The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Arriving at the Capitol, Washington stepped from his coach and was ushered inside. Surrounded by dignitaries, he walked to the second floor and entered the Senate chamber, a room forty feet square and fifteen feet high. The arched blue ceiling glittered with a sun and thirteen stars. The chamber held several fireplaces and eight large windows, four of them opening on a southern balcony.

  Senator Izard escorted Washington down the main aisle and formally introduced him to Vice-President Adams. Adams asked Washington to be seated. The President settled in a crimson damask-covered chair. Adams had prepared a little speech, but in this tense moment he couldn’t remember what he wanted to say. After an awkward silence Adams presented Washington to the assemblage and said, “Sir, the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States are ready to attend you to take the oath required by the Constitution, which will be administered by the chancellor of the state of New York.”

  Washington replied, in a low voice, “I am ready to proceed.”

  Everyone rose. The chief notables led Washington out of the Senate chamber onto the balcony fronting on Wall Street and facing south down Broad Street. Alexander Hamilton watched from a window of his home at 33 Wall Street. The moment Washington appeared on the balcony, a roar welled from the waiting multitude. He bowed three times, sat down in a chair, and, overcome with emotion, dropped his head into his hands. The crowd hushed. Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, a red-headed man wearing black robes, asked if he was ready to take the oath of office. Washington nodded.

  But no Bible could be found in Federal Hall. Livingston, grand master of the New York Masons, hurriedly sent a messenger to a nearby Masonic lodge to fetch one. When the Bible arrived, it was put on a crimson cushion held by Samuel Otis, secretary of the Senate. Otis was so short that his head barely showed above the Bible. Washington stood up, his deep-set eyes scanning the packed streets and crowded roofs. Again the spectators cheered. Washington placed his big right hand on his chest in mute and humble acknowledgment. Then, gently, unwaveringly, his hand came down on the open Bible. Fixing his eyes on Chancellor Livingston, he repeated the words: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Then he didn’t wait for Otis to lift the Bible to his lips but leaned down and kissed it. As he straightened up, he murmured, “So help me, God!”

  “It is done!” cried Livingston with tears in his eyes. “Long live George Washington, President of the United States!”

  The crowd took up the chant: “Long live George Washington, President of the United States!” An American flag rippled up a flagpole on Federal Hall, church bells bonged, the Battery cannon roared, a fifteen-gun salute thundered from a Spanish warship in the harbor, and a wave of cheers crashed against the great man himself. Livingston was so choked with emotion that he could only wave his hat. Like him, some spectators, cheeks frozen with ecstasy, eyes misting, and throats hardening, merely flourished their hats over their heads. Others shouted themselves hoarse. Later several people said that they could die happy, having seen George Washington sworn in as President. Overpowered by the thunderous ovation, Washington’s granite will almost cracked. He swallowed hard, stood briefly in trembling dignity, bowed solemnly, and then withdrew inside the Senate chamber.

  After fumbling through his inaugural address, he was escorted to nearby St. Paul’s Chapel to pray. By an irony of fate, at almost the same moment George III entered St. Paul’s Church in London to offer thanks for the return of his sanity. During his recent period of mental confusion the king had muttered over and over again, “I shall never lay on my last pillow in peace and quiet as long as I remember my American colonies.”

  Because Washington found the Cherry Street house too small for his needs and too far out of town, he moved. For the second executive mansion he chose the finest private building in town, the four-story McComb House at 39 Broadway. On the sidewalk just outside this brick dwelling a fateful decision was made.

  Congress was deadlocked on two issues: Should the federal government pay state debts incurred during the war, and where should the nation’s permanent capital be located? As sectional rivalries thickened, these questions became intertwined. Northern states, with the largest debts, favored the assumption of state debts by the federal government. Southern states, most of them solvent, opposed the plan. Northern states wanted the capital in the North. Southern states wanted it in the South.

  Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, leader of the Federalists, advocated a strong central government. He felt that assumption of state debts would establish the nation’s credit and force creditors to look to the federal government for payment, thus winning their support of the new nation at the expense of the states. If the federal government took over all debts, then it must get all revenues. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, leader of the Democratic-Republicans, felt that federal authority was already too great. As a Southerner, he wanted the nation’s capital located farther south—say, on the banks of the Potomac River.

