America Aflame (22 page)

The Republicans' campaign erased any line between religion and politics. Churches became party gathering places; ministers stumped for the party's candidates and even served as poll watchers. Frémont and his wife capped the campaign on election eve by attending the “Church of the Holy Rifles,” as evangelicals proudly called Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. The congregation gave the couple a rousing ovation.
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The ubiquity of religious rhetoric and imagery in the Republican campaign, however, further polarized an already divided Union. One minister depicted the upcoming election as “a decisive struggle … between freedom and Slavery, truth and falsehood, justice and oppression, God and the devil.” The Republican faithful chimed in with an Election Day spiritual: “Think that God's eye is on you; / Let not your faith grow dim; / For each vote cast for Frémont / Is a vote cast for Him!”
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Away from the pulpit, Republican campaigners sometimes found tough going in the North. A portion of the northern electorate perceived the Republicans as a gilded version of the radical anti-slavery parties of the 1840s, promoting racial equality and emancipation to the detriment of the white population, an association the Democrats exploited. As Lincoln stumped for the ticket in Illinois, he confronted hecklers at numerous places throughout the state. The Democratic press charged him with “niggerism.”
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Buchanan and the Democrats emerged victorious. The only national party had won a national election. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Indiana, and California voted for Buchanan, who swept the Lower South. Buchanan's victory, though, was narrow in these northern states; the Republicans performed remarkably well considering it was the first time they had fielded a presidential candidate. They had achieved a “victorious defeat” and eagerly looked forward to good prospects of prying at least Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois from the Democratic column in 1860.
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The South had not yet lapsed into one-party politics. Fillmore garnered 40 percent of the popular vote in the South but won only the state of Maryland. He fared poorly in the Lower South. The states that had the greatest stake in slavery voted solidly Democratic.

Frémont and Fillmore combined outpolled Buchanan in the popular vote, 2.2 million votes to 1.8 million. The Democratic candidate achieved a majority in the electoral college, however, primarily as a result of his strong showing in the South. The results were not comforting for southerners. An upstart avowedly anti-slavery party had carried eleven free states.

The Republicans, except for a radical fringe, loved the Union as much as the Democrats did. The issue was never union or disunion but the nature of the national compact. The Republicans believed that the preservation of the Union was inseparable from the founding ideals and that those ideals were incompatible with the institution of slavery. They perceived a dynamic and prosperous nation and welcomed the changes that flowed all around them, from the settlement of the West to the peopling of the great cities of the East. They believed that slavery, and particularly slaveholders—the Slave Power—impeded both the operation of American ideals and the fulfillment of the nation's great potential. Republicans also agreed that the United States could never fulfill its role as a beacon to the world as long as it sustained the institution of slavery. Most Republicans were not abolitionists because they were constitutionalists. The law of the land was the law of the land. But the territories were another matter.

The Democrats, and more particularly the southern Democrats, cherished the Union as well. They perceived no contradiction between slavery and America's founding precepts. Many of the Founding Fathers, after all, had owned slaves, and although the word “slavery” never appears in the Constitution, the basis of representation and the return of fugitives clearly implied the Founders' tolerance of the institution. Besides, the nation had existed for nearly seventy years as a blend of free states and slave states, and during this time America had attained a continental empire, influence around the world, and untold prosperity. It would be an overstatement to declare that the Republicans looked to the Union of the future, and the Democrats, particularly the southern Democrats, perceived the Union from the perspective of the founding, but if northerners marched confidently into the future, southerners entered tomorrow with trepidation.

Abraham Lincoln retired to his law practice once again. Alexander Stephens, buoyed by the election of Buchanan, looked forward to working with the new administration and reducing sectional animosity in Congress and the nation. President-elect Buchanan spent the days before his inauguration settling his cabinet picks, a majority of whom were southerners, and in discussing various points of law with Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland.

Out on the Plains, Kansas remained on political tenterhooks, and bands of Lakota Sioux vowed to continue their way of life. The young warrior Light Hair became proficient with bow and arrow. One day, he joined his father on a routine raiding party against the Omaha, seizing livestock, an increasingly necessary activity as the buffalo dwindled. Light Hair claimed his first kill in the battle—a young Omaha woman—an act that earned him derision from his peers.

