City of Glory (2 page)

1804:
In May, Jefferson dispatches Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new territory and report back to Americans exactly what their country now looks like. The expedition will take two years. Meanwhile, in July of that year, Burr kills Hamilton in an illegal duel. Warrants are issued for Burr’s arrest and he flees to Philadelphia, where he plots to make himself emperor of a new country to be formed from Mexico and the American West. In the autumn Jefferson is elected to a second term.

At this point Canada is a nation of 500,000, while the American population is about to top 6 million—not including nearly 2 million black slaves—but the Canadians are feared and demonized because it’s believed they encourage their fierce Indian allies to threaten U.S. settlements on the frontier.

1806:
In Europe Napoleon Bonaparte has helped subdue France’s Reign of Terror and led her army to a series of triumphs, but he cannot defeat the British navy and instead declares war on commerce. No ship that has called at a British port may afterward enter any continental European port. As a counter move, Great Britain declares it illegal for the ships of a neutral nation to visit a port from which the British are excluded, unless those ships first call at a British port and take on British goods. Direct trade between the United States and Europe is thus made an act of war. At the same time, Britain continues to claim the right to board any American vessel and look for those she says are deserters. Many naturalized Americans, particularly those who still have British accents (pronunciation has been diverging on both sides of the ocean for nearly two centuries) are impressed into the Royal Navy, a fearsome organization ruled by the lash and offering only the dubious satisfactions of rum and buggery.

1811:
James Madison is America’s fourth president, a Democratic-Republican handpicked by Jefferson as his successor. (Madison’s wife, Dolley Payne Todd Madison, is the first first lady to capture the popular imagination, and the first to preside over an inaugural ball.) The Twelfth Congress is in session. It includes a number of young and exuberant members from what is then the West—Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee—who are anxious to again take on Great Britain. They say they wish to fight for free trade and sailors’ rights. Their real purpose is to annex Canada, Florida, and Texas. They are called the War Hawks and they are to have their day.

1812:
On Thursday, June 18, the United States under President James Madison declares war on Great Britain. In the first year three attempts to take Canada fail, but the tiny American navy distinguishes itself, in part because much of the huge British fleet is occupied elsewhere. