The Epic of New York City (40 page)

This plain-speaking man was addressing an unusual pastor, since at first most ministers were hostile to abolitionism. After all, churches were built, pews rented, and ministerial salaries paid by the city's rich businessmen. The preachers, more concerned with buttering their bread than with trying on wings for size, hid behind tortured readings of the Scriptures. One New York cleric intoned from his pulpit that “slavery is a divine institution”; whereupon an abolitionist cried from his pew, “So is hell!”

Most newspapers also sided with the proslavery businessmen to safeguard advertising revenue. With Irish immigrants, wealthy merchants, preachers, and the press opposed to freeing the slaves, abolitionism was left in the hands of idealists and crackpots. They propagandized to arouse white men's consciences. Some hewed to just one line—liberation of slaves. Others—and they cracked the solidarity of the crusade—also clamored for different humanitarian causes, such as the rights of workers, the reformation of jails, the renunciation of debtors' prisons, more hospitals and orphanages, temperance, and equal rights for women.

Abolitionism's cradle was New England, and its creed was enunciated by two New England sons, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Until they began ranting about the injustice of slavery, advocates of Negro freedom had behaved quietly and decorously—so much so, in fact, that the evils of slavery were all but smothered under a conspiracy of silence.

In 1831, the year Horace Greeley arrived in New York, this conspiracy
was broken in Boston, broken violently by the appearance of Garrison's new periodical, the
Liberator.
In his first editorial Garrison roared:

Arthur Tappan's
Journal of Commerce
never had raised its voice this way. Garrison's
Liberator
fulminated for the next thirty-five years without interruption, and the name Garrison became a red flag to white Southerners and to many of their Northern business associates. Tappan once bailed Garrison out of a Baltimore jail. Georgia's state senate offered a $5,000 reward for the apprehension and conviction of Garrison in a Georgia court. A South Carolina editor wrote to the editor of the New York
Evening Star
that abolitionism could be “silenced in but one way—
Terror—Death.”

In 1832 there were seven morning and four evening newpapers in this city. Most vehemently opposed abolitionism. That year a twelfth paper, the New York
Sun,
was established by Benjamin H. Day. All the other papers sold for six cents a copy, but the
Sun
was priced at a penny. It was edited and printed at 222 William Street by Day, who vacillated on the issue of slavery versus freedom. He had a reporter and editor, named George W. Wisner, who was a passionate advocate of liberty for all Negroes. Day once grumbled, “Whenever Wisner got a chance, he was always sticking in his damned little abolitionist articles.”

On December 4, 1833, the American Antislavery Society was organized in Philadelphia, elected Arthur Tappan its first president, and voted to set up permanent headquarters in New York. Tappan promptly founded its official organ, the
Emancipator,
and chose for its editor a Congregational minister from Massachusetts, Joshua Leavitt. Every month Leavitt sent copies of the
Emancipator
to members of Congress, and every month twenty to thirty copies were returned with insults scribbled in the margins. One Southern lawmaker wrote: “You damned infernal psalm-singing, negro-stealing son-of-a-bitch,
if you ever show your damned hypocritical face in the dist. of Columbia, I will make my negroes cowhide you to death!”

The governor of Alabama complained to the governor of New York about the
Emancipator.
Tappan was marked for assassination. Vigilante groups were formed throughout the South. The New Orleans Vigilante Committee offered $20,000 for the capture of New York's Arthur Tappan. At Charleston, South Carolina, Tappan was hanged in effigy. A storekeeper in Norfolk, Virginia, took up a subscription for the delivery of Tappan's dripping head to him.

Even in New York abolitionists were attacked, and their homes were stoned. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist writer, said after one New York antislavery meeting, “I have not ventured into the city nor does one of us dare to go to church today . . . so great is the excitement here. 'Tis like the times of the French Revolution when no one dared trust his neighbors.”