  One day when Jefferson was about to enter Washington’s house, he was stopped by Hamilton. Jefferson was so tall that he was known as Long Tom. Hamilton was so short that he was called the Little Lion. The oddly matched pair locked arms and walked back and forth for half an hour, discussing the issues. Hamilton, the New Yorker, warned Jefferson, the Virginian, that the nation might fall unless a compromise was reached. Jefferson agreed. They worked out a deal: Hamilton agreed to lobby for a Southern capital if Jefferson solicited Southern votes for assumption of state debts. The fate of the national capital was decided on a sidewalk of New York.

  Philadelphia was chosen as a temporary capital until a new federal city could be built on the Potomac. On April 12, 1790, Congress met for the last time in New York, and on April 30 George Washington left the city, never to return.

  Having consolidated all war debts, Congress now issued $80,000,000 in government stocks. There was a scattered market for these securities, as well as for the shares of banks and insurance firms then being created. But trading was unorganized, being carried on in various coffeehouses, auction rooms, and offices. People were reluctant to invest unless they knew that they could sell their holdings whenever they chose. A group of merchants and auctioneers decided to do something about the situation. On May 17, 1792, twenty-four of them met under a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street and drew up an agreement that laid the foundation for the New York Stock Exchange. Antwerp had got its exchange in 1460; Paris, in 1726; and London, in 1773.

  No longer the federal seat, New York still offered much to interest its citizens. Workmen leveled the ruins of the Battery fort erected in 1626. A second Trinity Church arose on the site of the first fire-stricken building. Governors Island was transformed from a brambled wilderness into a picnic resort. The city’s first country club, the Belvedere, went up on a block now bounded by Montgomery, Clinton, Cherry, and Monroe streets.

  Less than a month after Washington’s inauguration, the New York branch of the St. Tammany Society had been reorganized as the Tammany Society or the Columbian Order. Named for a legendary Indian chief, called Tammany, and ostensibly created for fraternal purposes, it was in truth a counterbalance to the Society of the Cincinnati, founded six years earlier. The Cincinnati consisted of officers of the Continental army; membership was handed down to eldest male descendants. Tammany hoped to oppose this hereditary aristocratic society. At first Tammany took no prominent part in politics, but over the years it developed into the most powerful and ruthless political group in the nation.

  Under Tammany auspices the city’s first Columbus Day celebration was held on October 12, 1792. A gubernatorial campaign almost resulted in civil war in the city. Yellow fever struck repeatedly, hypnotism proved ineffectual against it, and some of the thousands of victims were buried in symbolic yellow sheets. A tornado slammed into town like a wet bullwhip. The fi
rst mental patient was admitted into New York Hospital. Bellevue Hospital for contagious diseases, later becoming perhaps the best-known hospital in the nation, was established on the East River three miles north of Wall Street. Enlightened people denounced slavery. Business boomed, and Broadway lots brought ever higher prices. In 1793 houses were numbered systematically for the first time.

  In 1794, as thirty-one-year-old Jacob Astor slogged through upper New York and Canada buying furs, Cornelius Vanderbilt was born on Staten Island. His great-great-great-grandfather, a poor farmer named Jan Aertson, had left the village of Bilt, in Holland, to emigrate to the New World in 1640. The big bawling baby born on May 27, 1794, near the Kill Van Kull, on Staten Island, was christened Cornelius Van Derbilt. In time the last name evolved into Vanderbilt, and after Cornelius had become a shipping magnate, everyone called him Commodore. Only two years after his birth an event that partially shaped his life occurred here.

  A Connecticult Yankee, named John Fitch, had built the first steamboat ever to carry a human being. On August 27, 1787, this craft plied up and down the Delaware River at three or four miles an hour, propelled by twelve big wooden paddles. The next year Fitch got a patent for the application of steam to navigation. By 1796 he was ready to try out his fifth boat in New York.

