The Devil's Own Work Page 9

  With the Compromise of 1850, Congress attempted once again to defuse the time bomb of slavery. The deal excluded slavery from California but not from New Mexico and Utah; the slave trade was abolished in the nation's capital; and slaveholders were granted a harsher fugitive slave law, which committed the federal government to helping owners pursue and recover runaways in the North. Black and white abolitionists joined forces to resist the law, and confrontations on the streets and in courtrooms across the North, particularly in Boston, heightened the sectional animosity that was dividing the country.33

  Greeley ultimately condoned the territorial compromise as a temporary solution but railed against the fugitive slave law. The Tribune continued to crusade for various reforms (better street cleaning, safer immigrant ships, banning child labor and prostitution, and creating more city parks), but Greeley's energies were scattered among numerous causes, fads, and theories, from seances to vegetarianism. He and P. T. Barnum sang hymns together and met near the Tribune office for meals of vegetables, unseasoned puddings, and Graham crackers.34 The time was drawing near, however, when Greeley would have to commit wholeheartedly to opposing slavery.

  In the presidential race of 1852, the Whig party self-destructed. The party's northern wing prevailed over southern Whigs to nominate Winfield Scott, an antislavery candidate. The Democrats were similarly divided but found a candidate on whom they could agree: New Hampshire's Franklin Pierce, a Yankee sympathetic to the South. In the general election, many southern Whigs defected, giving the Democrats a huge victory. Greeley, among others, declared that the Whig party was dead.35

  Horace Greeley

  Two years later, the danger that Kansas and Nebraska would be admitted to the Union and quickly become slave states finally focused Greeley's moral fire, while burying the remains of the Whig party. Senator Stephen Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, spearheaded the effort to organize the territories of Kansas and Nebraska as states; pressured by powerful southern Democrats in the Senate, Douglas called for "popular sovereignty," letting residents decide on slavery by referendum—a violation of the Compromise of 1820, which banned slavery above 36° 30', the southern border of Missouri.* Greeley unleashed a relentless series of editorials condemning Douglas's bill that helped galvanize antislavery opinion from coast to coast while vastly expanding the Tribunes circulation and influence.

  Greeley's talents as a political propagandist had finally crystallized. He branded the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 "a declaration of war by the slaveholders against the North" and called for the creation of a new national party to unite all free-soil advocates, who were abandoning the Whig and Democratic organizations. Greeley proposed "some simple name like Republican' to "fitly designate those who had united to restore our Union to its true mission of champion and promulgator of Liberty."36

  Little by little, the new, all-northern party emerged in the spring and summer of 1854, as antislavery groups prepared for state and congressional elections. Activists gathering at a church in Ripon, Wisconsin, were the first of many groups to declare themselves "Republicans." They were soon followed by thirty antislavery congressmen meeting in Washington and by conventions that proliferated in congressional districts across the North, particularly in the Old Northwest.* The party name was meant to evoke the republican values of the nation's Revolutionary founders in contrast to the slaveholders' tyrannical aristocracy.

  Congressman George Julian of Indiana and Senators Salmon Chase of Ohio, William Seward of New York, and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts were a few of the Republican party's leading lights. Newspaper editors, including Greeley's Democratic rival William Cullen Bryant, also joined the new party.37

  In the harsh, divisive fall campaign, free-soil hecklers in Chicago drowned out a speech by Senator Douglas. Former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln, eyeing a future seat in the U.S. Senate, hit the same campaign trail, challenging Douglas and supporting antislavery candidates for the Illinois legislature.† Lincoln remained a Whig in name for another year, even as he voiced the credo of the new Republican party: "Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a sacred right of self-government. These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and whoever holds to the one must despise the other."38

  Republicans and other antislavery candidates swept the North in 1854, depriving the Democrats of control in the House and in every northern state legislature except Massachusetts and Delaware. Those two states elected majorities from a new and powerful nativist party, dubbed the "Know Nothings" because members claimed to know nothing when asked about their secretive organization. These nativists also attracted a huge number of votes in Pennsylvania, New York, and several other northeastern and border states. Their main goal was to check the growing political power of immigrants by extending the waiting period for naturalization required by federal and state laws.

  After nativism crested and subsided in 1844, the flood of immigration between 1845 and 1854 had packed America's slums even more densely with Irish and German refugees, triggering a fresh wave of xenophobia. Urban crime rates, along with municipal spending on the poor, increased dramatically. Resentment and violence against the new arrivals, particularly against Irish Catholics, were generated as often by more established Protestant immigrants from England, Scotland, and Ireland as by American-born nativists. Targeting Irish and German immigrants, who tended to congregate in groggeries and beer gardens, temperance advocates also provoked ethnic conflict in the early 1850s, with successful campaigns for prohibition in more than a dozen states.39

