The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  The state supreme court upheld the law creating the state police force; in early autumn the court of appeals confirmed the finding; a few weeks later Mayor Wood disbanded his city police force. This threw 1,100 men out of work and contributed to the depression of 1857. The Mets hurt in the brawl at City Hall sued the mayor and received judgments of $250 each. However, Wood never paid, and the city finally settled the claims.

  Germany’s revolution of 1848-49 precipitated a wave of emigration that rose higher every year. Between 1852 and 1854 more than half a million Germans came to America, and although many moved West, enough remained in New York to constitute the city’s largest foreign-born group next to the Irish. Most Germans were better educated and more highly skilled than Irishmen; many had a background of labor organization and played an important role in the city’s trade union movement. The city’s first German language newspaper, the Staats-Zeitung, established in 1834 as a weekly, became a daily in 1850. Germans helped organize the Communist Club of New York in 1857. This was six years after Karl Marx had begun writing weekly letters for the New York Tribune about European politics, economics, and war. Although some German laborers donated money to build a Catholic church on Third Street, many of their fellow immigrants were anti-Catholic. This angered fanatical nativists, who denounced the Germans as atheists, anarchists, and Reds.

  Along the Bowery, between Houston Street on the south and Twelfth Street on the north, the Germans created their own Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany. Here they established a Volkstheater, a lending library, singing societies, gymnastic clubs, and beer gardens. Caring little for hard liquor and unable to afford wine, they quaffed vast quantities of beer, there being 1 beer garden for every 200 Germans. They strode the streets of Little Germany clad in leather shorts, called lederhosen, kept to themselves, and were conspicuously different from the Irish because they spoke a foreign tongue.

  Hatred of all foreigners rose as tens of thousands of Europeans landed on America’s shores. Supersecret societies multiplied under such names as the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner and the Wide-Awakes. New York City teemed with sixty of these dark-lantern lynch-minded groups. Horace Greeley lumped all together under the term “Know-Nothings,” because whenever a man was asked if he belonged to such a society, he would say that he knew nothing about it. There were secret grips and secret signs, and meetings were called by cutting colored paper into distinctive shapes and scattering them on sidewalks. This mumbo jumbo attracted members hoping to escape their drab lives by identifying themselves with something that must be very powerful because it was mysterious. For the frustrated and ignorant, the confused and bitter, the Know-Nothings also acted as a bridge between the decline of the Whig party and the rise of the Republicans.

  Abraham Lincoln said, “When the Know-Nothings get control the Declaration of Independence will read, ‘all men are created equal except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ ” By 1853 New York had the world’s largest anti-Catholic library. Irish domination of politics evoked the saying “Erin e Pluribus, Unum go Bragh.” There was a revival of Paddy-making—the creation and humiliation of scarecrow figures supposed to resemble Irishmen. Itinerant anti-Catholic preachers roamed streets and parks, protected by Protestant bullies, shrilling a gospel of hatred for all foreigners. An agitator, named John S. Orr, wore a white gown, blew a horn, and called himself the Angel Gabriel. Linking Popery and slavery as “twin sisters,” he cursed the Irish and cried that even though the Negro had a black skin, the Irishman was black inside. Archbishop Hughes appealed to Catholics to stay away from such street meetings, but hot-tempered sons of Erin clenched their fists and sailed into their tormentors.

  One Know-Nothing leader was Bill Poole, a butcher, bartender, and street brawler, who specialized in gouging out eyes. He met his match in cocky little Patrick “Paudeen” McLaughlin, and when their free-for-all was over, Bill Poole died. With his last breath he gasped, “I die an American!” Because of this precious remark, as George Potter has said, “nativists translated this gutter gladiator into a hero-martyr.” In 1858 the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor lamented, “Our city, operating like a sieve, lets through the enterprising and industrious, while it retains the indolent, the aged, and infirm, who can earn this subsistence nowhere.”