  For his experiment Fitch chose the sixty-foot-deep Collect, or Fresh Water Pond. One summer day spectators gathered under the hickory and chestnut trees fringing the sheer cliffs of the Pond and watched as the tall, lanky Fitch made ready. Stepping into his eighteen-foot yawl, he jackknifed his long legs under him and tended his iron pot of a boiler, while a lad stood in the stern and steered with an oar. The parasol-twirling ladies and cane-swinging men were witnessing a historic event, for this marked the first time a steamboat was propelled by a screw propellor.

  Although Fitch’s experiment was a success, he could get no backers to finance him. His pioneering boat was abandoned on the shore of the Collect, where it decayed and was carried away, piece by piece, by poor children in need of fuel. Discouraged by lack of recognition, Fitch killed himself two years later.

  People sought more lasting entertainment, but the John Street Theatre, the only one in town, had become old and shabby and altogether too small for the city’s expanding population. On May 5, 1795, the cornerstone was laid for the Park Theatre, America’s first outstanding playhouse. Located on Park Row north of Ann Street and east of City Hall Park, it was as elegant and beautiful as any London theater of the day, cost $130,000, and seated 1,200 spectators. Managers Lewis Hallam and John Hodgkinson opened it on January 29, 1798, with their production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It During the premiere, as was the custom, gentlemen sat with their hats on. In 1808 Stephen Price bought the majority interest in the management and inaugurated the policy of importing foreign players. His emphasis on using one celebrated actor in every play resulted in the birth of the star system and in the decline of stock companies.

  The Park Theatre was designed by Joseph and Charles Mangin, refugee brothers from France’s Reign of Terror. Another Frenchman then living in New York was Louis Philippe. Proficient in geography and mathematics, this genial and simple man taught school here to support himself while in exile. His lodgings were modest and small. Whenever he entertained, at least half his guests had to perch on his bed because there weren’t enough chairs to go around. After returning to his homeland, Louis Philippe served as the Citizen King of France from 1830 to 1848.

  New York’s lack of good drinking water and the belief that brackish water spread yellow fever gave sly Aaron Burr a chance he sought. A lawyer, who shared with Alexander Hamilton the cream of the local law practice, Burr was politically ambitious. He wanted to found a bank as a stepping-stone to political power. However, the two city banks already in existence were controlled by Federalists, who tried to stop the state legislature from granting other bank charters.

  In August, 1799, late in the legislature’s session, Burr introduced a bill to create the Manhattan Company to supply the city with pure water. On the face of it, this was a worthy civic measure, so few lawmakers bothered to read the full text. Had they done so, they would have found a provision that “the surplus capital of the company may be employed in any way not inconsistent with the laws and Constitution of the United States or the State of New York.” Actually, the bill created a bank, not a water supply company.

  To maintain his charter, Burr had to go through the motions of improving the city’s water. He sank a well near Broadway just north of the present Spring Street and laid a few miles of wooden pipes under the main streets. About the only use ever made of this well was to hide the body of a beautiful girl who had been murdered.

  Gulielma Elmore Sands was a pert twenty-two-year-old, who lived in a rooming house on Greenwich Street not far from the Hudson River. On December 22, 1799, eight days after the death of George Washington, her disappearance set the stage for the city’s first noted murder mystery. A few days later her remains were found in Burr’s well.

  Suspicion fell on her fiancé, a gay blade, named Levi Weeks. His rich uncle retained an able battery of lawyers, including Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. The jurors pondered just four minutes and then declared Weeks not guilty. With this, the dead girl’s landlady turned to Hamilton and cried, with venom unbecoming a Quaker, “If thee dies a natural death, then there is no justice in heaven!” Four years later Burr killed Hamilton in a duel.

  Chapter 15

  THE HAMILTON-BURR DUEL

  AT THE OPENING of the nineteenth century Chicago didn’t even exist. Boston, once America’s largest city, had slipped to third place. New York was creeping up on Philadelphia, now the nation’s most populous city. Nearly half a million settlers had pushed to the far side of the Allegheny Mountains, and Philadelphia remained the gateway to the West. A German visitor commented, “If Philadelphia should become extinct, everybody in New York would rejoice, and vice versa. New York is the vilest of cities, write the Philadelphia journalists. In New York they speak no better of Philadelphia.”

