The Devil's Own Work Read online

  By April 1834, Democratic president Andrew Jackson's war on the Bank of the United States had reinforced his image as the people's champion and polarized the country along class lines. Jackson, a planter from Kentucky, saw the Bank as a dangerous source of special privilege for the Northeast's aristocratic elite.32

  In New York City, Tammany Hall Democrats supported the president and were joined by labor leaders and workers who wanted to shut down all banks. Laborers bore the brunt of the business cycles extreme ups and downs. By eliminating the paper money issued by banks and allowing only silver and gold currency—"hard money"—labor groups hoped both to control inflation and to stave off periodic depressions.33

  New York's mayoral election of April 1834 pitted the "bank aristocracy against the people," declared George Henry Evans, editor of the Working-man s Advocate. The working class also received fervent support from William Cullen Bryant, a famous young poet from Massachusetts who had bought the New York Evening Post five years earlier; the paper was founded by Alexander Hamilton, but Bryant had strayed from those Federalist roots to become an outspoken Jacksonian Democrat.34

  The Whig party viewed this local contest, in the midst of the Bank War, as crucial to its eventual success or failure in national politics. Whig merchants and industrialists pressured their workers to vote the party's ticket, using the Hamiltonian argument that the interests of labor and capital were identical, since all the trades, from the merchant down to the carpenter, rigger, and longshoreman, depended on each other. Whigs also turned native-born workmen against the Democratic ticket by pointing to Tammany Hall's successful efforts to attract the threatening new waves of Irish Catholic immigrants as their base of support.35

  Whig forces taunted the "low Irish" who had turned out to vote for Tammany, and for the three days of the election, thousands of rioters— wealthy merchants and Irish workmen alike—clashed with sticks, clubs, and firearms, many taken by looting gun stores and a state arsenal. The Democratic mayor finally dispatched twelve hundred infantry and cavalrymen, who dispersed the rioters. With public buildings under heavy guard as the votes were counted, the Democrats pulled off a narrow victory.

  The Whigs boisterously celebrated their strong showing, but by the summer, the Jacksonians had won the Bank War. Congress voted to deny a new charter and to proceed with removal of funds from the Bank, which was headquartered in Philadelphia. The Bank and the Whigs were fading from the scene in tandem, while New York City emerged as the nation's preeminent financial center. Tammany's alliance with the growing labor movement further consolidated its power.36

  While the Bank War subsided in the summer of 1834, the furor over abolition burst back on the scene in New York. In June, six months after the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Arthur and Lewis Tappan funded the Female Anti-Slavery Society, bringing upper-class white women into the biracial movement and renewing conservatives' fear of "amalgamation." With the help of procolonization newspapers, unfounded, sensational stories about interracial marriages circulated throughout the city.37

  Rumor turned to violence in July and escalated into a week of antiabolition rioting—the worst of New York's many riots in the antebellum period. Rioters destroyed numerous homes, stores, and churches of both black and white abolitionists throughout the city. St. Philip's Church and the home of its pastor, Peter Williams Jr., were both destroyed. The humble dwellings of some five hundred poor blacks in Five Points were also ransacked, torched, or demolished, and victims who did not escape were seized and beaten by the mobs.38

  The Twenty-seventh National Guard regiment and the police were supported by cavalry units and a thousand citizen volunteers in quelling the riots.* Since the rioters appeared to be nativists as well as racists, hundreds of Irish workers signed up to crush them, abandoning their previous neutrality— a rare moment in which immigrant workers briefly acknowledged that they had common interests with blacks. When the riots gradually subsided, the consensus of public opinion pointed the finger at the victims: The antislavery agitators were looking for trouble and had found it.39

  William Cullen Bryant's Evening Post was the lone voice in the city's press condemning the rioters. His Whig rival, Horace Greeley, then editor of the New-Yorker, followed the herd.† The antagonism between them grew in 1835 when Bryant again stood alone to defend twenty-one tailors who went on strike, a new tactic for labor, which the employers were quickly able to thwart by having the workers arrested and fined. The Evening Post expressed outrage that men could be convicted for refusing "to work for the wages that were offered them . . . If this is not SLAVERY, we have forgotten its definition." The more conservative Greeley denounced "all combinations, either of masters or journeymen . . . Both parties clearly acted wrong." After hungry workers rioted and raided flour warehouses the following winter, Bryant examined their grievances while Greeley chastised them for failing to see the harmony of interests between themselves and "the business community in general."40

  When New York's abolitionists confronted the wreckage of their homes and institutions, it dampened their ardor and cowed them into retreat. Middle-class blacks like Peter Williams Jr. turned inward to deal with problems of poverty and moral uplift in the black community, while white radicals shifted their attention to the abolition of southern slavery instead of the glaring racial inequality in the North.41

  In the spring of 1835, after a year of retreat, the Tappan brothers dramatically escalated their antislavery campaign by printing more than a million illustrated pamphlets that detailed the evils of slavery and distributing them throughout the country, both North and South. The American Anti-Slavery Society also deluged the public with abolitionist newspapers, figurines of shackled slaves, handkerchiefs, medallions, and even chocolate wrappers. This merchandising and propaganda effort swelled the ranks of the abolitionists but also alarmed their conservative opponents, who organized riots across the North similar to those in New York a year earlier. The initial abolitionist efforts in Boston had been widely regarded as quixotic and futile, but the Tappans' mass media wizardry—they would soon claim a million members nationwide—was perceived as a grave threat by proslavery groups.

