New York at War (20 page)

No wonder, then, that angry words and deeds repeatedly disrupted the chorus of huzzas for Bompard. Politically, the summer of 1793 had been a long and hot one in New York City. By June, the “vast throng” that filled the Tontine Coffee House every evening had divided into “two parties,” and one night a brawl erupted between “Whig & Tory, or, to modernize it, Democrat & Aristocrat”—labels that linked the fracas to two revolutions. On the afternoon of the
Embuscade
’s triumphal return to the city, a Tontine crowd roughed up a British naval lieutenant, who escaped only by jumping over an iron railing to the street below. Charles William Janson, an English businessman, believed that a similarly pro-French “mob” at the Tontine “would have torn me piece-meal had I been pointed at as a stranger just arrived from England.” In mid-August, two melees broke out between roaming bands of French and English sailors.
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The passions of the French Revolution, and the global war it had sparked, were boiling over into the streets of New York. Yet even the most agitated Republicans and Federalists recognized that the United States had no navy, that its small army might subdue frontier Indians but was good for little else, and that local militia units would be no match for a European enemy sailing in through the Narrows. In their cooler moments, New Yorkers could hope that the Atlantic would be vast enough to keep the conflicts of the Old World at bay. But they would learn over the next twenty years that the agents of conflict would not stay away.

The truth was that New Yorkers could not easily disentangle their domestic concerns from international affairs. For one thing, Manhattan remained a global crossroads, attracting a dissonant array of émigrés: French refugees, some from the mother country and others fleeing a bloody slave rebellion in Saint Domingue (Haiti), who brought their own antagonistic royalist and revolutionary loyalties with them; Irish emigrants, many aflame with the French Revolution’s challenge to English domination; radical English workingmen and intellectuals, alienated from their king; loyal Britons like Janson, appalled by the French assault on the very idea of monarchy itself. These adversaries sharpened the animosities of native Republicans and Federalists, already busy hurling the epithets “monarchist” and “Jacobin” at each other.

More crucially, the city’s economy was also enmeshing its inhabitants in the European conflict. New York was riding the wave of a new commercial prosperity that depended on the ability of its merchants to exploit the global shortage in shipping caused by the Anglo-French war. As the French and British navies blockaded each other’s ports and seized each other’s ships, American shippers—New Yorkers prominent among them—stepped into the breach. New York–based brigs and schooners, their holds bulging with English manufactures, French West Indian sugar and molasses, and Hudson Valley flour, grain, and lumber, were soon conveying highly profitable cargoes across the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. This trade positioned New York to surpass Philadelphia as the nation’s busiest seaport by the mid-1790s. “Every thought, word, look, and action of the multitude seemed to be absorbed by commerce,” noted an English visitor a few years later as he walked through streets “jammed up with carts, drays, and wheel-barrows” near the East River docks.
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As the maritime war dragged on, and neither Britain nor France proved able to score a knockout blow, the belligerents began to cast hostile glances at America’s merchant fleets, the “neutral carriers” whose cargoes provided aid and comfort to the enemy. By January 1794, Governor Clinton was warning the state legislature of “the naked and exposed condition of our principal seaport” and its vulnerability to “insult and invasion.” The war-driven trade that was enriching them, New Yorkers understood, might end up imperiling their city; taking advantage of Europe’s disorder might draw them into Europe’s conflicts. If London or Paris felt sufficiently provoked, either the British or French navy might descend on New York to blockade it, attack it, or even occupy it.
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Over the next decade, the issue of whether Britain or France posed a greater threat seesawed back and forth. In 1794, as the Royal Navy seized 150 American vessels suspected of trade with the French West Indies, contingents of civilian volunteers worked to fortify the Upper Bay, restoring the trenches and redoubts built on Governors Island by American troops in 1776. In 1796, when the French Revolutionary government authorized French vessels to prey on American merchantmen, the New York state and city governments used volunteers and paid laborers to tear up the Battery promenade, “the finest walk in the world” in the view of one observer, to make room for new gun carriages and breastworks. Eager enlistees in the Patriotic Blues, Washington Troop of Horse, and other volunteer “uniform companies” drilled on the Battery and readied themselves to “march at a minute’s notice” if the French dared to land.
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Meanwhile, partisan bands continued to taunt each other on the streets, as Samuel Malcolm, President John Adams’s young secretary, learned during a visit to New York in July 1798. While singing “Hail, Columbia,” a Federalist anthem, during an evening stroll to the Battery with friends, Malcolm was recognized. In the words of a Federalist Philadelphia paper, a crowd “of boatmen and low fellows, from the wharves and docks, immediately collected . . . instigated by the deluding demon of French Jacobinism,” and retaliated with the French Revolutionary song “Ca Ira.” A brawl erupted, with the “low fellows” outnumbering and beating Malcolm and his comrades. Even more sinister was the spiking, or disabling, of one of the Battery cannon by persons unknown, evidence to Federalists that pro-French extremism was becoming outright treason. A Europe at war seemed to guarantee that Manhattan would remain a battleground in microcosm.
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On March 4, 1801, New York’s Republicans greeted the presidential inauguration of their hero, Thomas Jefferson, with cannon fusillades at the Battery, the ringing of church bells, and the hoisting of colors on vessels in the harbor. By voting for the “Sage of Monticello,” New York’s Jeffersonian coalition of artisans and liberal merchants had played a pivotal role in what the new president himself called the “Revolution of 1800,” the nation’s first peaceful transition of power from one party to another.

