The Big Oyster

by Mark Kurlansky

  Manhattan was the field for the bloodiest engagement of the Civil War that did not involve Confederate troops.

  Five Points, the most infamous slum in America, was ruled by street gangs such as the Swamp Angels, who earned their name by attacking from out of sewers, the Daybreak Boys, who were ten and eleven years old, the Dead Rabbits, who went into battle with their namesake impaled on a pike. They fought sweeping, pitched battles on the streets of Five Points. These gangs could muster one thousand fighters or more for a street battle. In 1857, the Dead Rabbits seized City Hall and held it for an hour while slaughtering their gang opponents in front of the building.

  By the time of the outbreak of the Civil War, Manhattan had built five hundred miles of city streets, but three-quarters of them had no sewage. The city’s population, 813,669, was a little more than half foreign-born. One-fourth of the New York population had been born in Ireland. Seemingly following the example of the Collect, the city created slums for immigrants to move to. In the 1840s, as gas lighting was being introduced all over the city, huge gas tanks were built near the East River just above Fourteenth Street, which was considered an unused area. After they were built, no one wanted to live near them because the gas tanks leaked, and so impoverished Irish immigrants settled into the area. Eighty percent of police arrests were of immigrants, which gave a sense of an ongoing war between the immigrant poor and the police. In the year 1862, the police arrested eighty-two thousand people—a tenth of the population of New York.

  In March 1863, the Conscription Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. All men between the ages of twenty and forty-five were required to register, and if drafted were required to serve for three years. Adding to the outrage of the poor, the act provided an exemption for the very wealthy; anyone could buy their way out of the draft with $300. Few New Yorkers, few Americans, could raise this sum. It was about a third of a year’s wages for an oyster shucker. A wealthy man could also hire someone to serve in his place, which was considered—by the rich—a civic-minded thing to do. The fathers of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, banker J. P. Morgan, and future presidents Chester A. Arthur and Grover Cleveland all hired substitutes. Even Abraham Lincoln, himself over the draft age of forty-five, set an example by hiring a substitute. George Templeton Strong paid his proxy soldier $1,100 and wrote, “My alter ego could make a good soldier if he tried. Gave him my address and told him to write to me if he found himself in the hospital or in trouble, and that I would try to do what I properly could to help him.”

  A few New Yorkers such as meat producers, industrialists, and the oyster producers benefited from the war. The main competitors of New York oysters, Chesapeake oysters, were no longer available. The military did not allow oyster sloops on the Chesapeake Bay for fear they would somehow be used to help the Confederacy. Closing down the bay meant New Yorkers not only took over the Chesapeake share of the market but went into the business of supplying seed oysters. Staten Island planters, ironically the same oystermen who had saved their beds by planting Chesapeake seeds, especially profited. Their prices almost doubled during the war, and the demand never slackened. The Union Army had always been a good customer. In 1859, the quartermaster general wrote that more money had been paid out that year for oysters than for meat. Much of that had been canned or pickled, but even during the war, troops on occasion were treated to fresh New York oysters.

  But with the general New York population there had been little enthusiasm for the war at the outset and it had grown even more unpopular. Most New Yorkers did not regard slavery as a serious transgression and thought abolitionists were fanatics. In 1850, George Templeton Strong, a Lincoln supporter, had written in his diary:

  My creed on that question is this: That slave holding is no sin.

  That the slaves of the Southern States are happier and better off than the niggers of the North, and are more kindly dealt with by their owners than servants are by Northern masters.

  That the reasoning, the tone of feeling, the first principles, the practices, and the designs of Northern Abolitionists are very particularly false, foolish, wicked, and unchristian.

  There was a huge and enthusiastic rally in Union Square in 1861 to see off the troops, but few had predicted what a slaughter this war would be. From the very start the news in New York was bad. New York troops fought in the first engagement and New Yorkers were shocked to learn they had been routed by the Confederates at a place called Manassas, Virginia, with an unimaginable 460 federal troops killed and 1,582 wounded. A New York soldier wrote in his diary, “Tonight not 100 men are in camp . . . . A hundred men are drunk, a hundred more are in houses of ill fame, and the balance are everywhere . . . . Colonel Alfred is very drunk all the time now.” Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, who had urged Lincoln to let the South secede, and had then urged him to march on Richmond, now urged him to give up the fight and negotiate terms.