  Among the infirm were patients in the state quarantine hospital at Tompkinsville, in the northeastern corner of Staten Island. Neighbors feared infection and felt that the pesthouse kept down property values. For ten years they petitioned the legislature to remove the building, but nothing was done. When yellow fever reappeared in 1858, the Castleton board of health said, “The board recommends the citizens of the county to protect themselves by abating the abominable nuisance without delay.” Copies of this inflammatory suggestion were posted throughout the island. Now people took matters into their own hands. They struck on the night of September 1, while the Metropolitan Police commissioners and other civic leaders were gathered in Manhattan to celebrate the completion of the first Atlantic cable.

  The Staten Island plot was hatched by 30 men of wealth and social prominence. That warm evening they met for a final briefing under a tree on Fort Hill, a stronghold erected by Hessians during the Revolution. Some of the conspirators wore masks. Each was given a handful of straw, a bottle of camphene, and a box of matches. Then they began marching, shadows amid shadows, toward the quarantine station. Other men fell into line until a mob, 1,000 strong, descended on the dreaded sanctuary.

  Surrounding its many buildings was a brick wall too high for easy scaling, so the attackers used wooden beams as battering rams, pounding at the wall until they had smashed holes big enough to admit them all. Quarantine officials had armed stevedores with muskets, but the rioters grabbed the weapons from their hands. Now, whooping and screaming and fanning out across the grounds, the invaders set fire to a dozen structures. Smallpox patients were saved from fiery death only by heroic nurses. The main hospital building somehow survived the attack.

  The next night the mob returned and succeeded in putting the torch to the main building. Its flames illuminated much of the island and the Upper Bay. Delirious patients, some near death, were carried out and laid on the grass, where they remained the rest of that night and most of the following day. A regiment of militia and a boatload of marines arrived after the riot was over.

  G. T. Strong wrote in his diary:

  This is the worst villainy that has been perpetrated in my day. . . . This riot, robbery and arson, and murder, this outrageous assault on men and women struggling against smallpox and yellow fever, was in fact a mere operation in real estate, a movement which Staten Islanders consider justifiable for the sake of ten per cent increase in the market value of building sites and village lots.

  Damages to state property came to $133,822. Arrests were made, the matter was aired in courts, but no one was convicted. The state closed the ruined quarantine station and converted a ship into a floating hospital for contagious diseases. Staten Island then became a popular summer resort.

  One month after the quarantine riot City Hall was sold.

  A Wall Street broker, Robert W. Lowber, had added to his riches by selling land to the city at exorbitant prices, sharing his graft with Mayor Wood and the city council. These officials agreed that the city would pay Lowber $196,000 for a certain parcel of land worth $60,000. But before Lowber got his money, Fernando Wood lost his bid for reelection, and a paint manufacturer, named Daniel F. Tiemann, became mayor. The new Republican mayor was politically inept, but as honest as Wood was larcenous.

  Tiemann’s reform administration refused to pay Lowber the sum promised him by Wood. The Wall Street broker sued and won. He demanded his $196,000 with interest, damages, and legal fees, bringing the total to $228,000. The city comptroller said that the city couldn’t pay this amount because it had no funds “applicable” for such a transaction. Lowber turned the matter over to the sheriff, who was compelled to obey the court’s decision. It no
w became his duty to seize city property that could be sold at auction to realize the amount of the judgment. One day in October, 1858, the sheriff announced that he was going to auction off City Hall and all its contents—including the mayor’s chair.

  Through the city raced a rumor that Fernando Wood would appear at the sale, buy City Hall, and then make the grand gesture of allowing city officials to use the building. Bullets of sweat creased the worried face of Mayor Tiemann. What a disgrace to let that scoundrel Wood pull such a coup! Tiemann was rich, but Wood was richer. As it turned out, Wood did not show up the day they sold City Hall. Mayor Tiemann bid on it through a clerk, relaxing only after the place was knocked down to him for the nominal sum of $50,000. Thus, for a short time City Hall was owned by one man. The city later bought it back from Tiemann at the price he had paid for it. The Wall Street broker was reimbursed, and there the matter ended.

  Chapter 23

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN ARRIVES

  FERNANDO WOOD was elected mayor for the third time in 1859. Openly hostile toward Negroes, he denounced them as inferior creatures and declared that “the profits, luxuries, the necessities—nay, even the physical existence depend upon the products only to be obtained by continuance of slave labor and the prosperity of the slave master!”

