America Aflame (23 page)

By the 1850s, the nation had gone too far in pursuit of urban life to turn back nostalgically to an earlier, more rural America. Cities had become the centers of innovation and wealth, and the egalitarian spirit flourished there contrary to fears that urban air would stifle democracy. Whatever problems accompanied urban life could be solved. This, after all, was America. If poverty existed, and it did, apply the new social science methodology, rationalize charity, and solve the problem. If crime and fire added to cities' growing pains, and they did, establish professional police and firefighting forces. If crowded cities generated health problems and epidemic diseases, and they did, provide cleaner drinking water, systematize public health services, and develop parks for esthetic and recreational pleasure. The American city stood on the cutting edge of a cutting-edge country. Some streets were paved, gas lighting adorned the thoroughfares, sewer systems flushed many city streets, water tasted more like a drink than a liquid menace, and all citizens could enjoy a stroll in the park on a Sunday afternoon.
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America's burgeoning cities inspired awe but no longer surprise. In fact, compared with Chicago's, Denver's, and San Francisco's, New York's growth seemed measured. Instant cities were the rage out West. As soon as migrants reached a likely place, down went streets and up went buildings. Immigrants from Europe and Asia eagerly sought these new places believing, correctly in most cases, that with everyone a newcomer, they stood about as good a chance at success as anyone.

Was there anything Americans could not accomplish, even turning crowded cities into airy gardens, solving the age-old scourges of disease and fire, and spreading wealth far and wide, not merely among a privileged elite but to anyone who would work hard? The ideals behind such achievements transcended the city or the farm. They were American principles of faith playing out in cities, on farms, and in the long wagon trains westward. Americans, those who came with hope to the new cities from near and very far, those who traveled westward with equal optimism, and even those who stayed put, pausing for a moment, a year, to persist here for the time being, and then maybe moving on if things did not work out right, or even if things did. All believed they were special, beyond Europe, beyond history; a new race of people, closer to God, and closer to His coming.

And each was as good as the other, a democracy of transcendence, Whitman wrote: “Come to us on equal terms. Only then can you understand us. We are not better than you. What we enclose you enclose. What we enjoy you may enjoy.” Americans were all pioneers, trekking to uncharted territory and by the dint of hard work and faith creating a new nation, and ultimately a redeemed world. “All the past we leave behind,” Whitman wrote. “We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world, / Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O pioneers!” Americans would conquer all obstacles: “We primeval forests felling, / We the rivers stemming, vexing we, and piercing deep the mines within; / We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving, Pioneers! O pioneers!”
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Americans stood apart from history. Other peoples and races were still bound to the historical inevitabilities of rise, fall, and extinction, be they Mexicans, Indians, or Africans. The chroniclers of America's new history, such as George Bancroft, projected a straight line of infinite progress watched over by Providence. Americans were new men and women connected to a new destiny. “Whenever a mind is simple,” Emerson wrote, “and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour.… The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.… [H]istory is an impertinence and an injury.” Americans were “born with knives in their brains,” Emerson declared, cutting through centuries of dead wisdom to sculpt a new individual and a new nation.
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Which is why the economic crash of 1857 sent city men to their knees. It was all so unexpected. What had they done to God to derail the nation from its divine mission? If the rush and the glitter of the mid-nineteenth-century city had made the poor invisible, the Panic revealed them and many more. The small-town, small-shop, small-farm American economy was transforming, and in such transitions many benefited, but some were left far behind. Fifty years earlier, the top 1 percent of income earners owned 12 percent of the wealth. By the late 1850s, they controlled nearly one-third of the nation's wealth. Artisanal work was disappearing, and laborers crowded a market of low wages and few benefits. The separation between manual and mental labor grew wider, as did the compensation for each.

The economic downturn not only cost jobs and deepened urban poverty, it shattered the confidence of the flamboyant fifties when progress seemed limitless and when God appeared everywhere, on the street, within men, and across the American continent ratifying the words and deeds of His Chosen People; an era when steam engines conquered time and space, and when the western rivers and rocks offered up untold treasures, and when a few dollars down today would yield a fortune tomorrow. America transcended the western tribes, the contentious slaveholder, the culture-bound Catholic, the encrusted hierarchies of Old Europe. But the rising misery of the winter of 1857–58 sent stocks and confidence tumbling one after the other.