  For white southerners, the shift of the abolition movement's base from Boston to New York was particularly galling, since the city already dictated the terms of capital investment and the extension of credit to the South. By late summer, vigilantes in the South were fanning out across harbors and roads and searching slave quarters to intercept and confiscate antislavery tracts. They carried torches in nighttime parades culminating with fiery speeches against the New York abolitionists. Some southerners demanded that the Tappans be turned over to the South for punishment and organized a boycott to ruin their silk-importing firm, the largest in the country. Others suggested that the South stop importing all products from New York, causing distress in the city's Chamber of Commerce.

  The American Anti-Slavery Society braced for trouble by barricading its doors, but there was no repetition of the recent riots. Local officials were poised to prevent it, and the federal government willingly appeased slavery proponents by banning the Tappans' tracts from the mail. President Andrew Jackson allowed New York City's postmaster to block delivery of the pamphlets to the South and condemned the abolitionists and their organization in his annual message to Congress.42

  While the Tappans and Garrisonians shifted their focus to the South after the New York antiabolition riots of 1834, white female charity workers emerged and stepped into the breach to look after the needs of New York's impoverished free blacks, especially the children and the elderly. Some of these women supported the idea of colonizing blacks outside the United States, and their goals for the advancement of blacks in their care were limited for the most part to menial labor rather than higher education. They were steering clear of the abolition controversy, or so they thought.43

  In 1834, on one of their strolls through a run-down area in Lower Manhattan, Anna Shotwell and her niece, Mary Murray, were insp
ired by the sight of black orphans sitting on a stoop to establish—with fourteen other women and an advisory board of five men—the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans, which they funded with two thousand dollars raised through small subscriptions.44

  Shotwell and Murray intended to start an orphanage, since none of the three privately funded orphan asylums in the city accepted blacks. In 1837, they started by opening a day school with just five orphans, housed in a small cottage on Twelfth Street. The city later granted some land to the association— twenty lots on Fifth Avenue, between Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets— where a substantial building was completed in 1843, and twenty more lots were granted the next year.45

  At first, black leaders did not approve of segregating black children for any reason, even for their supposed benefit. Moreover, with few exceptions, the Colored Orphan Asylum prepared its graduates for the kind of menial labor that blacks saw as a dead end. The children were "bound out" at the age of twelve as indentured servants on farms, "the boys until the age of twenty-one and the girls to age eighteen."46* Shotwell argued that without the asylum's intervention these disadvantaged orphans were likely to become "burdens on society, and some perhaps would swell the catalogue of its delinquents and convicts." While idealistic charity workers were motivated by the "increasing spirit of compassion and kindness," in America, Shotwell wrote, the asylum also helped reduce "pauperism and crime" and contributed to "public safety."47

  Anna Shotwell, Hannah Shotwell, and Mary Murray, founders of the Colored Orphan Asylum

  However, the asylum's work eventually won blacks over, as did the hiring of James McCune Smith, the nation's first accredited black doctor. McCune Smith, who had eagerly celebrated statewide emancipation as a teenager at the African Free School No. 2, continued his education under Peter Williams Jr. and applied to American medical schools but was rejected because he was black. Williams, who led St. Philip's Church for more than twenty years and mentored hundreds of black students, steered McCune Smith to medical school abroad and raised money for his tuition. In 1837, McCune Smith graduated first in his class ahead of hundreds at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. For his colleagues in the Glasgow Emancipation Society, he was a living embodiment of innate racial equality.48

  He had returned from Scotland and become the attending physician at the asylum in 1843, tending to the health of the eighty-two orphans in the new building on Fifth Avenue.49 McCune Smith also saw both black and white patients in his thriving private practice on West Broadway. Since his success was so rare, it heightened his frustration with the persistence of racial inequality in the northern states, the "damning thralldom that grinds to dust the colored inhabitants."50

  For McCune Smith and other black leaders, America's racial caste system not only was wrong but had no basis, since they knew that behind the facade of white supremacy many Americans descended from interracial couples, including mixtures of Dutch, Native American, Spanish, and African blood, and particularly from white masters and their black female slaves in the South.

  McCune Smith mocked the pseudoscience of phrenology when he wrote that the black news vendor on the street had facial features common to the "first families" of Virginia and could easily have been sired by Thomas Jefferson, who "contradicted his philosophy of negro hate by seeking the dalliance of black women" and produced numerous children of "mixed blood."51* In McCune Smith's literary sketches of the news vendor and other blacks in menial jobs, titled "Heads of Colored People," and in his other writing, he stressed that civilization itself was impossible without a "coming together" of the races, and that the enormous vitality of American society came from the mixture of peoples that had created it.52

  McCune Smith and other abolitionists were up against the prevailing Jacksonian mind-set of white supremacy. Labor leader and Democratic congressman Ely Moore of New York warned that the Whigs intended to subjugate the working class by freeing the slaves in the South "to compete with the Northern white man in the labor market."

