The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  On December 4, 1833, the American Antislavery Society was organized in Philadelphia, elected Arthur Tappan its first president, and voted to set up permanent headquarters in New York. Tappan promptly founded its official organ, the Emancipator, and chose for its editor a Congregational minister from Massachusetts, Joshua Leavitt. Every month Leavitt sent copies of the Emancipator to members of Congress, and every month twenty to thirty copies were returned with insults scribbled in the margins. One Southern lawmaker wrote: “You damned infernal psalm-singing, negro-stealing son-of-a-bitch, if you ever show your damned hypocritical face in the dist. of Columbia, I will make my negroes cowhide you to death!”

  The governor of Alabama complained to the governor of New York about the Emancipator. Tappan was marked for assassination. Vigilante groups were formed throughout the South. The New Orleans Vigilante Committee offered $20,000 for the capture of New York’s Arthur Tappan. At Charleston, South Carolina, Tappan was hanged in effigy. A storekeeper in Norfolk, Virginia, took up a subscription for the delivery of Tappan’s dripping head to him.

  Even in New York abolitionists were attacked, and their homes were stoned. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist writer, said after one New York antislavery meeting, “I have not ventured into the city nor does one of us dare to go to church today . . . so great is the excitement here. ’Tis like the times of the French Revolution when no one dared trust his neighbors.”

  On the evening of July 9, 1834, some Negroes met in the Chatham Street Chapel to hear a sermon by a Negro minister. In the audience sat the white abolitionist Lewis Tappan, a jaunty figure despite his Puritanical heritage. The meeting had just begun when members of the New York Sacred Music Society broke in to proclaim that they had rented the place for the evening. The Negroes, who had paid for use of the chapel, refused to leave. There was an exchange of words, then blows.

  White men beat Negroes with lead-loaded canes, seriously injuring two or three of them. The fight attracted a crowd, and a riot was in the making when the police arrived and drove both whites and blacks from the chapel. The fracas continued on the street. Tappan walked away toward his home on Rose Street, just behind the present Municipal Building. Recognized as a damned abolitionist, he was followed by a yelling mob that pelted his residence with stones after he had run inside.

  The next evening another proslavery crowd, still spoiling for a fight, gathered in front of the chapel. Its doors were locked, but the agitators broke in and held an impromptu meeting. A rabble-rouser, named W. W. Wilder, lashed passions with a speech denouncing abolitionists, and as the meeting closed, there came cries of “To the Bowery Theatre!”

  Opened in 1826, the Bowery Theatre was the nation’s first gas-lighted playhouse and it seated 3,000 persons. It stood at the present 50 Bowery on the southeastern corner of the approach to the present Manhattan Bridge. Burned down and rebuilt many times, it remained one of America’s foremost theaters for nearly a century. That night of July 10, 1834, a benefit performance was being given for an English actor, George Percy Farren, whose cross-grained comments about Americans had irked New Yorkers.

  The crowd at the chapel somehow got the idea that the Englishman’s alleged anti-Americanism meant that he was an abolitionist. Leaving the chapel, rowdies headed for the theater, picking up reinforcements along the way, their menacing roars being heard in the showplace before their arrival. The theater doors were slammed shut, but when the mob got there, it burst through them, interrupting a performance by the American tragedian Edwin Forrest. From the stage he tried to pacify the intruders but was howled down. Before the Englishman could be found and maimed, the police appeared and herded everyone out of the theater.

  Now agitators howled, “To Arthur Tappan’s house!” Taking up the cry, the mob raced back down the Bowery, changed its collective mind, and turned instead toward the home of Lewis Tappan. He and his family escaped just before the throng surged into sight. The rioters took Tappan’s place apart, stick by stick, saving only a painting of George Washington. Then they rampaged through town, torturing Negroes, raping prostitutes, and gouging out an Englishman’s eyes and tearing off his ears.

  This human violence followed on the heels of a natural catastrophe, for just two years earlier the city had been plagued by Asiatic cholera. For centuries the deadly disease had ravaged the Far East, but it did not spread to the Western Hemisphere until the nineteenth century. In 1831 cholera reached England, leaping from there to Ireland. The early part of June, 1832, an Irish immigrant ship brought the infection to Quebec, and on June 27 the first cases appeared in New York City.

