America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  The rapid expansion of retail, banking, industry, and commerce spawned newer occupations in law, insurance, real estate, education, hotel and restaurant management, and financial services. Usually salaried positions, these occupations expanded the middle class—the readership for Greeley’s Tribune, the patrons of the theater, the population for new subdivisions, and the consumers of things. This quintessential urban class was defined less by occupation and income—though obviously that counted—than by where they lived, how they spent their leisure time, the churches they went to, the books and magazines they read, and what they consumed.

  Tales of the city fascinated other Americans just as the saga of the westward movement had captured their imagination. Many of these accounts made clear, however, that success in the city sometimes came at a price. Lurid titles such as George Foster’s series New York in Slices, New York by Gas-Light, and New York Naked became best sellers. Rather than repelling readers, these stories rendered the city even more alluring. Foster was a guide of the city much as Frémont was a guide of the West, and negotiating the streets of New York at night could be just as exciting as riding through the Sioux country out west. If the West was redolent of a special freedom for Americans, so was the city. The city, like the West, represented a new beginning, a casting off of custom and tradition, a regeneration of the American experiment. Cities were “electric transformers” and “accelerators of all historical time.”7

  Foster told of liberated men and women enjoying the day- and nightlife of bustling, bawdy New York. The new urban woman was a particular delight to Foster’s readers. Lize, a recurring character in his stories, “never feels herself at home but at the theater or the dance.… She is perfectly willing to work for a living, works hard and cheerfully, as any day laborer or journeyman mechanic of the other sex.” Foster assures readers that Lize is not a housewife but an independent working woman: “She rises before the sun … swallows her frugal breakfast in a hurry, puts a still more frugal dinner in her little tin kettle …, and starts off to her daily labor.… From six to six o’clock she works steadily, with little gossip and no interruption save the hour from twelve to one, devoted to dinner.” This rigorous schedule—the hard work for which Americans were famous—does not dull Lize’s demeanor or disposition. “Her very walk has a swing of mischief and defiance in it, and the tones of her voice are loud, hearty, and free.”8

  Lize exemplified what Americans found intriguing about the city. She enjoyed life, she played and worked hard, she was independent, and she flouted tradition. She was distinctive, as the city was distinctive, as America was distinctive. To readers across the country, in small towns and farms—where most Americans still lived—these were the alluring aspects of urban life. They realized, as one magazine editor stated, that “the great things in history have not been done in the country.… If [a person] has talent and ambition, he will surely burst away from the relentless tedium of potatoes and corn, and earn more money in an hour by writing a paragraph exhorting people to go and hoe corn and potatoes, than he would by hoeing them for a day.”9

  While Americans found the city alluring, at least in literature, they also held reservations about the urban explosion. Much as some worried that a continental empire would stretch the democratic fabric to the breaking point, they expressed concern that cities and their diverse populations threatened the nation’s future as well. “In the formation of a nation’s education,” wrote one woman at mid-century, “as of a national character, the country more than the city must control. The city becomes cosmopolitan; its people, blending all nationalities, lose distinctive national characteristics, and … love of country as well.”10

  The rapid growth of evangelical Protestantism in the nineteenth century was fueled in part by a perception of urban godlessness. Roman Catholics concentrated in cities, and the city generally tended to erode Christian piety. The fact that New York City contained more than two hundred known houses of prostitution by the 1850s confirmed the erosion of faith. In such circumstances, the task of ministers was clear. As Henry Ward Beecher declared from his pulpit in Brooklyn, “We must preach Him IN THE CITIES; for nowhere else is the need of this greater, and nowhere else are the opportunities for doing it more numerous and inviting.”11

  Beecher also wrote “Lectures to Young Men,” advising them on appropriate conduct in the new urban environment where temptations abounded. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) appeared in Boston in 1851 and soon spread to other cities. Here was a place where young bank tellers, salesmen, attorneys, journalists, and clerks could expand their minds and protect their souls. These and like associations did not so much shield their charges from the city as they prepared them to cope with the challenges of urban living. “This desire to press forward in the path of improvement, this ambition to excel,” wrote one young member, “is one of the noblest attributes of the mind.… It is the power which, guided and directed by the grace of God, is destined to reform the world.” Adherence to God and Christian virtues could harness the energy of the city to greater personal and national objectives.12

  Just whose God reigned in the cities? The God of Abraham or the God of Mammon? As medieval urban dwellers had built cathedrals to express their faith, nineteenth-century city dwellers constructed department stores and brokerage houses as the palaces of their faith. Urban households enjoyed much larger disposable incomes than the rural families. City families in the mid-nineteenth century spent, on average, about three times as much per year as rural households. As advertisements cluttered the penny presses and new emporia sprang up to satisfy the demands of the burgeoning urban population, the city became a retail extravaganza.