  Jacksonian intellectuals declared that charity should "begin at home" in northern states like Massachusetts and New Hampshire. "The abolitionists of the North have mistaken the color of American Slaves," declared Theophilus Fisk, a labor leader and ex-priest based in Boston; "all the real Slaves in the United States have pale faces . . . I will venture to affirm that there are more slaves in Lowell and Nashua alone than can be found South of the Potomac." Compared to the plight of the northern worker, Fisk claimed, chattel slavery was a benevolent system with a lifelong social safety-net. "Emancipate the slave, and what then! He would fiddle, steal, and then starve.'53

  James McCune Smith

  *The Irish were New York City's largest immigrant group, numbering more than two hundred thousand in 1860, about a fourth of the population.

  † Pope Day was celebrated on November 5, the holiday marking the failed plot of Guy Fawkes to blow up Parliament. The Pretender was Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Scottish Catholic aspirant to the throne of England who was defeated in the Battle of Culloden Moor in 1746.

  *A great promoter of this idea was inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who wrote two books in the mid-1830s detailing the alleged conspiracy.

  *With Jackson's reelection in 1832, the Democratic-Republican party became the Democratic party.

  † in 1826, sixteen blacks in New York County could vote; that number increased only to about three hundred by 1861.

  † Only a few fortunate blacks entered skilled trades, and they were held back within each profession. The Herald counted eight black physicians, fourteen clergymen, and seventeen teachers in New York City in the Civil War years. Exceptional black entrepreneurs, who ran successful businesses in white areas, included Thomas Downing, whose famous Oyster House at Broad and Wall streets was a popular meeting place for merchants, financiers, and government officials (Spann, Gotham at War, p. 124).

  *Formerly, the streets were named Cross Anthony, and Orange. See the Walking Tour in the appendix for the area today.

  ‡ The roots of St. Philip's Church, where Williams served as pastor, and of New York City's black middle class, date back to colonial days and the catechism classes led by Elias Neau, an Anglican missionary, beginning in 1705. Originally located on Center Street, St. Philip's Church had moved uptown to Mulberry Street by 1863.

  *With European immigration, the proportion of blacks in New York's population fell from 11 percent in the 1790s to 1.5 percent in 1860. The number of black residents peaked at 16,000 in 1840 but fell to 12,500 in 1860 as Irish immigrants drove blacks out of menial jobs.

  † Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania enacted gradual emancipation. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts provided for immediate abolition with amendments to their state constitutions.

  ‡ Free blacks in Manhattan published fifteen newspapers and three magazines between 1827 and the end of the Civil War.

  *Parliament enacted gradual emancipation in 1833 and abolished slavery completely in 1838.

  *The Twenty-seventh later became the Seventh Regiment.

  † Greeley founded the Tribune seven years later.

  *"At the end of their nine years of service the boys received one hundred dollars with accumulated interest which had been deposited in the bank for them in annual installments; the girls were paid thirty dollars for six years of work" (Freeman, p. 179).

  *Phrenologists claimed that the intelligence of an individual, and by extension a race, could be definitively measured by the shape and topography of the skull.

  CHAPTER 3

  Horace Greeley and the Birth of the

  Republican Party

  ly—scatter through the land—go to the Great West," Horace Greeley exhorted unemployed workers in his weekly paper, the New-Yorker. In 1837, the same year that Anna Shotwell and Mary Murray opened their school for black orphans, an economic panic gripped the country. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers were on the verge of starvation, having exhausted their credit with "boar
ding-houses, landlords, and grocers," Greeley recalled.1London's credit markets had contracted suddenly, and southern cotton growers had defaulted on loans to a major New York firm, which had collapsed and set off a domino effect throughout the economy, ruining hundreds of businesses. Banks in every state called in loans and ceased payment in silver and gold, while the country tumbled into six years of economic depression.2

  Greeley was deeply affected by the sight of workers suffering through no fault of their own and feared widespread misery would lead to riots.

  I saw two families, including six or eight children, burrowing in one cellar under a stable,—a prey to famine on the one hand, and to vermin and cutaneous diseases on the other, with sickness adding its horrors to those of a polluted atmosphere and a wintry temperature. I saw men who each, somehow, supported his family on an income of $5 per week or less, yet who cheerfully gave something to mitigate the sufferings of those who were really poor. I saw three widows, with as many children, living in an attic on the profits of an apple-stand which yielded less than $3 per week, and the landlord came in for a full third of that.3

  In the coming years Greeley embraced the idea of "Association"; of workers banding together to form cooperative enterprises that would maximize their leverage as both producers and consumers in the new world of unbridled capitalist competition.