  A Mrs. Fitzgerald and her two children were found dead in their apartment at 75 Cherry Street. The police took one look and called a doctor. The deceased bore the unmistakable marks of Asiatic cholera: bodies shrunken from loss of fluid, skin dry and wrinkled, tongues white and dry, eyeballs shrunken, faces pinched, and cheeks hollow.

  When the city fathers understood the situation, they ordered the streets cleaned as never before. This did no good. A coroner’s jury sat in the case of a cholera victim found dead on a Harlem road, and of the twenty witnesses and jurors who appeared, nine soon died of cholera themselves. Terrified townspeople clustered in churches to pray for deliverance. Board of health figures were appalling: On Saturday, July 14, there were 115 new cases and 66 deaths; Sunday, 133 new cases, 74 deaths; and Monday, 163 new cases, 94 deaths. Doctors treated patients with dry friction, dry heat, opium, and brandy—without much effect. Every picture of a cholera patient of the period shows a brandy glass at his head.

  Aside from going to church, most people stayed home. One lawyer took up the study of Greek to while away the clientless hours. Then panic set in. First to flee were the rich, who departed in such haste that they left their fine houses in shambles. They headed toward New Jersey, Westchester County, Far Rockaway, the eastern tip of Long Island, and Connecticut. Cornelius Vanderbilt now ran a fleet of steamships on Long Island Sound, and he and other steamboatmen profited from the panic. They sent overcrowded vessels to Connecticut ports, where alarmed citizens brandished pitchforks and guns and refused to let the ships dock. Driven from the harbors, the craft nosed along the Connecticut coast until they found deserted beaches where New Yorkers could land.

  The next few weeks even the city’s poor ran for their lives, fathers carrying tots in their arms, women clutching bags of food, and boys leading horse-drawn carts piled with pitiful belongings. Roads became traffic nightmares of plunging horses and cursing men and frightened refugees. That horror-haunted summer of 1832 nearly half the population of a quarter million left the city. But the poorest of the poor, the Irish of the Five Points, lacked the means to get out of town. The Five Points lay in the city’s Sixth Ward, an area northeast of City Hall, and one-third of all cholera cases occurred in this ward. Business was paralyzed. Streets were empty. A butcher riding a cart from Houston Street down Broadway to Fulton Street in broad daylight saw no one en route except two watchmen.

  In proportion to population, this was the worst epidemic in the city’s history. Nearly 4,000 persons died of cholera between June 27 and October 19, 1832.

  Plague was followed by fire. About 9 P.M. on December 16, 1835, a watchman was passing the corner of Merchant (now Beaver) Street and Pearl Street when he smelled smoke. In those days Beaver Street was narrow and crooked and filled with tall stores recently put up by dry goods merchants and hardware dealers. The watchman sounded the alarm for the city’s worst fire in that era of disasters.

  Fifty-five-year-old Philip Hone, the retired auctioneer and diarist, was writing in the library of his $25,000 house at 235 Broadway. Just a few blocks away at that very moment the city’s other great diarist, fifteen-year-old George Templeton Strong, lolled in his bedroom of his father’s three-story brick house at 108 Greenwich Street near Rector Street. A slender, fair-haired, precocious lad, G. T. Strong was a sophomore at Columbia College. Both he and Hone noted in their diaries that they first heard the fire alarm at a
bout 9 P.M. Strong said that the temperature stood exactly at zero.

  A northwester of nearly gale force scudded over icy streets and lashed snow into frozen surf. The moment Hone heard the news, he bundled up and struggled through the storm to see what was going on. Strong’s father had a law office on Wall Street, but at first the elder Strong didn’t think it necessary to plunge into the howling wind to look after his place. Soon, though, a man rushed into the Strong household and awakened the attorney, and the two then dashed into the night.

  The fire started on the first floor of a five-story warehouse at 25 Merchant Street, at the corner of Pearl Street. This ground floor was rented by Comstock & Andrews, fancy dry goods jobbers. Apparently the blaze was caused by an overheated pipe. The watchman who discovered the fire was joined by fellow patrolmen, and they forced open the front door. The interior, filled with bolts of cloth and clothing, was such an inferno that the men backed away and tried to latch the door in place. At that moment flames licked through the roof. Wind-borne embers dashed against stores on the other side of Pearl Street, and within fifteen minutes the dumbfounded watchmen counted fifty other buildings ablaze.