  New York was part rustic, part urban. Blackberries grew on Bleecker Street, and a glass chandelier dangled from the vaulted dome of the Park Theatre. At the foot of Greenwich Street fishermen hauled nets onto the beach, while gentlemen and ladies promenaded on fashionable Wall Street. The town had grown north of the Battery a distance of only about one mile, with gardens and vacant lots interspersed among the dwellings.

  There remained the inefficient charm of the narrow and crooked streets which followed early footpaths, but Broadway was straight and lined with poplars. An English traveler, noting Broadway’s maximum width of seventy feet, compared it favorably with Oxford Street in London. Between Murray and Canal streets the Broadway hills were graded, and the roadbed was lowered twenty-three feet at one site. In the main, Broadway rose gently northward, and pedestrians strolling south could still see the Upper Bay and even down to the Narrows. In the north, Broadway ended at what today is Astor Place, where it ran into a fence marking the southern boundary of a farm, owned by Captain Robert R. Randall, the rich son of a privateer.

  The Bowery remained a dusty country road lined with quaint Dutch cottages, and boys stole peaches from the orchard left by Peter Stuyvesant Another Kissing Bridge spanned a small creek at the present intersection of Fiftieth Street and Second Avenue. The Boston Post Road turned eastward below Madison Square and bent its crooked way to Harlem. It cost four cents to cross from Brooklyn to Manhattan on horse ferries, small craft moved by paddle wheels, which were turned by four horses trudging around a shaft on the boats. Inns were crowded, and as many as eight guests slept in a single room.

  Everyone’s ears were assaulted by a cacophony of cries from chimney sweeps, milkmen, bellmen, and bakers. Old Negro mammies peddled mint, strawberries, radishes, and steaming hot yams. Hot-corn Girls wandered barefoot and shawl-wrapped through the streets, with cedar baskets in the crooks of their arms, crying in singsong voices, “Hot corn! Hot corn! Here’s your l
ily-white corn! All you that’s got money—poor me that’s got none! Come buy my lily-white corn and let me go home!”

  On solemn and dreary Sundays heavy chains were strung across streets near churches to keep away noisy traffic. At dinner tables people were beginning to use forks with four tines, instead of the two-prong and three-prong kinds. Men who sympathized with the radicals of Paris struggled into the queer trousers that had become the badge of the democrat, pantaloons so long that they reached armpits. Fashions became ever more extravagant. Dandies brushed their hair from the back toward the front, looking as though they had walked backward into a hurricane.

  New York State had developed into a grazing and dairy area, and cowboys rounded up cattle not far from the city. The Hessian fly, unwittingly brought in by mercenaries during the Revolution, blighted wheatfields and lowered the quality of New York’s once-famous grain. Another unwanted import, the house rat, was multiplying annoyingly. A good dwelling rented for $350 a year. In the next 19 years John Jacob Astor was to invest an average of $35,000 a year in Manhattan real estate. Lotteries flourished, and business was good. Seamen groused because they were paid only $10 a month. Their anger might have sharpened had they known that the beautiful and talented actress Mrs. Robert Merry earned more than $100 a week performing at the Park Theatre.

  One theater devotee, who stared at the statue of Shakespeare in the lobby, was Washington Irving, a seventeen-year-old with an oval face, chestnut hair, and blue-gray eyes. Born at 131 William Street, named for George Washington, and coiner of the phrase “the almighty dollar,” Irving became the first American author of international renown. He hadn’t yet heard of a six-year-old named Cornelius Van Derbilt, who was making poor marks in a school on Staten Island. Jacob Astor, now thirty-seven years old and worth $250,000, strode arrogantly into the Tontine Coffee House, where lesser men hastened to invite him to share a chunk of raw codfish and a glass of spirits. And an impressionable nine-year-old named Peter Cooper—later an inventor, manufacturer, philanthropist, and perhaps the best-loved man in New York—witnessed something in City Hall Park that he never forgot. Cooper later wrote: