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July 27 - November 9, 2022
rantipole
In February 1812 Madison restored nonimportation against Great Britain. Two months later, on his recommendation, Congress adopted a ninety-day embargo that everyone knew to be the last step prior to an actual declaration of war. Everyone, that is, except the British government, which was just then preoccupied with rampant inflation, massive unemployment, labor unrest, and, early in May, the assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval.
Shipping costs from Lake Erie to Manhattan plummeted from a hundred dollars a ton to under nine dollars. A few more years of this brought the annual value of freight transported along the canal up to fifteen million dollars, double that reaching New Orleans via the Mississippi; by mid-century the figure would approach two hundred million. Enough money would be collected in tolls—nearly half a million dollars the first year alone—to repay the cost of construction and help subsidize an additional six hundred miles of canals in the state over the next fifteen years.
Between 1820 and 1832 the number of immigrants entering the port rose from thirty-eight hundred to some thirty thousand; in 1837 it swelled to nearly sixty thousand—almost 75 percent of the national total.
Manhattan’s population climbed from 124,000 in 1820 to 166,000 in 1825 and 197,000 in 1830. By 1835 it exceeded 270,000. No other place in the country was growing so fast.
In the Caribbean, however, British policy backfired. By stubbornly blocking American trade to Jamaica, as it had done since the Revolution, Britain succeeded only in destroying the island’s economy while New York merchants moved on to new opportunities in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Another alternative to specie was opium, and in 1816 Astor became America’s first large-scale drug dealer, smuggling five thousand pounds of Turkish opium from Smyrna to Canton.
Foreman Cheeseman,
By the 1830s some New York shops had five hundred women on the payroll, and men’s garment making had become one of the city’s (and the nation’s) most important industries.
A financial panic swept the nation in 1819, followed by two or three years of deflation and stagnation that caused great suffering in the South and West. Although the BUS survived, it was widely blamed for the crisis; some casualties, among them a planter named Andrew Jackson, vowed revenge.
By 1830—less than two decades after construction began on the Erie Canal—New York had overtaken Philadelphia as the nation’s premier money market. Its banks controlled significantly more capital (and were safer too, because the state had just established an insurance fund to guarantee notes issued by member banks).
For the adventurous speculator, though, there was still no place like home. Manhattan land values had risen 750 percent between the Revolution and the War of 1812, and with the Erie Canal in place the future looked even more promising.
By 1830 Brooklyn had become the country’s first commuter suburb,
They didn’t always succeed—New York firms failed more often than did the dynastic enterprises of Boston—but their collective ambition stoked the city’s economic furnace.
Public enterprise was as much a part of New York’s civic culture as private ambition, and a raft of governmental initiatives helped the city embrace and enhance its natural advantages. Above all, it was the state-run Erie Canal that secured New York City’s position as the nation’s entrepôt, galvanizing its commerce, its banking, its stock market, and its manufacturing sectors:
the year the Erie commenced operation, five hundred new mercantile operations opened their doors in the city.
Fulton and Livingston perfected their steamboat under the aegis of a state monopoly without which they would not likely have spent the time, money, and energy it took to bring the project to completion. A similar monopoly encouraged the New York Gas-Light Company to illuminate the streets—by warding off competitors, subsidizing construction, and guaranteeing an initial market. State law also undergirded the monopolistic auction system, which generated some of the larg...
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Certainly nothing remotely like the Sancte Claus portrayed by Irving had ever been known on either side of the Atlantic.
Before 1825 literary magazines hadn’t covered the negligible fine arts world; now the weekly New-York Mirror began reviewing the annual exhibitions at the National Academy and reproducing some of the artwork via engravings and woodcuts.
The slave population of 2,369 in 1790 dwindled to 518 by 1820. African Americans declined as a percentage of New York’s total population (from 8.8 percent to 6.9 percent over the 1820s), reflecting the quickening pace of European immigration. But the absolute number of blacks in the city grew substantially, from 3,262 in 1790 to 13,976 by 1830, as freedpeople flocked in from surrounding rural regions.
(Some estimates suggest that perhaps 5 to 10 percent of all women between the ages of fifteen and thirty prostituted themselves at some point, with the figure rising above 10 percent during depressions.)
So notorious was the Hook’s reputation as a site for prostitution that (according to one theory) the local sex workers were nicknamed “Hookers,” generating a new moniker for the entire trade.
The first words two just-met strangers might likely utter were “Let’s liquor.”
Ira Aldridge, until the teenager’s father, a deacon at Mother Zion, made him quit to pursue a ministerial career. (To no avail: Aldridge, aware he had no chance to develop his talents in race-bound New York, fled to London, where he would play Othello at the Royal Theatre, and become the rage of Europe for a quarter century.)
But probably the first white person to deliberately appropriate elements of black culture for the purpose of performance was Charles Mathews, an English actor who toured the United States in 1822-23.
Crow and Coon were paradoxical creations. Their primary import was racist ridicule. Slavery was presented as right and natural; slaves as contented, lazy, and stupid; northern blacks as larcenous, immoral, and ludicrous. At the same time, Rice’s act (like those of his colleagues) was laced with envy. At a time when employers, ministers, and civic authorities were demanding productivity, frugality, and self-discipline, Crow and Coon shamelessly indulged in sensual pleasures.