  Cholera had decimated the strength of the city’s volunteer firemen. What’s more, the previous night the fire fighters had battled a big conflagration at Burling Slip on the East River, and when the new alarm sounded, they were so exhausted that they responded slowly. Half an hour passed before they put the first water on the flames. Everything was pitted against them. Shorthanded and already worn out, they manned antiquated equipment. The city’s water supply was scanty. Cisterns, wells, and most fire hydrants were frozen. Firemen had to beat their hoses to keep water from congealing in them. This worked for a while, but no sooner would water spray from a nozzle than it turned to ice in the air and fell as hail. Unremitting pressure of the ferocious wind lowered the water level of the East River just enough so that firemen on the docks above couldn’t reach it with suction hoses. So the frustrated, exhausted, shivering firemen could do little more than watch as a large section of town went up in flames.

  That bitter night the air was so clear that the fire’s reflection was seen as far away as Philadelphia to the southwest and New Haven to the northeast. The blaze raged 16 hours before it was brought under control, and 3 days passed before the last spark was extinguished. When all was over and citizens took stock of the disaster, they found that 17 blocks of lower Manhattan, consisting of 52 acres, had been gutted. Exactly 693 buildings—about 500 of them stores—were destroyed. Only 1 structure was left standing in the afflicted area. Not a single life was lost, but property damage came to more than $20,000,000.

  The city’s fire insurance firms, unable to pay policies in full, were ruined. Many banks closed. As a result, businessmen were unable to get money to rebuild their shops and factories. Thus, the great fire of 1835 was one of the causes of the panic of 1837.

  Since the year 1762 the nation had experienced ten major depressions; two were especially severe. The panic of 1784-88 lasted forty-four months, while the panic of 1815-21 stretched out for seventy-one months. The depression beginning in 1837 was fated to endure for seventy-two months. In fact, it remained the worst panic in the nation’s history until the Great Depression, which started in 1929.

  The fire, however, was only one of many factors triggering the panic of 1837. States had piled up huge debts to build canals and railroads. People had speculated recklessly in buying land in the West—and even on Long Island. To check the speculation, President Andrew Jackson ordered all payments for public land to be made in gold or silver; this cramped banking operations. Banks overextended themselves. Interest rates were too high. Imports exceeded exports. Bad weather ruined crops. British bankers called in their loans. Stock prices fell. Real estate collapsed.

  “This is the most gloomy period which New York has ever known,” Hone scribbled in his diary. “The number of failures is so great daily that I do not keep a record of them, even in my mind. . . . All is still as death; no business is transacted.” Depositors began a run on the city’s banks, which held more than $5,500,000 of their securities. Hone “witnessed the madness of the people—women nearly pressed to death, and the stoutest men could hardly sustain themselves; but they held on as with a death’s grasp upon the evidence of their claims, and, exhausted as they were with the pressure, they had strength enough to cry, ‘Pay! Pay!’ ” The banks hired plug-uglies and ordered them to fire on the crowds if the situation got out of hand.

  All coins vanished. Firms paid their workers in shinplasters. A real shinplaster was a paper plaster saturated with tar and vinegar and applied to a sore shin. During the American Revolution the word took on the meaning of fractional currency. Now the paper currency called shinplasters assumed every form and denomination, from the alleged value of five cents to five dollars. Badly printed, it was easy to counterfeit; in fact, counterfeiting became a flourishing business. Although workers didn’t know if shinplasters had any value, they were compelled to accept them or starve.

  Wages were cut. Jobs grew scarce. With the cessation of all shipbuilding for two years, shipyard employees were left idle. Building construction came to a halt, throwing 6,000 more laborers out of work. Soon every third workingman was unemployed. Job-seeking Negroes vied with the Irish, native Americans competed with the foreign-born, skilled craftsmen wrangled with the unskilled—and the puny labor movement collapsed. About 10,000 citizens lived in absolute poverty. The almshouse commissioners said that seven-tenths of all relief applicants were Irish women whose husbands were out of town. But—added the native-born anti-foreigner officials—the husbands were “very particular to be here to vote at the spring election.”