  Other slaughters followed. In one battle in 1862 at a place called Shiloh, 3,477 men died, almost as many as had died in the eight years of the American Revolution. Later that year, more than twelve thousand Union troops were killed or wounded in one day at Antietam. Every day New Yorkers read the lists of dead and wounded in the newspapers. In September 1862, photographer Mathew Brady opened an exhibit in New York of work by his assistants Alexander Gardner and James E. Gibson entitled The Dead of Antietam. Photography was new, and few had ever seen such images of war. Because the camera exposed slowly and was a large cumbersome box with glass plates for negatives, it could not function in the heat of battle. Instead it recorded battlefields covered with the staring, twisted, mutilated dead. The New York Times reported, “Mr. Brady has done something to bring to us the terrible reality, the earnestness of war.”

  By the summer of 1863, as New York prepared for conscription, General Robert E. Lee’s army was in Pennsylvania, not far away, and many New Yorkers were calling for Lincoln to negotiate a peace settlement. A masterpiece of warped logic became widespread in New York: All of the carnage and suffering of the Civil War was the fault of black people for being slaves. As blacks fled north and challenged New York immigrants for the worst jobs, the poorest immigrants, especially the Irish, turned bitterly against those they regarded as the newcomers. The idea of fighting to free blacks so they could migrate north and steal their jobs was infuriating to these impoverished New Yorkers. Were they all to be slaughtered because of them? Blacks were beaten on the streets of New York, even lynched. Avenue A was particularly infamous for lynchings.

  On Sunday, July 12, 1863, the first conscripts, the names drawn the day before, were listed in the New York papers along with the New Yorkers among the twenty-three thousand Union dead or wounded at Gettysburg. On Monday morning, more names were being drawn as a mob attacked the conscription office, destroyed the files, tore down the building, and went out on the streets looting and burning. According to The New York Times, “They talk, or rather they did talk at first, of the oppressiveness of the Conscription Law, but three fourths of those who have been actively engaged in violence have been boys and young men under twenty years of age, and not at all subject to the Conscription.” What had happened was that the slums and their street gangs were finally exploding.

  The metropolitan police force fought back with 2,297 men and were often badly outnumbered. An estimated fifty thousand to seventy thousand people took part in the riot, with some gangs rallying ten thousand fighters. A thousand citizens armed with handguns and clubs were sworn in as auxiliary but still could not contain the mobs. The police chief was beaten to death. The mob attacked the wealthy in their homes and smashed stores and looted. Two disabled veterans were killed. They attacked black homes, boardinghouses, orphanages, and schools. Women gang members were said to be the most vicious against blacks and captured policemen, torturing them with knives, gouging out eyes and tongues, or spraying a victim lashed to a tree with oil and setting him on fire.

  Rioters fought the polic
e in the streets, in buildings, in parks, and on rooftops. More than one hundred buildings were burned down. After four days of fighting, regiments of infantry and cavalry pulled from the battlefield at Gettysburg, sunburned from their days fighting under the July sun, arrived in New York and the street gangs were no match for these battle-hardened veterans.

  In the end, of 161 Five Pointers conscripted, 59 received exemptions, 11 hired substitutes, two paid the $300 fee, and 88 simply failed to report. Only one Five Pointer draftee served, Hugh Boyle, who went in at the end of 1864, served in the war until it ended five months later, and then, on his way to join occupation forces in Texas, deserted.

  After the war, the memory of the 1863 draft riot left the people of New York with a lingering fear of the slums, the immigrants, and the poor. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century claim that Manhattan was a healthy spot had long been forgotten. The city was notoriously unhealthy and much of that bad health was centered in the slums. In 1863, the year of the riots, one in every thirty-six New Yorkers died. The same year, one in every forty-four Philadelphians died and the same for Bostonians. Even in London and Liverpool, with their Dickensian slums and poverty, only one in every forty-five died that year.