A year or so later, about the time James Buchanan took the oath of office as president, Light Hair killed two men in a raid on another tribe. In this skirmish he had demonstrated skill and courage, and soon all in camp talked about his bravery. Light Hair's father, a respected medicine man, decided it was time for his son to receive a name more in keeping with a Sioux warrior. In a brief but moving religious ceremony attended by the elders following a tradition as old as the wind that blew across the Plains, the tribe bestowed a new name on Light Hair. Henceforth, the land, his people, and his gods would know him as Crazy Horse.

CHAPTER 6

REVIVAL

THE MEN,
somber-faced and silent, decked out in the urban middle-class uniform of black broadcloth and white shirts, ascended the wooden staircase to a large, sparsely furnished room. They stood or took the few chairs, opened their Bibles to pray, spoke of their conversion, and begged for forgiveness. They sang a hymn and went back down the stairs and out into the street crowded with lunchtime shoppers and businessmen purposefully headed somewhere. The worshipers had skipped lunch to read God's word and sing His praises in the fellowship of other men. It was autumn in New York, and the chill air hinted at winter's arrival.
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The streets seemed more crowded now than a week or a month ago: scruffy children with their hands out; beggars beseeching a penny or a piece of bread. An economic depression, called a “Panic,” had halted prosperity with a thunderclap of vengeance. Wild speculation in western lands and railroads, the bane of frontier regions, had infested eastern financial centers. Rationality succumbed to the fever. Was not progress unending? Was not gold flowing from California? Never mind that the value of railroad stock reflected the hopes of promoters much more than the value of their railroads. A ship carrying millions in gold bullion from California to back the paper currency financing the fever sank. A bank failed. Then others, suddenly chastened, began to call in loans, and the call fell on deaf ears. British banks withdrew their funds from New York banks. Manufacturers could no longer fuel their expansion with borrowed capital as lenders closed their books, and then their doors. Inventories piled up; workers were dismissed; and the misery mounted with the cold weather. It had all happened so quickly: “in broad daylight and in fair weather, the blast came, in obedience to its own laws of existence and motion.”
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The winter of 1857–58 would be hard. Already, children were dying in the squalid Irish warrens of lower Manhattan, and the poor in other cities would soon feel the harsh blast of a most miserable winter. Few could afford enough food, and fewer still coal to keep warm. Contemporary sources estimated that anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 people lost their jobs in New York alone; 40,000 in Philadelphia; and 20,000 in Chicago. As the ripples of default spread out from Gotham, few escaped the Panic's impact. Carl Schurz's career as a real estate speculator and rising businessman in small-town Wisconsin came to an abrupt end. Facing severe financial embarrassment, the loss of his property, and even the ability to provide food for his family, Schurz took to the lecture circuit, eking out a living, studying law at night, hoping a career change would alter his fortunes. New York's
Journal of Commerce
, whose columns once touted new stock offerings, incredible inventions, and surefire advice on amassing fortunes, now proffered this poetic nostrum: “Steal awhile away from Wall Street and every worldly care / And spend an hour about mid-day in humble, hopeful prayer.”
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That this should be happening in America's greatest city seemed all the more incredible. By 1857 Americans had come to understand the fragility of their democratic institutions; now they confronted the frailty of their dreams as embodied in the nation's burgeoning cities. The city was as much a destination for young men and women of ambition as the West. And like the West, the young nation's freewheeling spirit permeated the chock-a-block offices and residences of New York.