  This “year of national ruin,” Horace Greeley was publishing a weekly, called the New Yorker, from an office at 18 Ann Street. Troubled by the misery he saw at every hand, Greeley wrote: “Mechanics, artisans, laborers, you cannot with safety give heed to those who prophesy smooth things. . . . We say to the unemployed, you who are able to leave the cities should do so without delay. . . . Fly—scatter through the land—go to the Great West.” In issue after issue he repeated this advice until he became known as “Go West” Greeley.

  He also claimed that local rents were higher in New York than in any other great city of the world. Agreeing, the City health inspector, Gerret Forbes, said, “We have serious cause to regret that there are in our city so many mercenary landlords who only contrive in what space they can to stow the greatest number of human beings in the smallest space.” John Jacob Astor, the so-called landlord of New York, didn’t suffer lack of space himself; his thirteen-acre Hell Gate estate on the East River gave him plenty of elbowroom.

  Seventy-four years old when the panic began, his once ruddy skin sagging in gray pouches, Astor no longer needed his China trade or fur profits to earn money to buy ever more Manhattan real estate. Income from rent alone more than covered the price of his new land. While hungry men scrabbled for jobs that paid off in dubious shinplasters, Astor lent a friend $250,000. The old man also bought mortgages from people who couldn’t keep up payments on their property and then promptly foreclosed, thus accumulating more land at ridiculously low prices. He made millions out of the panic.

  Washington Irving, now back from Europe, was glad to take money from Astor to write an authorized history of Astoria, the old fellow’s ill-fated trading post on the Pacific Coast. Despite the fame Irving enjoyed, he wrote: “My own means. . . are hampered and locked up so as to produce me no income.” It was during the panic of 1837 that Irving coined his famous phrase, writing of “the almighty dollar. that great object of universal devotion throughout our land.”

  Cornelius Vanderbilt now owned the greatest fleet of steamers on Long Island Sound, and in 1837 the press began calling him Commodore. Arthur and Lewis Tappan failed in business. Philip Hone lost two-thirds of his fortune, but in the depth of the depression he wrote: “We had a handsome supper, with oceans of champagne.” Meantime, a pale, sh
arp-faced painter, named Samuel F. B. Morse, who hadn’t yet won fame with his telegraph, went twenty-four hours without food.

  Speculation in flour boosted the price from $6 to $15 a barrel, and it was rumored that a few big flour and grain merchants were buying all the flour in town. On February 10, 1837, newspapers and placards announced that a protest meeting would be held in City Hall Park, at 4 P.M. on February 13, to denounce the high price of bread, meat, fuel, and rent.

  Although it turned out to be a cold bleak afternoon, there gathered 6,000 persons, most of them Irish immigrants and nearly all of them in faded working clothes. Speaker after speaker reviled the rich, especially landlords and those who hoarded flour. One agitator cried, “Fellow citizens, Eli Hart and Company now have fifty-three thousand barrels of flour in their store! Let’s go and offer them eight dollars a barrel for it, and if they do not accept—” A man who stood near the speaker, noticing the presence of Mayor Cornelius W. Lawrence, Eli Hart, and a knot of policemen, whispered into his ear. The orator then ended, in a softer voice, “If they will not accept it—we will depart in peace.”

  But the crowd understood the speaker’s meaning. With a roar, people rushed down Broadway. Hart’s big brick building stood on Washington Street between Dey and Cortlandt streets. The worried merchant gathered some cops and trotted toward his place; but at Dey Street they were surrounded, and clubs were snatched out of the hands of policemen. Hart’s clerks tried to bar the store’s three iron doors and its windows, only to be assaulted before the place was secured.

  Surging inside and swarming upstairs, the rioters rolled flour barrels to the windows and pushed them out. Dashed onto the icy pavement, the casks burst open, spilling flour everywhere. Then the mob ripped open burlap bags holding wheat and spilled their contents on the street; a fog of powder thickened the air. The mayor got to the scene, mounted a flight of steps opposite the store, and tried to reason with the vandals. Nobody listened. Angry people pelted him with bricks and stones and hunks of ice until he retreated. The rioters tore one of the store’s iron doors from its hinges and used this as a battering ram to beat open the other two doors. Three streams of maniacal people poured into the place to hasten the plunder.