  In 1865, the bleeding nation, with its more than six hundred thousand dead and another almost half million wounded, was reeling from the Civil War. But in New York there was also fear of fetid slums and terrifying epidemics. In reality, smallpox, cholera, and typhoid epidemics did not cause the high fatality rate. More people died of nonepidemic diseases such as tuberculosis, diarrhea in children, bronchitis, and pneumonia. But it was the sudden sweep of a fatal disease, the epidemic, that incited the fear and imagination of New Yorkers.

  Cholera would periodically attack cities all over the world, an unseen deadly force. Death came within a few days, and mortality rates were as high as 90 percent of all patients stricken with the disease. Terrified populations would search for causes. In New York, it was often traced to a ship that came from an infected port city. New Yorkers would brace themselves when they learned of cholera outbreaks in European cities.

  What caused such pestilence? In New York, the principal suspects were foreigners, poverty, slums, immoral living, and alcoholism. It was often thought not that the poor were victimized by disease, but rather that they caused it. The modern-day assault of AIDS was not the first time an epidemic led to the stigmatization of its victims. In nineteenth-century New York, victims of cholera, yellow fever, and typhus were commonly looked down upon. Then, in the fall of 1854, several prominent citizens came down with cholera and died. A major epidemic had begun among the privileged. “There is a strange flare up of this epidemic just now, among people of the more ‘respectable’ class,” George Templeton Strong noted in his diary on October 24. He was to personally witness a few fatal cases among his circle of friends.

  The epidemic was a tremendous shock. Since it could not be blamed on the filth and moral degradation of the slums, perhaps it was being caused by oysters. And so what became known as “the oyster panic” began.

  Numerous frightened New Yorkers began theorizing that the cholera resulted from eating bad oysters. Not surprisingly, there was a marked drop in oyster sales, especially among merchants who sold to the rich, such as Downing. Strong quoted, in his words, “the former venerable Ethiop” insisting, “If any gentleman can prove he died of the oyster I works in, I’ll pay his expenses to Greenwood,” the Brooklyn cemetery. In Downing’s defense, Strong assured in his October 31 diary entry, “There is no serious increase of cholera cases, and probably no foundation for distrust of oysters, raw, broiled or roast.” Strong was very wrong. It is now known that a chief cause of cholera is food that has been infected by sewage, and that raw shellfish is a particularly likely way to contract the disease.

  In 1855, New York City mayor Henry Wood, responding to the oyster panic the previous year, moved to rigorously enforce the generally ignored laws restricting oyster sales. In 1839, a law had been passed reviving an old law about months lacking R. It outlawed the sale of oysters in New York from May 1 to September 1. This had created a festive moment in restaurants and markets when the oyster season reopened in September. Municipalities were free to lengthen the off-season, and the Great South Bay had stayed closed until September 15 and the Brookhaven beds didn’t open until October 1. But by 1855, when Mayor Wood began rigorously enforcing the law, most New Yorkers had nearly forgotten about it. By then, New Yorkers were not panicked anymore and they laughed at the old-fashioned law. Ballou’s Pictorial in the fall of 1855 wrote of oystermen who had started spelling the month “Orgust” so that it would have an R. Even then this was already an old joke.

  The debate about the R months continued throughout the century. In September, at the opening of the 1883 season, a satirical New York Times editorial said, “There are eager lovers of the oyster who will eat ‘fries’ and ‘broiled’ up to 12 P.M. on the 30th day of April, but no good man will touch an oyster after the hour has struck.” The article suggests that the unlucky Italians can’t eat oysters in January because Gennaio, the Italian name for January, has no R. “On the other hand, the Arab of the desert can eat oysters in certain Mohammedan months which contain an R, while in the corresponding Christian months the gracious R is wanting.”