As America's cities transitioned from commercial entrepôts to diverse centers of trade, industry, and services in the 1840s, they forged a national economy that sustained unprecedented economic growth and energy. Walt Whitman, whose poetry mimicked the brashness of the city, liked nothing better than to stroll down Broadway, his hat cocked at a rakish angle, with a flower in his buttonhole and a cane swinging by his side, to revel in the myriad sights and sounds of a metropolis that seemingly changed before his eyes and ears: “The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders, / The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor …/ The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of the rous'd mobs.”
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Such excitement was not for everyone, and the city began a geographic sorting-out process to shield those who could afford a quiet residence from those who could not, and to group like activities together for efficiency and profit—here a retail area, there an industrial enclave, and further away a middle-class residential neighborhood. The city characterized by eclectic land uses, a livery stable next to a dry goods shop, on top of which residences were located, was disappearing. A writer in
Harper's
in the 1850s complained that New York “is never the same city for a dozen years altogether,” and that anyone born there forty years ago would “find nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew.” New Yorkers swarmed up the narrow island as soon as and even faster than developers could plat lots. “How this city marches northward!” marveled attorney George Templeton Strong in 1850.
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New York's growth was nothing short of astonishing, not only by American but also by global standards. Between 1800 and 1850, Manhattan grew by 750 percent, the highest rate of urban growth in the world during that period. Immigrants from Germany and Ireland, raw farm boys like Walt Whitman, and hopeful girls and their families from small towns streamed into the nation's metropolis until New York came to be the synonym for a dynamic America: “the great city of New York wields more of the destinies of this great nation than five times the population of any other portion of the country.”
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The rapid expansion of retail, banking, industry, and commerce spawned newer occupations in law, insurance, real estate, education, hotel and restaurant management, and financial services. Usually salaried positions, these occupations expanded the middle class—the readership for Greeley's
Tribune
, the patrons of the theater, the population for new subdivisions, and the consumers of things. This quintessential urban class was defined less by occupation and income—though obviously that counted—than by where they lived, how they spent their leisure time, the churches they went to, the books and magazines they read, and what they consumed.

Tales of the city fascinated other Americans just as the saga of the westward movement had captured their imagination. Many of these accounts made clear, however, that success in the city sometimes came at a price. Lurid titles such as George Foster's series
New York in Slices, New York by Gas-Light
, and
New York Naked
became best sellers. Rather than repelling readers, these stories rendered the city even more alluring. Foster was a guide of the city much as Frémont was a guide of the West, and negotiating the streets of New York at night could be just as exciting as riding through the Sioux country out west. If the West was redolent of a special freedom for Americans, so was the city. The city, like the West, represented a new beginning, a casting off of custom and tradition, a regeneration of the American experiment. Cities were “electric transformers” and “accelerators of all historical time.”
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Foster told of liberated men and women enjoying the day- and nightlife of bustling, bawdy New York. The new urban woman was a particular delight to Foster's readers. Lize, a recurring character in his stories, “never feels herself at home but at the theater or the dance.… She is perfectly willing to work for a living, works hard and cheerfully, as any day laborer or journeyman mechanic of the other sex.” Foster assures readers that Lize is not a housewife but an independent working woman: “She rises before the sun … swallows her frugal breakfast in a hurry, puts a still more frugal dinner in her little tin kettle …, and starts off to her daily labor.… From six to six o'clock she works steadily, with little gossip and no interruption save the hour from twelve to one, devoted to dinner.” This rigorous schedule—the hard work for which Americans were famous—does not dull Lize's demeanor or disposition. “Her very walk has a swing of mischief and defiance in it, and the tones of her voice are loud, hearty, and free.”
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Lize exemplified what Americans found intriguing about the city. She enjoyed life, she played and worked hard, she was independent, and she flouted tradition. She was distinctive, as the city was distinctive, as America was distinctive. To readers across the country, in small towns and farms—where most Americans still lived—these were the alluring aspects of urban life. They realized, as one magazine editor stated, that “the great things in history have not been done in the country.… If [a person] has talent and ambition, he will surely burst away from the relentless tedium of potatoes and corn, and earn more money in an hour by writing a paragraph exhorting people to go and hoe corn and potatoes, than he would by hoeing them for a day.”
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While Americans found the city alluring, at least in literature, they also held reservations about the urban explosion. Much as some worried that a continental empire would stretch the democratic fabric to the breaking point, they expressed concern that cities and their diverse populations threatened the nation's future as well. “In the formation of a nation's education,” wrote one woman at mid-century, “as of a national character, the country more than the city must control. The city becomes cosmopolitan; its people, blending all nationalities, lose distinctive national characteristics, and … love of country as well.”
10