Walt Whitman, normally an ebullient drumbeater for his country and his city, wondered if the Panic reflected a deeper disaffection that portended the disintegration of American democracy. The prosperity and technological advances of the 1840s and 1850s and the extension of a continental empire had concealed troubling fissures in American society. Whitman's meanderings along the streets of New York distressed him, not only the squalor he encountered but also the gratuitous violence that flared from the bowels of the burgeoning tenement districts and occasionally spilled into nearby commercial and residential districts.
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Clashes between sectarian gangs accelerated in the mid-1850s. The city's Democratic political leadership, with its substantial Irish base, seemed uninterested in stemming the violence. The municipal police force was thoroughly corrupt and merely added to the chaos. An exasperated state administration formed the rival Metropolitan Police force in 1857 and ordered the city's force disbanded. When the mayor refused to carry out the order, the two forces joined battle in the streets. A court order succeeded in disbanding the city police on July 2, 1857. Two days later, the Irish “Dead Rabbits” and their Protestant rivals, the “Bowery Boys,” fought a pitched battle in Manhattan's “Bloody Sixth” Ward, home to the notorious Five Points slum. The state-appointed police force stood by helplessly. Security was scarcely better in other cities. When the Panic set in during the fall, worker demonstrations erupted across urban America, most notably in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, and Louisville. Americans feared for their cities and their democracy.
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The Panic of 1857 did not invent urban disorder, but the increasing violence did prompt the press and leading citizens to question the price of progress, perhaps for the first time. The unalloyed boosterism of the early 1850s dissolved into more sober reflection. In November 1858, a writer in
Harper's
catalogued the “rowdyism and anarchy which obtain in New York. Riots and crimes abound. Justice is not certain. The necessaries of life are notoriously and fatally adulterated. The laws are neither obeyed by the people nor executed by the magistracy.” Little wonder that George Templeton Strong found a society in extremis: “We are a very sick people. The outward and visible signs of disease, the cutaneous symptoms, are many.” New York, or any other mid-nineteenth-century American city, was neither as good as its boosters had declaimed nor as rotten as the growing chorus of detractors feared. Whatever the reality, a shift in perception had occurred. New evidence corroborated the view that disorder was on the rise and that it threatened American democracy.
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Gangs of New York: Paramilitary political gangs were not an invention of the Reconstruction-era South. Throughout (mostly northern) cities, groups of street gangs affiliated with rival political parties and divided by religious differences clashed. On July 4, 1857, the “Bowery Boys,” supporters of the Know Nothings, fought a pitched battle with their Irish Catholic adversaries, the “Dead Rabbits.” (Courtesty of the Library of Congress)

The fledgling science of society—social science—and its penchant for statistical compilations indicated that the trend of urban crime matched popular perceptions. One study showed that in a four-year period between 1848 and 1852, violent crimes increased by 129 percent in New York, fueled by a sixfold jump in murders. The press sensationalized the crime wave and undoubtedly contributed to the growing sense of urban lawlessness. The sensational became the routine: “Horrible murders, stabbings, and shootings, are now looked for in the morning papers with as much regularity as we look for our breakfast.” Whitman's beloved city had become to him “crime-haunted and dangerous,” ruled by the revolver.
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None of this sudden awareness of urban lawlessness surprised southern journalists, who had discussed the failure of “free” society for several years prior to the Panic of 1857. A writer in
De Bow's Review
wondered, “What would be the result were the police force of one of our large cities withdrawn for a single night?… We would have life as in the streets of Byzantium when Mohammed the Turk poured his savage hordes through them.” Such a result, the Virginian George Fitzhugh asserted, was the natural outcome of a society whose “whole moral code was every man for himself.” The South, by contrast, was more humane and less troubled by disorder. The evils of “Pauperism, crime, and mortality” were decidedly less evident in southern cities than in the urban North.
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Southern publications now enlisted northern critics, heretofore rare, to make their argument as the economy worsened in 1857. The clash between capital and labor, hidden by the prosperity earlier in the decade, became more evident.
De Bow's Review
reprinted an editorial from a northern journal lamenting the loss of worker autonomy in the new market economy. “The capital which sustains mechanical business is not under the control of the operatives.” The result, according to the editor, leaves “the operatives … helpless.” The North was becoming more like Europe. Despotism would invariably follow disorder.
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Not only were northern publications making the southern argument, but the economic crisis seemed to spare the South from its worst consequences. Though white and black workers tangled in the streets of Baltimore and Richmond and sectarian gangs patrolled neighborhoods on election day in some southern cities, the degree of violence, or at least its publicity, seemed much less in the urban South. It was also true that southern enterprises that maintained close commercial and financial connections to northern cities suffered. But cotton retained a fair resiliency, and the low tariff Congress passed in 1857 aided exports. The lesson was obvious: the speculative mania and overweening pride that characterized the free labor North had not infected the South sufficiently to cause a similar economic dislocation. Where distress appeared, it resulted from dependence on northern banks and factors.

Governments, and the political parties connected to them, were both impotent and complicit in the crises that gripped the financial markets and the streets of urban America. New York reformer Thomas Low Nichols, looking back on these years from the not-too-distant perch of the early 1860s, commented that “it is a matter of world-wide notoriety that during the past ten years whole legislatures have been bribed; that the state and national treasuries have been despoiled of millions; that members of Congress have sold their votes in open market to the highest bidder.”
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For a nation whose people expected virtue from their leaders, these allegations were distressing. If optimism turned to cynicism, the legitimacy of democratic government could crumble. While Americans were congenitally suspicious of party cabals, their governments seemed especially opaque and corrupt in the 1850s. Walt Whitman observed that the political process had served up “swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency.” Alexis de Tocqueville, ever the keen observer of American culture, seconded Whitman's judgment in 1857, connecting the speculative madness of the economy to a similar disposition in politics, where individuals “who lacked moderation, sometimes probity, above all education,” seemed to have usurped the nation's democratic institutions.
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