On the evening of July 9, 1834, some Negroes met in the Chatham Street Chapel to hear a sermon by a Negro minister. In the audience sat the white abolitionist Lewis Tappan, a jaunty figure despite his Puritanical heritage. The meeting had just begun when members of the New York Sacred Music Society broke in to proclaim that they had rented the place for the evening. The Negroes, who had paid for use of the chapel, refused to leave. There was an exchange of words, then blows.

White men beat Negroes with lead-loaded canes, seriously injuring two or three of them. The fight attracted a crowd, and a riot was in the making when the police arrived and drove both whites and blacks from the chapel. The fracas continued on the street. Tappan walked away toward his home on Rose Street, just behind the present Municipal Building. Recognized as a damned abolitionist, he was followed by a yelling mob that pelted his residence with stones after he had run inside.

The next evening another proslavery crowd, still spoiling for a fight, gathered in front of the chapel. Its doors were locked, but the agitators broke in and held an impromptu meeting. A rabble-rouser, named W. W. Wilder, lashed passions with a speech denouncing abolitionists, and as the meeting closed, there came cries of “To the Bowery Theatre!”

Opened in 1826, the Bowery Theatre was the nation's first gas-lighted playhouse and it seated 3,000 persons. It stood at the present 50 Bowery on the southeastern corner of the approach to the present
Manhattan Bridge. Burned down and rebuilt many times, it remained one of America's foremost theaters for nearly a century. That night of July 10, 1834, a benefit performance was being given for an English actor, George Percy Farren, whose cross-grained comments about Americans had irked New Yorkers.

The crowd at the chapel somehow got the idea that the Englishman's alleged anti-Americanism meant that he was an abolitionist. Leaving the chapel, rowdies headed for the theater, picking up reinforcements along the way, their menacing roars being heard in the showplace before their arrival. The theater doors were slammed shut, but when the mob got there, it burst through them, interrupting a performance by the American tragedian Edwin Forrest. From the stage he tried to pacify the intruders but was howled down. Before the Englishman could be found and maimed, the police appeared and herded everyone out of the theater.

Now agitators howled, “To Arthur Tappan's house!” Taking up the cry, the mob raced back down the Bowery, changed its collective mind, and turned instead toward the home of Lewis Tappan. He and his family escaped just before the throng surged into sight. The rioters took Tappan's place apart, stick by stick, saving only a painting of George Washington. Then they rampaged through town, torturing Negroes, raping prostitutes, and gouging out an Englishman's eyes and tearing off his ears.

This human violence followed on the heels of a natural catastrophe, for just two years earlier the city had been plagued by Asiatic cholera. For centuries the deadly disease had ravaged the Far East, but it did not spread to the Western Hemisphere until the nineteenth century. In 1831 cholera reached England, leaping from there to Ireland. The early part of June, 1832, an Irish immigrant ship brought the infection to Quebec, and on June 27 the first cases appeared in New York City.

A Mrs. Fitzgerald and her two children were found dead in their apartment at 75 Cherry Street. The police took one look and called a doctor. The deceased bore the unmistakable marks of Asiatic cholera: bodies shrunken from loss of fluid, skin dry and wrinkled, tongues white and dry, eyeballs shrunken, faces pinched, and cheeks hollow.

When the city fathers understood the situation, they ordered the streets cleaned as never before. This did no good. A coroner's jury sat in the case of a cholera victim found dead on a Harlem road, and of the twenty witnesses and jurors who appeared, nine soon died of cholera themselves. Terrified townspeople clustered in churches to
pray for deliverance. Board of health figures were appalling: On Saturday, July 14, there were 115 new cases and 66 deaths; Sunday, 133 new cases, 74 deaths; and Monday, 163 new cases, 94 deaths. Doctors treated patients with dry friction, dry heat, opium, and brandy—without much effect. Every picture of a cholera patient of the period shows a brandy glass at his head.