  It was mainly with a view to oysters that Julius Caesar reformed the calendar. He found that what the almanach called the Summer occurred late in the Autumn, so that in the months in which oysters were peculiarly desirable no “r” existed. He therefore pushed back the “r”less months into the heat of summer and enabled the Roman to feast on oysters on the true first of September. Moreover he invented leap year merely for the purpose of adding another oyster day to February. It was by these two grand strokes of genius that Caesar won the enthusiastic support of the Roman oyster dealers and endeared himself to every Roman whose taste for oysters had not been destroyed by the artificial and unwholesome dishes affected by the rich and dissolute members of the Pompeiian party.

  In 1864, a New York citizens’ association undertook a block-by-block inspection of the city. In 1865, it published its three-hundred-page report, which was widely distributed and resulted in the formation of a Metropolitan Board of Health. The goal of the report, which was largely sponsored by the wealthy, was to clean up the sanitary and moral conditions in the slums that caused diseases. The report pointed out that “The mobs that held fearful sway in our city during the memorable out-break of violence in the month of July 1863, were gathered in overcrowded and neglected quarters of the city.”

  It also reported that “everything is thrown into the street and gutters all times of the day. The slums still had overflowing outhouses . . . . Filth of every kind was thrown into the streets, covering their surface, filling the gutters, obstructing the sewer culverts, and sending forth perennial emanations which must generate pestiforous diseases.” Scientists did not yet know the causes of most diseases, but most educated New Yorkers were convinced that somehow the problem was slums—the source of disease and crime and violence. Always in the back of New Yorkers’ minds was the 1863 draft riot. Finally, in 1887, the city turned to its usual solution and began buying up and tearing down the Five Points neighborhood.

  The unheeled, limping nation was quickly spreading westward. The cattle industry that fed the Union Army, the largest army to date in history, continued to grow. Industry that armed the Union Army in booming cities such as Cleveland continued its expansion. The railroads that moved the army continued branching into the West. Even before the war, in 1857, New York had been linked to St. Louis by train. After the war, New York oysters became a common feature of the restaurants in St. Louis hotels.

  Ships were faster, and the Atlantic seemed smaller. The three thousand miles between New York and Liverpool had taken President Martin Van Buren five weeks in 1832. In 1850, the S.S. Atlantic of the New York & Liverpool United States Mail Steamship Company broke the record of its competitor, Cunard’s Royal Steam P
acket Company, by crossing from Liverpool to New York in ten days sixteen hours. Two years later, her sister ship became the first to cross from New York to Liverpool in less than ten days. After the war, ten-day crossings became commonplace.

  New York City, the great port for this expanding nation, became a city of wealth and extravagance, with a brash sense of its own importance. War profiteers who had made fortunes settled in and began showing off. It was labeled the Flash Age. New York City had been known not only for its slums but for its beauty, its lawns and gardens and trees, including those in Battery Park, designed to be seen from the sea in the foreground. A pear tree on Third Avenue and Twelfth Street planted in 1660 by Peter Stuyvesant lasted until the early 1860s. It was a city of Georgian homes. Union Square, named not after the Northern cause but because it joined so many avenues and streets, was a flower market in the springtime.

  After the war, the city grew from a charming port to a major commercial center. An enormous number of brownstones were built, denounced for modern architectural banality by the old guard. Steel- and ironworks, created for military contracts that ended with the war, turned to making cast-iron buildings, raising the skyline above what had been a three-story town. In 1870, the seven-story Equitable Life Assurance Society Building at Broadway and Cedar Street created a sensation with what the New York Post called “The new way of getting up stairs,” a steam-powered elevator, which encouraged the designing of taller buildings. In 1873, the first streetcar rails were laid, though the public was so skeptical of the invention—the car deriving electricity from one of the rails—that horse-drawn coaches continued to congest Broadway.

  For all the new brownstones, living space was becoming even more scarce to a growing population. Folding beds that doubled in the day as a bookcase, a wardrobe, or a desk became a popular New Yorkism. Manhattan still had hills and marshes and wetlands. But waterfront marshes were being filled in with granite and earth from the center of the island.