New York at War (24 page)

It remains an open question whether the British intended to attack New York City. Admiral Warren’s successor in Bermuda as Royal Navy commander, Sir Alexander Cochrane, proved to be as irresolute as Warren when it came to aggressive action against American coastal targets. Pressed by the War Office and admiralty in the summer of 1814 to select an objective for a joint navy and army attack, Cochrane hedged, weighing the pros and cons of a list of cities that included New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. If twelve thousand men were provided, he wrote in July, New York might well be destroyed or “put under contribution.” If troops landed on Long Island, they could easily bombard the city across the East River with rockets and artillery.
⁵⁰

Cochrane had left the final choice of which American city to attack to the more decisive Admiral Cockburn, who picked Washington. But it is fair to speculate that the final decision was, in part, shaped by a healthy British respect for the defenses Jonathan Williams and Joseph Swift had fashioned for New York. By making New York conspicuously less vulnerable than other targets, the forts and batteries served as valuable deterrents. The daily newspapers that city dignitaries ensured got through to the blockading squadrons further underscored the determination of troops and civilians to fight for the city. The British failure to take a similarly fortified Baltimore harbor in September 1814 may have driven the lesson home. After all, easier, more vulnerable targets beckoned—like New Orleans.
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On the frigid evening of February 11, 1815, a harbor pilot named David Mitchell burst into the office of the New York
Gazette
in Hanover Square, near the South Street docks. Gasping for breath, Mitchell managed to whisper, “
Peace
!
Peace
! . . . An English sloop-of-war is below with news of a treaty of peace.” As the assembled men tumbled out into the square shouting with joy, lit candles began appearing in windows, street by street. “The cry of ‘Peace!
Peace
! PEACE!’ spread through the city at the top of all voices,” a participant later recalled. “No one stopped to inquire about ‘free trade and sailors’ rights.’ No one inquired whether even the national honor had been preserved. . . . It was enough that the ruinous war was over.”
⁵²

New Yorkers had already learned of Andrew Jackson’s stunning victory on January 8 over the redcoats at New Orleans, a crushing blow to the British offensive. Now their joy and relief were complete. While the Treaty of Ghent left key American grievances unresolved, the war’s conclusion almost magically removed sources of tension that had stirred New Yorkers for two decades: seizures of ships and seamen, and antagonisms between Republicans and Federalists over foreign policy. New Yorkers could share in a sense of having won, or at any rate survived, what Alexander McLeod, one of the city’s Presbyterian ministers, labeled “this second war of independence.”
⁵³

A new New York emerged out of the shadow of the War of 1812—an assertively nineteenth-century city, a place of confidence and unleashed energies. South Street merchants, frustrated by the war’s capricious blockade, now quickly took advantage of revived trade with Britain; soon they would be able to tout their city as “the great emporium of North America.” The city’s population boomed as vessels, no longer in fear of prowling warships, poured European emigrants across the East River piers. Interrupted by the war in their planning for a man-made waterway carrying the commerce of the Great Lakes to Manhattan’s shores, merchants now helped to elevate their mayor to the governor’s mansion in Albany, where De Witt Clinton shaped American history by overseeing the construction of the Erie Canal.
⁵⁴

The war had bestowed on the city a new set of identities: a role for Wall Street as a financial underwriter of war, a role for foundries and shipyards to mass-produce the tools of war imagined by men like Robert Fulton. These new identities remained rooted in New York’s oldest motive, the pursuit of profit, as well as in the imperatives of patriotism and self-defense. But New York’s growing might also suggested a new paradox, easily forgotten in times of peace. As the city became the nation’s marketplace, workshop, bank, and symbol of power and wealth, it also became that much more provocative a target for foes. As the batteries of heavy metal standing on its shores mutely testified, New York City remained at the edge of the Atlantic, warning off potential aggressors while simultaneously tempting them.

