City of Glory
Authors: Beverly Swerling
SIMON & SCHUSTER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by MichaelA, Ltd.
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including the right of reproduction
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Swerling, Beverly.
City of glory : a novel of war and desire in Old Manhattan / Beverly Swerling.
p. cm.
Sequel to: City of dreams.
1. New York (N.Y.)—History—1775—1865—Fiction. 2. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.W47C59 2007
813’.6—dc22
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9872-8
ISBN-10: 0-7432-9872-1
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
For Bill, as always, and for Michael, who would, I think,
have loved all the swash and buckle.
Author’s Note
T
HE GEOGRAPHY OF
New York City is as accurate for the time as research has allowed. In some cases changed street names will confuse those who know the modern city. There were many incarnations of George Street. The one where this story opens is now Rose Street at the southern edge of Tribeca. Little Dock Street became Water Street. Chatham Street is now Park Row. Mill Street is Stone Street. French Church Street is Pine Street. North Street, the city limits at the period of the story, is present-day Houston Street. In the neighborhood known as Five Points (today occupied by the city’s courts and a large swath of Chinatown), Anthony is now Worth Street, Cross is now Mosco Street, and Orange Street is now Baxter. Amos Street, location of the infamous Newgate Prison in what was then known as the Village of Greenwich, is now West Tenth Street. And one further point: in the matter of the Battle of Bladensburg, what is now called the Anacostia River was known at the time as the Eastern Branch of the Potomac.
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there.
—F
RANCIS
S
COTT
E
KY AT THE BATTLE OF
F
ORT
M
C
H
ENRY,
B
ALTIMORE
, S
EPTEMBER 14
, 1814
A Time Line
H
ERE IS A BRIEF HISTORY
of the run-up to the events in this book, and a few details about life in the infant United States before the opening of the tale. It is intended for those who find context important. There are no penalties for skipping straight to the story.
Most of the action here takes place in New York City during ten days in the early period of the great experiment that is the United States. Because it aspires to be a good book, it is about love and hate and greed and passion, and sometimes selfless heroism, in this case told against the backdrop of the War of 1812. That last confrontation with Great Britain is often called the final act of the American Revolution, but it is the nation’s most obscure conflict.
1792 to 1796:
George Washington’s second term. Two strong political parties emerge in his cabinet, the Democratic-Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson, and the Federalists led by Alexander Hamilton, who is nothing if not a man of New York City.
At that moment Hamilton’s town has some 90,000 residents and is poised to overtake Philadelphia as the nation’s most populous center, as well as the undisputed queen of commerce. No longer the capital city (the federal government moved to Philadelphia in 1790, awaiting the completion of a ten-mile-square Federal District on the Potomac River) New York has become the city of capital, the nation’s economic center. Hamilton and the Federalists believe America’s future lies with great industrial cities that will be merchant barons to the world. A strong central government is vital to that vision, and an enlightened autocracy the only way they see to manage it. Jefferson’s ideas are demonstrated in the rural idyll he has labored to create at Monticello in Virginia. His America must remain what ninety percent of it is at the time, a nation of great landholders and yeoman farmers. He believes passionately in states’ rights, and only slightly less passionately in the rights of the common man. (Despite being a slaveholder himself, he is honestly conflicted over slavery, and wrote an antislavery clause into his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, only to see it struck out by others among the signers.)
In Europe, France and Britain have been at war since shortly after the 1789 French Revolution. America has struggled to remain officially neutral, but on the street—particularly in New York—everyone takes sides. The city’s artisans and craftsmen, a class known collectively as mechanics, along with the unskilled laborers, declare themselves republicans and are hugely pro-French. At home, despite relying on the city for their living, the working people support the rural dreams of Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans, and hunger for the equality promised by both the American and French revolutions. The merchants and professionals, on the other hand, are appalled at the heads rolling off the French guillotine. They become more and more pro-British, and more than ever convinced that giving the masses control of the government is madness. Federalism, with its promise of strong central control, is firmly established as the philosophy of the ruling class of New York and New England.
1796 to 1800:
John Adams, a Federalist, is the nation’s second president and Thomas Jefferson (elected separately in the manner of the time) is his vice president. Adams is the first president to live in the District of Columbia in what is termed the President’s Palace or the Executive Mansion, though it is from the first painted white.
1800:
Adams runs for a second term. Jefferson opposes him. On the ballot are two vice presidential candidates, Aaron Burr of New York and Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina. By December of 1800 everyone in the bitterly divided country knows that the Democratic-Republicans Jefferson and Burr have been elected, but to what? Each has the same number of Electoral College votes, and since by law the electors do not say which man they are choosing for which office, the election for president is declared to be a tie. Following the procedure laid down in the Constitution adopted fourteen years earlier, responsibility for the decision is given not to the senators, who are appointed by the legislatures of the fifteen states (Vermont and Kentucky have joined the original thirteen), but to the House of Representatives, whose members are voted into office by the people. In February of 1801, after six days of balloting, Jefferson is declared the nation’s third president and Burr his vice president.
Jefferson slashes the federal budget, lowers taxes, reduces the national debt, and in 1803 buys Louisiana from the French. This vast territory of 828,000 square miles (today’s state of Louisiana is 48,523 square miles) stretches from the Mississippi River to the Rockies and from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. The Louisiana Purchase almost doubles the size of the country, but much of it is unexplored.