  The issue of slavery in all its ramifications—moral, religious, economic, political, and sociological—towered above other issues, such as fear of foreigners, anti-Catholicism, women’s rights, and temperance. Since 1808 the importation of slaves into the United States from Africa or the West Indies had been prohibited by federal law. At first Congress did little to enforce the law. After 1820, however, when slave running was made a capital crime, an agency was set up to suppress this trade. Even so, not a single person was executed under the act until the outbreak of the Civil War. With an increase in the price of slaves in the 1850’s, New York experienced a boom in slave trading. Horace Greeley called the city “the nest of slave pirates.”

  Between 1852 and 1862 a total of 26 schooners and brigs belonging to the port of New York were charged by the federal government with engaging in the slave trade. Men who smuggled in slaves were called blackbirders, while the Negroes themselves were referred to as black ivory. The favorite New York rendezvous of the blackbirders was Sweet’s Restaurant, at Fulton and South streets, where many a nefarious deal was plotted. One successful slave-trading ship was a beautiful 95-foot yacht, the Wanderer, which sailed under colors of the New York Yacht Club. Her skipper and part owner was W. C. Corrie, who fronted for a syndicate of Southerners but was elected to the local club because of the quality of his craft. The Wanderer picked up more than 400 Congo Negroes and landed them on one of the Sea Islands of Georgia. When this act of piracy was disclosed, Corrie was merely expelled from the New York Yacht Club.

  The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who turned to every breeze, said, “My earnest desire is that slavery may be destroyed by the manifest power of Christianity. If it were given me to choose whether it should be destroyed in fifty years by selfish commercial influences, or, standing for seventy-five years, be then the spirit and trophy of God, I had rather let it linger twenty-five years more, that God may be honored, and not mammon, in the destruction of it.” This pious remark vexed Horace Greeley, who suggested in the Tribune that he would “wish to take the sense of those in bondage before agreeing to the twenty-five years’ postponement for the glory of Christianity.” Frederick Douglass, the former slave, growled, “With a good cowhide, I could take all of that out of Mr. Beecher in five minutes!”

  From the time the first horse-drawn streetcars began running in New York, Negroes had been barred from riding them. In 1855 a court affirmed their right to ride in all public conveyances, but transit companies paid no attention to the ruling. One Sunday a Negro minister, the Reverend James C. W. Pennington, urged his parishioners to stand up for their rights. He boarded a Sixth Avenue car and, in a display of passive resistance, refused to get off at the request of the conductor. He was forcibly ejected.

  The financial panic that wracked the city and the nation in 1857 provoked Southern resentment of Northern control of the cotton trade. Until the outbreak of the Civil War—when the South owed $200,000,000 to the North—the money manipulators of New York dominated every phase of this business, from plantation to market.

  The New York Evening Post declared that “the city of New York belongs almost as much to the South as to the North.” James D. B. De Bow, a New Orleans magazine editor, proclaimed New York “almost as dependent upon Southern slavery as Charleston itself.” When the London Times asked De Bow what he thought New York would be like without slavery, he replied, “The ships would rot at her docks; grass would grow in Wall Street and Broadway, and the glory of New York, like that of Babylon and Rome, would be numbered with the things of the past.”

  This was what Northern businessmen feared. As trade with the West declined during the panic, these hardheaded traders reassured Southerners of their continuing friendship. It disturbed them when eighteen firms and individuals in Columbus, Georgia, pledged themselves not to trade with any New York firm hostile to the South. Deeper grew the cleavage between Northerners and Southerners, and louder their voices.

  In Illinois a senatorial candidate, named Abraham Lincoln, said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” The New York Tribune sent a correspondent to cover the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and Lincoln kept a special pigeonhole in the desk of his Springfield office for letters from Horace Greeley. When members of the American Antislavery Society met again in New York in 1859, James Gordon Bennett’s Herald sneered: “They are down upon everybody and everything except their own little set of crazy demagogues and fanatics.” Henry J. Raymond’s Times explained attendance at abolitionist sessions this way: “People go to hear them just as they would go to a bull-baiting or rat-killing match, if these were respectable.”