Aside from going to church, most people stayed home. One lawyer took up the study of Greek to while away the clientless hours. Then panic set in. First to flee were the rich, who departed in such haste that they left their fine houses in shambles. They headed toward New Jersey, Westchester County, Far Rockaway, the eastern tip of Long Island, and Connecticut. Cornelius Vanderbilt now ran a fleet of steamships on Long Island Sound, and he and other steamboatmen profited from the panic. They sent overcrowded vessels to Connecticut ports, where alarmed citizens brandished pitchforks and guns and refused to let the ships dock. Driven from the harbors, the craft nosed along the Connecticut coast until they found deserted beaches where New Yorkers could land.

The next few weeks even the city's poor ran for their lives, fathers carrying tots in their arms, women clutching bags of food, and boys leading horse-drawn carts piled with pitiful belongings. Roads became traffic nightmares of plunging horses and cursing men and frightened refugees. That horror-haunted summer of 1832 nearly half the population of a quarter million left the city. But the poorest of the poor, the Irish of the Five Points, lacked the means to get out of town. The Five Points lay in the city's Sixth Ward, an area northeast of City Hall, and one-third of all cholera cases occurred in this ward. Business was paralyzed. Streets were empty. A butcher riding a cart from Houston Street down Broadway to Fulton Street in broad daylight saw no one en route except two watchmen.

In proportion to population, this was the worst epidemic in the city's history. Nearly 4,000 persons died of cholera between June 27 and October 19, 1832.

Plague was followed by fire. About 9
P.M
. on December 16, 1835, a watchman was passing the corner of Merchant (now Beaver) Street and Pearl Street when he smelled smoke. In those days Beaver Street was narrow and crooked and filled with tall stores recently put up by dry goods merchants and hardware dealers. The watchman sounded the alarm for the city's worst fire in that era of disasters.

Fifty-five-year-old Philip Hone, the retired auctioneer and diarist, was writing in the library of his $25,000 house at 235 Broadway. Just a few blocks away at that very moment the city's other great diarist, fifteen-year-old George Templeton Strong, lolled in his bedroom of his father's three-story brick house at 108 Greenwich Street near Rector Street. A slender, fair-haired, precocious lad, G. T. Strong was a sophomore at Columbia College. Both he and Hone noted in their diaries that they first heard the fire alarm at about 9
P.M.
Strong said that the temperature stood exactly at zero.

A northwester of nearly gale force scudded over icy streets and lashed snow into frozen surf. The moment Hone heard the news, he bundled up and struggled through the storm to see what was going on. Strong's father had a law office on Wall Street, but at first the elder Strong didn't think it necessary to plunge into the howling wind to look after his place. Soon, though, a man rushed into the Strong household and awakened the attorney, and the two then dashed into the night.

The fire started on the first floor of a five-story warehouse at 25 Merchant Street, at the corner of Pearl Street. This ground floor was rented by Comstock & Andrews, fancy dry goods jobbers. Apparently the blaze was caused by an overheated pipe. The watchman who discovered the fire was joined by fellow patrolmen, and they forced open the front door. The interior, filled with bolts of cloth and clothing, was such an inferno that the men backed away and tried to latch the door in place. At that moment flames licked through the roof. Wind-borne embers dashed against stores on the other side of Pearl Street, and within fifteen minutes the dumbfounded watchmen counted fifty other buildings ablaze.

Cholera had decimated the strength of the city's volunteer firemen. What's more, the previous night the fire fighters had battled a big conflagration at Burling Slip on the East River, and when the new alarm sounded, they were so exhausted that they responded slowly. Half an hour passed before they put the first water on the flames. Everything was pitted against them. Shorthanded and already worn out, they manned antiquated equipment. The city's water supply was scanty. Cisterns, wells, and most fire hydrants were frozen. Firemen had to beat their hoses to keep water from congealing in them. This worked for a while, but no sooner would water spray from a nozzle than it turned to ice in the air and fell as hail. Unremitting pressure
of the ferocious wind lowered the water level of the East River just enough so that firemen on the docks above couldn't reach it with suction hoses. So the frustrated, exhausted, shivering firemen could do little more than watch as a large section of town went up in flames.