  Never one to shrink from confrontation, Archbishop John Hughes of New York gloried in the rapidly increasing number of Catholic churchgoers, which far outstripped the growth of Protestant churches in the previous decade. "The object we hope to accomplish is to convert all Pagan nations, and all Protestant nations," Hughes proclaimed in a widely reprinted speech, The Decline of Protestantism and Its Causes. "There is no secrecy in all this . . . Our mission [is] to convert the world—including the inhabitants of the United States—the people of the cities, and the people of the country . . . the Legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all!" Protestantism was on its deathbed, the archbishopric's newspaper declared, and "its last moment is come when it is fairly set, face to face, with Catholic truth."40

  Abolitionists, nativists, and prohibitionists had common roots in the evangelical Protestantism of the Second Great Awakening, and members of all three groups tended to oppose both slavery and the Catholic Church. Therefore, when Know Nothings voiced their opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Republicans took care to distinguish themselves by condemning nativism, just as they did the Democratic party's virulent racism. However, some Republicans also formed alliances with the Know Nothings' American party in an attempt to control and supplant it, as both groups vied to become the main alternative to the Democrats in the mid-1850s.

  By 1856, a Republican had been elected Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives—thanks in part to Greeley's presence in the House cloakroom, where he buttonholed congressmen and wielded the threat of censure in his powerful Tribune to enforce party discipline. The Republican party was thus firmly established, while a precipitous decline in immigration after 1854 helped rob the American party of its momentum. More important, most northerners had come to regard anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant hysteria as a sideshow compared to the conflict over slavery's expansion. "Popular sovereignty" had turned Kansas into a savage killing zone.41

  After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, abolitionists and slaveholders both rushed settlers to Kansas, where widespread violence erupted as each side strove to dominate the referendum and determine the fate of slavery in the state. Greeley had never been an abolitionist and publicly denounced the bloodshed, but he also helped send rifles to Kansas for the free-soil forces wh
ile using the Tribune to encourage settlement and fan the flames of a conflict that, as it grew, helped foster unity under the Republican tent.42

  "We are playing for a mighty stake," Senator David Atchison of Missouri declared to a colleague. "If we win we carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean, if we fail we lose Missouri Arkansas Texas and all the territories." He told Jefferson Davis, "We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang" the abolitionists, "but the thing will soon be over." Senator William Seward of New York in turn confronted southern senators: "Since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it on behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right."43

  *The Tribune also had a weekly edition distributed outside of New York City.

  *"Soap-locks" were street toughs who stiffened their long hair with soap, much as styling gel is used today.

  † A grocery that served liquor was called a grocery-groggery.

  *McGee's newspaper should not be confused with the antislavery magazine The Nation, founded in 1865 and still being published today.

  † 'Tippecanoe" was Harrison's log cabin home that Whig campaign managers invented to give him popular appeal.

  *The compromise designated Missouri a slave state, the only one permitted north of that line.

  *Before the expansion of the United States from coast to coast, the upper Midwest was known as the Northwest.

  † U.S. senators were not yet elected directly by the people, but rather by the state legislature.

  CHAPTER 4

  Frernando Wood, the "Southern"

  Mayor of New York

  t is all very well for gentlemen to get up here and clamor about the wrongs and outrages of the southern slaves," declared Mike Walsh on the floor of the House in 1854, "but, sir, even in New York, during the last year, there have been over thirteen hundred people deprived of their liberty without any show or color of offense, but because they were poor, and too honest to commit a crime." Arguing that the "white wages slave of the North" was worse off than the black slave in the South, the Irish American, Democratic congressman from New York continued: "If a dozen of us own a horse in common, we want to ride him as much as possible, and feed him as little as possible. [Laughter] But if you or I own a horse exclusively, we will take good care to feed him well, and not drive him too much to endanger his health."1

  The North's largely immigrant working class saw no attraction in the new Republican party, in which its Protestant enemies— abolitionists, prohibitionists, nativists, and former Whigs—were mingling. While industrialization threatened to turn workers into "wage slaves," Protestant evangelicals distinguished clearly between chattel slavery and wage work and insisted that the poor were responsible for their own plight; individual integrity and effort, they preached, determined a free laborer's lot in life—not the impersonal forces of the economy or the rapacity of capitalist employers. Thus, to most urban laborers, the abolition of slavery seemed a false and misguided philanthropy which bemoaned the suffering of blacks in the faraway South while neglecting the worker at home, whose job depended on trade with the cotton kingdom.2

  Moreover, the evil of slavery in the South hardly seemed urgent when, every year, more than half the children in New York City's slums died from disease before the age of five, and the death rate for children younger than two years old stood at 70 percent. Overcrowding had pushed the city's overall mortality rate to a record high of forty deaths per thousand residents in 1845—and it remained at that level nine years later in 1854. Only weeks after the Astor Place riots in 1849, a cholera epidemic wiped out more than five thousand of the city's poorest residents, while the wealthy fled to the suburbs. Cholera afflicted the slums again in 1852, as did an epidemic of typhus. African Americans and immigrants alike suffered huge increases in the number of tuberculosis cases.3

  In a single year, between 1853 and 1854, inflation drove the cost of living up by almost a third, while wages failed to keep pace. Labor unions, resurgent with the economic boom of the previous ten years, organized frequent strikes when employers did not honor agreements. While the unions strove to smooth over differences between American, Irish, German, French, and workers of other nationalities, they did not welcome African Americans or women into their ranks.