Gaining power, however, did not cool the hostility of Republicans toward England, especially as the Royal Navy replaced the French as primary predator on American merchant vessels. Perpetually short-handed during the wars of the Napoleonic era, British commanders resorted to impressment, seizing any able-bodied mariner or landsman they deemed to be a British subject. Seamen aboard American cargo ships were considered fair game; indeed, many were native Britons who had never obtained US citizenship. But by the late 1790s, the taverns and coffeehouses of waterfront Manhattan were also alive with stories of Royal Navy captains seizing naturalized American citizens and even native-born Yankees. The Royal Navy justified its indiscriminate roundups by arguing that thousands of British sailors were working on vessels out of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston under the cover of fraudulently obtained citizenship certificates (known as “Protections”) that were issued by federal customs officials and circulated freely in waterfront boardinghouses.
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But for New Yorkers who now feared British confiscation of men as well as of “contraband” goods and vessels, the cry of “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights” drowned out arguments over legal niceties. In new neighborhoods of modest two-story clapboard houses that replaced meadows and swamps north and east of the old city limits, families of working seamen and artisans felt the full impact of impressment in the void left by a missing husband and father or the fear that one’s brother or friend might be the next sailor to disappear into the ranks of the Royal Navy. An unknown number of New Yorkers shared the experience that befell John Bateman in early 1807. A mariner who lived near the East River waterfront, Bateman was taken off the brig
Ulysses
at sea by the press gang of HMS
Demerara
. Nine months later, Bateman managed to get a letter to the US Customs office in New York: “I have got a wife & children in Bedlow Street. . . . [I have] suffered much in my mind in consequence of my helpless family. . . . They may be in much want of all necessaries. . . . I am all they have to look to for that.” Bateman added that, for alleged “neglect of duty,” he had suffered a dozen lashes applied to his back.
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It was bad enough when New Yorkers went to work at sea, only to disappear into British servitude; worse yet when the Royal Navy dared to harass merchantmen in the city’s own waters. British warships, which periodically dropped anchor in the Upper Bay to exchange dispatches and take on provisions, also stopped, seized, and sent to Halifax any vessel they deemed to be trading with the French. On April 24, 1806, the moment New Yorkers of both political parties had long feared finally arrived. On that day, half a mile off Sandy Hook, the sixty-gun
Leander
signaled the New York–based sloop
Richard
to stop for inspection. The
Richard
’s crew either misunderstood the signal or decided to make a run into port. In response, the
Leander
fired a warning shot across the
Richard
’s bow, decapitating crewman John Pearce. Crowds of New Yorkers calling for revenge poured into the streets. Pearce was buried at public expense amid protest meetings condemning the “repeated outrages committed by foreign ships of war at the mouths of our harbors.”
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Royal Navy forays into the city’s streets stirred similar emotions. In early September 1807, the frigate HMS
Jason
sent a boat into the harbor with dispatches for New York’s British consulate. Upon docking, six of her crew immediately scattered. Drawing his pistols, the boat’s furious lieutenant threatened to shoot the deserters if they didn’t return to their posts. But New Yorkers were in no mood to cooperate. A crowd closed around the refuge-seeking deserters and handled the lieutenant “very roughly.” New Yorkers had the added pleasure of learning that John Bateman, now a crewman on the
Jason
, had been returned to his family on Bedlow Street after US Customs officials persuaded the
Jason
’s commander that Bateman was a bona fide American citizen. But small victories like these did not answer the question that increasingly dominated the conversation of the coffee houses as tensions escalated between the United States and Great Britain: if the Royal Navy unleashed the fullness of its fury, how could New York withstand it?
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One man thought he knew how to safeguard New York from an enemy fleet. At age fifty-five, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Williams of the US Army Corps of Engineers had enjoyed a varied career by the time he arrived in New York in 1805. Born in Boston, Williams had studied at Harvard and had joined his great-uncle, Benjamin Franklin, in London in 1770, becoming his private secretary. Settling in Philadelphia after the revolution, Williams became a successful merchant, an associate justice in the city’s courts, and the author and translator of treatises on navigation, botany, mathematics, and military engineering. The latter helped secure for him a major’s commission in the army from President Adams. His work also brought him to the attention of Thomas Jefferson. Despite Williams’s Federalist loyalties, the new president persuaded him to accept an appointment as first superintendent of the new national military academy at West Point in 1802. In 1805, Williams accepted a subsidiary assignment, the kind of job to which his role as the army’s ranking engineer entitled him: the task of planning the fortification of New York City. Williams plunged into the work. From a base camp on Governors Island, he sent forth boatloads of engineers and soldiers equipped with plumb lines, cables, and surveying equipment to gauge the distance between shores and the depths of navigable channels.
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By the summer of 1807, Williams had drafted a sweeping plan for recasting the port of New York as a defensive zone. He believed that the main danger to the city was the prospect of a British fleet arriving off the tip of Manhattan to bottle up the East River and effectively throttle its commerce; the Royal Navy could then “put the city under contribution,” demanding a large ransom in return for not bombarding it or burning it to the ground. The inner harbor, moreover, now lacked some of its traditional safeguards. In 1790, New Yorkers had torn down the fort Cryn Fredericks had designed to protect the foot of Manhattan, to make way for an executive mansion—one that President Washington never occupied, since the capital moved from New York to Philadelphia that year.
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Jonathan Williams, mastermind of New York’s harbor fortifications. Engraving by Charles Balthazar Julien Fevret de Saint-Mémin,
Jonathan Williams, Head-and-Shoulders Portrait, Right Profile,
1798. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.