The rapid growth of evangelical Protestantism in the nineteenth century was fueled in part by a perception of urban godlessness. Roman Catholics concentrated in cities, and the city generally tended to erode Christian piety. The fact that New York City contained more than two hundred known houses of prostitution by the 1850s confirmed the erosion of faith. In such circumstances, the task of ministers was clear. As Henry Ward Beecher declared from his pulpit in Brooklyn, “We must preach Him IN THE CITIES; for nowhere else is the need of this greater, and nowhere else are the opportunities for doing it more numerous and inviting.”
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Beecher also wrote “Lectures to Young Men,” advising them on appropriate conduct in the new urban environment where temptations abounded. The Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) appeared in Boston in 1851 and soon spread to other cities. Here was a place where young bank tellers, salesmen, attorneys, journalists, and clerks could expand their minds and protect their souls. These and like associations did not so much shield their charges from the city as they prepared them to cope with the challenges of urban living. “This desire to press forward in the path of improvement, this ambition to excel,” wrote one young member, “is one of the noblest attributes of the mind.… It is the power which, guided and directed by the grace of God, is destined to reform the world.” Adherence to God and Christian virtues could harness the energy of the city to greater personal and national objectives.
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Just whose God reigned in the cities? The God of Abraham or the God of Mammon? As medieval urban dwellers had built cathedrals to express their faith, nineteenth-century city dwellers constructed department stores and brokerage houses as the palaces of their faith. Urban households enjoyed much larger disposable incomes than the rural families. City families in the mid-nineteenth century spent, on average, about three times as much per year as rural households. As advertisements cluttered the penny presses and new emporia sprang up to satisfy the demands of the burgeoning urban population, the city became a retail extravaganza.

Few establishments epitomized this urban affluence more than the department store. A. T. Stewart had arrived in New York from Belfast in 1825. He parlayed the savings and hard work from his dry goods business to open the aptly named “Marble Palace” department store in 1846. The glittering chandeliers, the wide aisles, the burnished mahogany counters, and the dazzling array of merchandise thrilled customers, who felt they were participating in an event merely by entering such an establishment. Many pressed their noses against the large plate-glass windows, and a new phrase—“window shopping”—was born. The stores became spaces for middle-class women, few of whom worked outside the home, but whose role was to decorate, purchase, and plan a household. The independence of the young, single working girl, exemplified by George Foster's Lize, percolated up the social ladder to middle-class women. But class was not the theme of the department store; here was a democratic space, where salesgirls, native-born or immigrant, and shoppers of all varieties mingled. A widely read book on urban etiquette published in the 1850s,
Miss Leslie's Behavior Book,
counseled readers about department-store protocol: “Testify no impatience if a servant-girl, making a six penny purchase, is served before you.” In department stores, “the rule of ‘first come, first served,' is rigidly observed.”
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By the 1850s, all the major cities boasted these commercial palaces. Boston's Jordan Marsh, Philadelphia's Wanamaker and Brown, New York's Lord and Taylor, and Chicago's Marshall Field's were the marvels of their day as residents and tourists alike gaped at first sight of the latest innovations in retail establishments. The palaces were part of a new downtown, more exclusively given over to commercial and industrial uses. Those who could afford to do so moved uptown. They became commuters and, in some cases, suburbanites.
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Moving to the suburbs was a variation on the theme of westward movement. If abundance of land, the opportunity for work, and the possibility of success motivated the trekkers to the Pacific, they also accounted for the mobility to and from the cities of mid-nineteenth-century America. To own land and a home was a marker of success regardless of the geography. It represented less a rejection of the urban milieu than an opportunity to fulfill the American dream. Americans during this era learned to move easily from natural to man-made environments, remaking the natural to suit modern sensibilities and softening the artificial to remain connected to nature. A middle landscape, in other words, an ability to appreciate both places. It was the way Americans came to accept their urban civilization, despite misgivings, and take it for their own.