Catholic emancipation in England (1829) generated a flood of antipopery books and tracts decrying the new license; many of these were exported to New York, where they agitated local activists.
Also in 1834, Samuel F. B. Morse, just back from Europe, published a series of letters in the New York Observer, an evangelical paper, concerning a “Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States.” The artist announced that in Vienna he had discovered the existence of a plot by European monarchs leagued in the Holy Alliance to flood the United States with Catholics. In another Morse series, issued as a pamphlet in 1835, the newly appointed NYU professor warned of “foreign turbulence imported by ship-loads” at the behest of “priest-controlled machines” and rhetorically demanded:
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In 1835 nearly 25 percent of the black men sailing out of New York City were members of predominantly black crews.
True, New York laborers had their political independence, no trifling matter. But the Revolution had been fought for economic independence as well, and by that criterion, the growth of wage-work, the declining respect for manual labor, the rise of renttenantry, the transformation of proud craftsmen into “hirelings”—all these together constituted a disturbing trajectory, whose end point might yet be dependency, even bondage, for whites as well as blacks.
Only their complete expulsion from a trade could truly preserve its dignity, one reason New York’s blacks were being steadily driven from all but the most “servile” occupations.
More disturbingly, the Irish were sometimes referred to as “niggers turned inside out,” as, conversely, blacks were occasionally termed “smoked Irish.”
More than any other economic factor, railroad financing helped solidify New York City’s role in the national credit system.
Withholding loans and calling in debts, Biddie singlehandedly deflated the national economy, producing widespread financial prostration, especially hi New York.
The president declared that the distress was only affecting “brokers and stock speculators and all who were doing business on borrowed capital” and that “all such people ought to break.”
Over the next three days, for the first time in the city’s history, they would be casting ballots in a mayoral election; the city charter had been amended in 1833 to finally give New Yorkers the right to elect their own chief magistrate.
The value of land in Manhattan went from $64.8 million in 1826 to $87.6 million in 1830 to over $143 million in 1835—then shot to $233 million within the next twelve months, for a total rise of 280 percent over the previous decade.
Previously, property (especially “farmland”) had been taxed lightly or not at all, one reason eighteenth-century merchants had regarded it as such a good investment. But as land values catapulted, the city began to demand a portion of the profits, and total assessments leapt from just over two hundred thousand dollars in 1830 to over $1.1 million in 1837. With their fiscal fate now tied to the value of private holdings, aldermen adopted a policy of aggressively enhancing the value of private property, in the name of promoting the public good.
Given the tremendous housing shortage and most workers’ continued need to live within walking distance of their jobsites, landlords harvested tremendous rents just by packing people into preexisting buildings. Indeed, the more they reduced maintenance and let their properties deteriorate, the more the city reduced their tax assessments, thus boosting their profits.
All told, the country’s money supply, which had jumped from $144 million in 1831 to $172 million in 1834, climbed to $276 million in 1836.
Despite this success, employers were thoroughly alarmed. In 1833 there had been virtually no labor movement. Now, in 1836, two-thirds of New York’s workingmen were enrolled in fifty-two confederated unions.
Locksmith Slamm
New York’s force was closely modeled on London’s, with one crucial difference. London’s Metropolitan Police was an arm of the national government, divorced from local control. New York’s was totally decentralized. Each ward became a patrol district, with its own stationhouse. And each ward nominated its own candidates for police officers; if accepted by the mayor, they were required to live and serve in that ward. New York’s police, beholden to politicians, would be inextricably enmeshed in local politics.
By 1853 26 percent of all U.S. rail bonds were in the hands of overseas investors, notably English and German.
Yet New York City remained number one—with one of every fifteen people employed in U.S. manufactures working on the island of Manhattan—because king-size iron works, factories, and refineries were not the be-all and end-all of industrialization.
As of 1855 roughly two-thirds of the city’s industrial workforce was employed in firms with fewer than a hundred hands, half of them in firms with under twenty-five—big by the standards of 1840, but nonetheless lilliputian alongside a behemoth like Novelty.
All in all, in 1860 Manhattan housed 4,375 manufacturing establishments, which employed 90,204 workers. Most of these were small operations, crammed into the upper stories of buildings used otherwise for trade and commerce (44 percent were in the downtown warehouse district bounded by the Second Ward).
By 1855 the garment industry was far and away the city’s largest, embracing 35 percent of all manufacturing employees. In 1860 New York produced roughly 40 percent of the country’s clothes.
After painter Samuel F. B. Morse returned from Europe in 1832, the renaissance New Yorker devoted himself, more or less simultaneously, to art, politics, and science. He served as professor of the literature of the arts of design at the University of the City of New York. He joined the crusade against popery and ran for mayor on the Native American ticket. And he set out to design a device that would “transmit intelligence by electricity.”
In Pierre, a disillusioned Melville had warned Young Americans they would never produce a native literature because “vulgarity and vigor—two inseparable adjuncts” were denied them. What, then, were they to make of a poet whose work drew sustenance from minstrel shows, blood-and-thunder romances, and the penny press, who boasted that “copulation is no more rank to me than death is” and proclaimed “the scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer”?