  Few establishments epitomized this urban affluence more than the department store. A. T. Stewart had arrived in New York from Belfast in 1825. He parlayed the savings and hard work from his dry goods business to open the aptly named “Marble Palace” department store in 1846. The glittering chandeliers, the wide aisles, the burnished mahogany counters, and the dazzling array of merchandise thrilled customers, who felt they were participating in an event merely by entering such an establishment. Many pressed their noses against the large plate-glass windows, and a new phrase—“window shopping”—was born. The stores became spaces for middle-class women, few of whom worked outside the home, but whose role was to decorate, purchase, and plan a household. The independence of the young, single working girl, exemplified by George Foster’s Lize, percolated up the social ladder to middle-class women. But class was not the theme of the department store; here was a democratic space, where salesgirls, native-born or immigrant, and shoppers of all varieties mingled. A widely read book on urban etiquette published in the 1850s, Miss Leslie’s Behavior Book, counseled readers about department-store protocol: “Testify no impatience if a servant-girl, making a six penny purchase, is served before you.” In department stores, “the rule of ‘first come, first served,’ is rigidly observed.”13

  By the 1850s, all the major cities boasted these commercial palaces. Boston’s Jordan Marsh, Philadelphia’s Wanamaker and Brown, New York’s Lord and Taylor, and Chicago’s Marshall Field’s were the marvels of their day as residents and tourists alike gaped at first sight of the latest innovations in retail establishments. The palaces were part of a new downtown, more exclusively given over to commercial and industrial uses. Those who could afford to do so moved uptown. They became commuters and, in some cases, suburbanites.14

  Moving to the suburbs was a variation on the theme of westward movement. If abundance of land, the opportunity for work, and the possibility of success motivated the trekkers to the Pacific, they also accounted for the mobility to and from the cities of mid-nineteenth-century America. To own land and a home was a marker of success regardless of the geography. It represented less a rejection of the urban milieu than an opportunity to fulfill the American dream. Americans during this era learned to move easily from natural to man-made environments, remaking the natural to suit modern sensibiliti
es and softening the artificial to remain connected to nature. A middle landscape, in other words, an ability to appreciate both places. It was the way Americans came to accept their urban civilization, despite misgivings, and take it for their own.

  By the 1850s, the nation had gone too far in pursuit of urban life to turn back nostalgically to an earlier, more rural America. Cities had become the centers of innovation and wealth, and the egalitarian spirit flourished there contrary to fears that urban air would stifle democracy. Whatever problems accompanied urban life could be solved. This, after all, was America. If poverty existed, and it did, apply the new social science methodology, rationalize charity, and solve the problem. If crime and fire added to cities’ growing pains, and they did, establish professional police and firefighting forces. If crowded cities generated health problems and epidemic diseases, and they did, provide cleaner drinking water, systematize public health services, and develop parks for esthetic and recreational pleasure. The American city stood on the cutting edge of a cutting-edge country. Some streets were paved, gas lighting adorned the thoroughfares, sewer systems flushed many city streets, water tasted more like a drink than a liquid menace, and all citizens could enjoy a stroll in the park on a Sunday afternoon.15

  America’s burgeoning cities inspired awe but no longer surprise. In fact, compared with Chicago’s, Denver’s, and San Francisco’s, New York’s growth seemed measured. Instant cities were the rage out West. As soon as migrants reached a likely place, down went streets and up went buildings. Immigrants from Europe and Asia eagerly sought these new places believing, correctly in most cases, that with everyone a newcomer, they stood about as good a chance at success as anyone.

  Was there anything Americans could not accomplish, even turning crowded cities into airy gardens, solving the age-old scourges of disease and fire, and spreading wealth far and wide, not merely among a privileged elite but to anyone who would work hard? The ideals behind such achievements transcended the city or the farm. They were American principles of faith playing out in cities, on farms, and in the long wagon trains westward. Americans, those who came with hope to the new cities from near and very far, those who traveled westward with equal optimism, and even those who stayed put, pausing for a moment, a year, to persist here for the time being, and then maybe moving on if things did not work out right, or even if things did. All believed they were special, beyond Europe, beyond history; a new race of people, closer to God, and closer to His coming.

  And each was as good as the other, a democracy of transcendence, Whitman wrote: “Come to us on equal terms. Only then can you understand us. We are not better than you. What we enclose you enclose. What we enjoy you may enjoy.” Americans were all pioneers, trekking to uncharted territory and by the dint of hard work and faith creating a new nation, and ultimately a redeemed world. “All the past we leave behind,” Whitman wrote. “We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world, / Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O pioneers!” Americans would conquer all obstacles: “We primeval forests felling, / We the rivers stemming, vexing we, and piercing deep the mines within; / We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving, Pioneers! O pioneers!”16

  Americans stood apart from history. Other peoples and races were still bound to the historical inevitabilities of rise, fall, and extinction, be they Mexicans, Indians, or Africans. The chroniclers of America’s new history, such as George Bancroft, projected a straight line of infinite progress watched over by Providence. Americans were new men and women connected to a new destiny. “Whenever a mind is simple,” Emerson wrote, “and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour.… The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.… [H]istory is an impertinence and an injury.” Americans were “born with knives in their brains,” Emerson declared, cutting through centuries of dead wisdom to sculpt a new individual and a new nation.17

  Which is why the economic crash of 1857 sent city men to their knees. It was all so unexpected. What had they done to God to derail the nation from its divine mission? If the rush and the glitter of the mid-nineteenth-century city had made the poor invisible, the Panic revealed them and many more. The small-town, small-shop, small-farm American economy was transforming, and in such transitions many benefited, but some were left far behind. Fifty years earlier, the top 1 percent of income earners owned 12 percent of the wealth. By the late 1850s, they controlled nearly one-third of the nation’s wealth. Artisanal work was disappearing, and laborers crowded a market of low wages and few benefits. The separation between manual and mental labor grew wider, as did the compensation for each.