CHAPTER 6

The Front Door

The Civil War, 1861–1865

T
he massive crowd overflowed the bounds of Union Square and filled Broadway and Fourth Avenue, bringing horse-drawn drays and streetcars to a standstill. Thousands more men, women, and children lined the windows and roofs of the fashionable townhouses and hotels that surrounded the Square. It was the afternoon of April 20, 1861, and New York City had turned out to support the Union in its moment of crisis. Mounted on an open-air dais, Major Robert Anderson raised the splintered flagstaff and flag that his men had taken with them when they had surrendered Fort Sumter to Confederate troops a week earlier. The crowd of at least a hundred thousand roared and erupted into a resounding impromptu chorus of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Like most of the participants, Wall Street lawyer George Templeton Strong found himself thrilled by an outpouring of patriotic fervor he would remember for the rest of his life. “Large companies of recruits in citizen’s dress parading up and down, cheered and cheering,” he recorded in his diary that night. “Flags from almost every building. The city seems to have gone suddenly wild and crazy.” Two days earlier, Strong had watched as the men of the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry from Boston had marched down Broadway to the docks, on their way to Washington to answer President Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand volunteers to put down the Southern rebellion. “Immense crowd; immense cheering. My eyes filled with tears. . . . God be praised for the unity of feeling here! It is beyond, very far beyond, anything I hoped for. If it only last, we are safe.”
¹

Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
, the nation’s most widely read newspaper, claimed that the Union Square rally was “the greatest popular demonstration ever known in America.” New Yorkers had much to be proud of, and confident about, as the North mustered against the Southern Confederacy that spring of 1861. Washington might be the nation’s political capital, but in the decades since the War of 1812, New York had become the capital of virtually all else. The largest city in the New World, its built-up area now extended well into the Forties, with a checkerboard of constructed blocks and empty lots spreading further up Manhattan. Wall Street was now acknowledged to be the Western Hemisphere’s headquarters for banking, insurance, and securities investment. In 1860, over two-thirds of all merchandise imported into the United States arrived at New York docks, and over one-third of all exports left from them. Manhattan held more industrial workers, and a greater number and diversity of manufacturing businesses, than any other single place outside Europe. Broadway had become the premiere retail shopping street and promenade of the Americas, the place where, in the words of the newspaperman and poet Walt Whitman, one could enjoy watching “the beautiful ladies, the bustle, the show, the glitter, and even the gaudiness.” Fueled by immigration, New York’s dizzying growth had made it one of the world’s most populous cities—with over eight hundred thousand inhabitants—within a single lifetime; its satellite communities of Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Hoboken held several hundred thousand more. The men of such a city would surely beat the effete sons of the Southern aristocracy, the foe Strong disparaged as “the slave-breeding woman-floggers of Charleston and New Orleans and Richmond.”
²

Like most Northerners, New Yorkers believed that the South would be defeated in a matter of weeks. With its thousands of footloose young men, the city had repeatedly served as a recruiting ground during Latin America’s wars of liberation against Spain, the Texas War for Independence in 1836, the Mexican War, abortive “filibustering” expeditions to seize Cuba and Nicaragua, even covertly for the British during the Crimean War of 1854–1855. Now New Yorkers rushed to volunteer, forming or joining regiments whose names—Corcoran’s “Irish” Sixty-Ninth, the First German Rifles, the Garibaldi Guard—reflected the city’s immigrant diversity. Thomas Southwick, a young workman for the Third Avenue Railroad Company, joined Duryee’s Zouaves, known for their exotic uniform based on that of troops in French Algeria—baggy red pants, white leggings, blue jacket, and red fez with blue tassel. “Already in my imagination we were mounting the breastworks as they do in novels and scattering haughty Southerners like sheep,” Southwick later recalled. “I’d be a hero, of course, if there were any Confederate flags to tear down or great generals to rescue. I’d be just the boy to do it.”
³