  The afternoon of Saturday, February 25, 1860, an odd and ugly man stepped ashore from a ferry at Cortlandt Street. His furrowed face and weatherworn look and his ungainly clothes and loose-jointed gait seemed to mark him as a Westerner. Topping his six-foot four-inch height was a tall beaver hat that made him appear even taller. Wisps of black hair stuck out from the rim of this hat. His ill-fitting suit hung in wrinkles on his badly proportioned figure, with its scraggy neck, narrow chest, and long arms. In one big bony hand he carried an old-fashioned carpetbag. Set deeply within the gaunt clean-shaven face, the gray eyes of Abraham Lincoln gazed for the first time on New York.

  No one was at the dock to meet him. A New York lecture agent had invited Lincoln to the city in behalf of the young men of Henry Ward Beecher’s church. However, because of a conflict in dates, his engagement was now sponsored by the Young Men’s Republican Union of New York City. This group hoped to prevent the nomination of Senator William Henry Seward as Presidential candidate of the new Republican party. Aware that Seward was the front-runner, Lincoln was gratified to read a friendly story about himself in Greeley’s Tribune. Still alone, he checked into the Astor House, where gentlemen were requested to park their pistols in the cloakroom.

  The next morning Lincoln crossed over to Brooklyn to hear a sermon by Beecher, whom he considered “the greatest orator since St. Paul.” Sunday afternoon an Illinois Congressman took Lincoln slumming through the notorious Five Points—always a must for out-of-town visitors.

  A cold rain was falling on Monday when some young Republicans called for Lincoln at the Astor House. When he said that he wanted to buy a new hat, they drove him to Knox’s Great Hat and Cap Establishment at Broadway and Fulton Street. Because Knox made a hobby of collecting politicians’ hats, he gave Lincoln a new silk topper in exchange for his beaver hat. Back on the street, noticing that the rain was turning into a wet snow, Lincoln may have wondered if bad weather would reduce attendance at Cooper Union that evening. He stared at Broadway horsecars, their sides gay with pictures p
ainted by well-known artists, and then drew up in front of 643 Broadway, where Mathew B. Brady ran a photo studio. In the reception room Lincoln met George Bancroft, the eminent American historian. Then Brady ushered Lincoln into an inner room and posed him standing erect, his left hand resting on a book on a small table. Lincoln looked directly into the lens of the camera, his gaze soft and gentle, his lips somewhat melancholy. The photographic session over, Lincoln was driven to his hotel to dress for the evening.

  Thickening snow gummed the streets as Lincoln struggled into the new suit he had brought along for this, his first appearance before an Eastern audience. It was a black broadcloth frock coat, much too small and badly wrinkled from confinement in his carpetbag. His low collar exposed his thin neck, and the right side of the collar wouldn’t stay down. Onto his big feet he pulled new boots so tight that he limped all evening. As Lincoln later confessed, he was ashamed of his appearance.

  Despite the traffic-snarling snowstorm, 1,500 persons paid 25 cents each to hear this strange man from the West. Although Lincoln had lost the senatorial race to Stephen A. Douglas, he had written to a disheartened friend: “Quit that. You will soon feel better. Another ‘blow-up’ is coming; and we shall have fun again.” Already there was talk of Abraham Lincoln as a dark horse candidate for the Presidency.

  Gathered in Cooper Union that night, as Greeley said, was the “intellect and moral culture” of the city of New York. Ticket holders strolled into the Great Hall and sat down in revolving chairs upholstered in red leather. About 8 P.M. Lincoln was led past the thick white pillars, under the glass chandeliers with their hissing gas jets, and onto the stage, where he sat down. One man staring at the seated Lincoln felt that there was something strange about his posture, and soon he understood what it was: Although Lincoln’s long legs were crossed, both feet were flat on the floor of the platform. Then bearded William Cullen Bryant arose and introduced Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Applause sounded like rain on a tin roof.