  The economic downturn not only cost jobs and deepened urban poverty, it shattered the confidence of the flamboyant fifties when progress seemed limitless and when God appeared everywhere, on the street, within men, and across the American continent ratifying the words and deeds of His Chosen People; an era when steam engines conquered time and space, and when the western rivers and rocks offered up untold treasures, and when a few dollars down today would yield a fortune tomorrow. America transcended the western tribes, the contentious slaveholder, the culture-bound Catholic, the encrusted hierarchies of Old Europe. But the rising misery of the winter of 1857–58 sent stocks and confidence tumbling one after the other.

  Walt Whitman, normally an ebullient drumbeater for his country and his city, wondered if the Panic reflected a deeper disaffection that portended the disintegration of American democracy. The prosperity and technological advances of the 1840s and 1850s and the extension of a continental empire had concealed troubling fissures in American society. Whitman’s meanderings along the streets of New York distressed him, not only the squalor he encountered but also the gratuitous violence that flared from the bowels of the burgeoning tenement districts and occasionally spilled into nearby commercial and residential districts.18

  Clashes between sectarian gangs accelerated in the mid-1850s. The city’s Democratic political leadership, with its substantial Irish base, seemed uninterested in stemming the violence. The municipal police force was thoroughly corrupt and merely added to the chaos. An exasperated state administration formed the rival Metropolitan Police force in 1857 and ordered the city’s force disbanded. When the mayor refused to carry out the order, the two forces joined battle in the streets. A court order succeeded in disbanding the city police on July 2, 1857. Two days later, the Irish “Dead Rabbits” and their Protestant rivals, the “Bowery Boys,” fought a pitched battle in Manhattan’s “Bloody Sixth” Ward, home to the notorious Five Points slum. The state-appointed police force stood by helplessly. Security was scarcely better in other cities. When the Panic set in during the fall, worker demonstrations erupted across urban America, most notably in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, and Louisville. Americans feared for their cities and their democracy.19

  The Panic of 1857 did not invent urban disorder, but the increasing violence did prompt the press and leading citizens to question the price of progress, perhaps for the first time. The unalloyed boosterism of the early 1850s dissolved into more sober reflection. In November 1858, a writer in Harper’s catalogued the “rowdyism and anarchy which obtain in New York. Riots and crimes abound. Justice is not certain. The necessaries of life are notoriously and fatally adulterated. The laws are neither obeyed by the people nor executed by the magistracy.” Little wonder that George Templeton Strong found a society in extremis: “We are a very sick people. The outward and visible signs of disease, the cutaneous symptoms, are many.” New York, or any other mid-nineteenth-century American city, was neither as good as its boosters had declaimed nor as rotten as the growing chorus of detractors feared. Whatever the reality, a shift in perception had occurred. New evidence corroborated the view that disorder was on the rise and that it threatened American democracy.20

  Gangs of New York: Paramilit
ary political gangs were not an invention of the Reconstruction-era South. Throughout (mostly northern) cities, groups of street gangs affiliated with rival political parties and divided by religious differences clashed. On July 4, 1857, the “Bowery Boys,” supporters of the Know Nothings, fought a pitched battle with their Irish Catholic adversaries, the “Dead Rabbits.” (Courtesty of the Library of Congress)

  The fledgling science of society—social science—and its penchant for statistical compilations indicated that the trend of urban crime matched popular perceptions. One study showed that in a four-year period between 1848 and 1852, violent crimes increased by 129 percent in New York, fueled by a sixfold jump in murders. The press sensationalized the crime wave and undoubtedly contributed to the growing sense of urban lawlessness. The sensational became the routine: “Horrible murders, stabbings, and shootings, are now looked for in the morning papers with as much regularity as we look for our breakfast.” Whitman’s beloved city had become to him “crime-haunted and dangerous,” ruled by the revolver.21

  None of this sudden awareness of urban lawlessness surprised southern journalists, who had discussed the failure of “free” society for several years prior to the Panic of 1857. A writer in De Bow’s Review wondered, “What would be the result were the police force of one of our large cities withdrawn for a single night?… We would have life as in the streets of Byzantium when Mohammed the Turk poured his savage hordes through them.” Such a result, the Virginian George Fitzhugh asserted, was the natural outcome of a society whose “whole moral code was every man for himself.” The South, by contrast, was more humane and less troubled by disorder. The evils of “Pauperism, crime, and mortality” were decidedly less evident in southern cities than in the urban North.22