Would-be soldiers seemed to fill every promenade, parade ground, and saloon. At age forty-one, George Templeton Strong found himself with other professional men drilling in Washington Square, although his nearsightedness and his desire to support his wife and three young sons ultimately persuaded him to stay at home. Tent camps and makeshift wooden barracks sprouted in City Hall Park, in the new Central Park, at the Battery, on Staten Island and Rikers Island, and at Willets Point in rural Queens, wherever space could be found. One by one, regiments of enthusiastic volunteers boarded boats and trains for the nation’s capital. By early May, New Yorkers could exult proudly in the fact that nearly half of the sixteen thousand troops guarding Washington hailed from Manhattan and Brooklyn.
⁴

Then, on June 22, 1861, news arrived by telegraph that struck New Yorkers like a cold slap in the face. “We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped by secessionists,” Strong wrote in his diary. Facing Confederate forces at Bull Run, the Union army—Manhattan regiments included—had evidently panicked and fled back to their trenches around Washington, “as rabbits to their burrows.” Overnight, the humiliating disaster transformed expectations. Brooding in her townhouse on Eighth Street, another diarist, Maria Lydig Daly, descendant of one of the city’s oldest patrician families, resigned herself to the meaning of Bull Run: “Now the war must be a thing of time. Our prestige is gone and must be reconquered.”
⁵

Although they did not yet realize it, New Yorkers faced a protracted war that would fracture the momentary unity for which Strong had thanked God in April. The city’s inhabitants had already been in conflict with each other; the shooting war inflamed rather than quelled their tensions.

The truth was that New York was a deeply divided city. The emerging sectional conflict between North and South had been shaping political divisions, class tensions, and race relations in the city for three decades. Underlying all was a dominant reality: the heavy reliance of Manhattan’s economy on Southern trade. New York City was immersed in the enormously profitable cotton economy of the South just as surely as were Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans. New York bankers, brokers, and exporters provided planters with the credit and insurance they needed to harvest “white gold” and buy black slaves. In 1860, New York shippers exported over $12 million in cotton, most of it destined for the textile mills of Manchester, England. New York’s merchants had made themselves the middlemen linking the American slave system to Britain’s industrial revolution (earning further profits by cramming the holds of their ships with Irish emigrants on the return voyages).
⁶

The link between New York and the South pervaded all aspects of the city’s life. Southern whites, welcomed with open arms by retailers and wholesalers, came to Manhattan to do their spending. Merchants and planters from below the Mason-Dixon Line were familiar customers in the dry goods stores of Pearl Street and the showrooms of fashionable jewelers and carriage makers, and they made Hiram Cranston’s New York Hotel on Broadway a home away from home for traveling slaveholders. Some Southerners became permanent New Yorkers, like the beautiful Martha Bulloch, who left her Georgia plantation to marry Manhattan merchant and financier Theodore Roosevelt Sr. According to her son, a future president of the United States, “Mittie” Roosevelt remained an “unreconstructed” Confederate; family lore has it that during the war she defiantly unfurled the rebel stars and bars from the window of her townhouse near Gramercy Park. Even Manhattan’s entertainment industry contributed to the city’s pro-Southern climate, as Thomas Rice and other white performers used the stage of the Bowery Theatre to create blackface minstrelsy, whose comic caricatures of happy-go-lucky plantation “darkies” challenged the far bleaker portrayals of slavery issuing from abolitionist printing presses a few blocks away. Some New Yorkers even broke federal law by sending covert expeditions to West Africa to buy slaves for sale in the Cuban, Brazilian, and Southern markets. “Down-town merchants of wealth and respectability are extensively engaged in buying and selling African Negroes,” the
Journal of Commerce
charged in 1857. “The City of New York belongs almost as much to the South as to the North,” the
New York Times
noted on the eve of the war.
⁷

The Democratic Party leaders and voters who dominated the city’s political life accepted and endorsed New York’s links to slavery. Emboldened by the national party’s strong base among slaveholders, the New York “Democracy” was an avowed bastion of white supremacy and of resistance to any effort by antislavery activists to sever the salutary bond between North and South. This ideology united Wall Street patricians like the banker August Belmont and the attorney Samuel Barlow, who bankrolled the national party, with the masses of working-class European emigrants, most of them Irish and German, who gave the local party its electoral majorities.