen years old, he moved to Philadelphia, where he became a painter of portraits and landscapes. When the forgotten Fitch was building steamboats, Fulton was painting portraits. It was while studying art in England under Benjamin West that he became interested in engineering, the master gunsmith in him emerging again. He worked on canal projects.
In 1796, he went to Paris at the invitation of Joel Barlow, a former chaplain of the Continental Army and passionate booster of all things American. Barlow was in Paris convincing a group of Frenchmen to immigrate to Ohio. In France, Fulton became fascinated, obsessed according to some accounts, with underwater warfare. He designed submarines that fired torpedoes. In 1801, he demonstrated his prototype, which stored fresh air in a copper globe, to the French Admiralty. Although the vessel managed to stay under the water in Brest Harbor for more than four hours, the French government declined to develop such a weapon.
Then he visited Robert Livingston, with whom he had several years earlier steamed across the Collect. Livingston had been a deputy to the Continental Congress, law partner of the first Supreme Court chief justice, John Jay, and a native New Yorker who was serving as the U.S. ambassador to France. Fulton could not interest Livingston in his submarine either. Livingston had a long-standing interest in steamboats, though,
which was why he had been on board Fitch’s invention on the Collect. Being from New York City, Livingston immediately grasped the significance of Fulton’s idea for using the steam engine. The engine Fulton wanted to use had been developed by James Watt, a Scot who is also sometimes credited with inventing steam engines but had not—Thomas Savery did in 1698—to drive two paddle wheels and power a vessel. Livingston contracted Fulton to build a boat with steam-powered paddle wheels that would work the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. Their first prototype in 1803 sank in the Seine. The French were nevertheless impressed with the theory. But Fulton and Livingston were not theorists, they were a new breed of American pragmatists in search of commercial success.
They returned to America, and Livingston secured a monopoly from the New York State legislature for all steam-powered vessels on New York rivers. On the East River, the site of numerous shipyards, they built the Clermont, a 130-foot vessel with two 15-foot-diameter side paddle wheels and two masts flying square canvas sails for added power.
In August 1807—historians disagree on the exact day—the Clermont steamed from Manhattan to Albany, 150 miles up the Hudson, in thirty-two hours. Along the way the forty-one-year-old artist-engineer-inventor-entrepreneur at last found the time to propose marriage to Harriet Livingston, a relative of his partner. He made it back downriver to Manhattan in thirty hours. The state monopoly had been on condition that they could produce a steamboat that traveled at least four miles an hour. They had averaged five miles an hour. “The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved,” Fulton wrote Joel Barlow. Immediately following this successful demonstration, Fulton and Livingston began regular service between Manhattan and Albany. The fares were high, seven dollars one way to Albany, and yet the boats were packed with eager customers. Fulton and Livingston had shown that steam travel was profitable and that is what changed New York and the world and probably why Robert Fulton is erroneously remembered as the inventor of the steamboat.
The Big Oyster Page 9