  When white male workers representing seventy unions and twenty-eight reform groups had formed the international Industrial Congress in 1850, and formulated the demands that remained central to organized labor's agenda for the rest of the nineteenth century, they focused on "an eight-hour day, a minimum wage on public works projects, and direct city hiring of workers rather than the use of private contractors." They also called for laws to regulate the building and maintenance of tenements, enforcement of public health codes, and public baths and libraries. For those who chose to leave the city, they supported a homestead law to enable workers to settle in the West.

  In New York, the groundswell of labor activity in the early 1850s included both the formation of unions and worker cooperatives as well as huge demonstrations, protests at City Hall, and some violent clashes, including a riot at 38th Street and Ninth Avenue, on August 4, 1850, in which hundreds of German tailors confronted subcontractors who were violating the citywide tailors' strike. The police intervened, and two tailors were killed while dozens suffered serious injuries. It was the first fatal clash between striking urban workers and the authorities in U.S. history.

  Given the recent flood of immigration, the European upheavals of 1848, and the Astor Place riots of 1849, employers were quick to conclude, as the Herald put it, that "vast importations of foreign socialists" had triggered the unrest. German refugees, for example, who had fought in the revolts of 1848, were in fact influential, but they were joining forces with New York's homegrown labor movement, which had simply been dormant until the economy had recovered in the mid-1840s. By 1853, however, the labor movement as a whole remained divided as the new Amalgamated Trades Convention focused on wages and work rules, while turning away from the immigrant revolutionaries' calls for a labor party and sweeping political change.4

  In 1853, Louis Napoleon, having made himself emperor of France in the wake of the tumultuous uprisings of 1848, commissioned Baron Haussmann to reshape Paris drastically with imperial boulevards too wide for rebel barricades. Worried upper-class New Yorkers looked at Manhattan's volatile slums and immigrant enclaves, and despite their democratic ideals, yearned for a forceful leader to clean up the city.5

  The City Reform League, founded a year earlier by William Dodge, Stephen Whitney, and other wealthy merchants, named industrialist Peter Cooper its president in 1853 and crusaded against high taxes, unbridled spending, and corruption perpetrated by the Tammany-controlled Common Council.* Housed in City Hall, this legislative branch of the city government consisted of a board of aldermen and a board of assistant aldermen elected by each ward.6

  The municipal government had always been riddled with corruption, but a crop of particularly hungry, lower-middle-class businessmen was elected to the council in 1851. Their rise coincided with the reversal of a longstanding policy regarding street railroads: The council decided to grant franchises to railroad companies, allowing them to compete with operators of horse-drawn omnibuses by attaching horses to their trains below Thirty-second Street. This created a bidding war that enriched the aldermen and helped unleash an unprecedented wave of graft. Dubbed the "Forty Thieves," after the street gang, the Common Council embarked on a two-year frenzy of municipal corruption from 1852 to 1853, selling off the city's assets—land, wharves, ferry franchises—or giving them away to cronies, while lining its members' pockets with kickbacks.7

  Aldermen awarded sanitation contracts to dishonest or inept street-cleaning companies. They also blocked housing codes and labor laws to shield favored businessmen and created or protected monopolies. The sale of franchises to the railroads proceeded without any planning or coordination of the city's
transportation system. From 1850 to 1853, taxes had increased 54 percent, while spending by the city had shot up 70 percent in the past two years. The growing use of revenue anticipation bonds, facilitated by a new law in 1852, was endangering the city's creditworthiness.8

  Alderman William Tweed typified the parade of loyal small businessmen and street toughs—including artisans, grocers, saloon owners, and liquor dealers—with which Tammany had packed the Common Council. The burly, charismatic Tweed had been the foreman of a volunteer fire company when the department's chief engineer terminated him for arming his men with axes and starting a brawl with a competing outfit. Bent on displaying their prowess, young firemen routinely fought with each other; while buildings burned, they insisted on pumping water by hand instead of using modern steam engines.9

  In defense of the Common Council, Tweed pointed out that the street repairs, police stations, and prisons demanded by the public were expensive. "I ask the people if a city such as ours, daily receiving an immense population of the idle, degenerate, vicious, and good from all parts of the world, could be governed at less expense?" Indeed, reformers were also alarmed by the crime and mayhem spawned by Democratic rule, notably the release of gang members and other rioters from jail in 1852, which coincided with a rash of muggings.10

  Policemen took bribes and allowed illegal gambling houses to thrive in broad daylight, with firemen, thugs, and gang members as their patrons. Peter Cooper and his allies succeeded in revising the city charter in 1853, weakening the Common Council, strengthening the mayor, and reforming the police. Control of the police department became more centralized with the creation of a board of commissioners, which included the mayor, recorder, and city judges. In an attempt to separate law enforcement from ward politics, the charter specified that councilmen could no longer appoint police officers or preside as judges in municipal courts. With mandatory blue uniforms and job security pegged to performance, the police force became more disciplined and aggressive, collaring 40 percent more criminals the following year.11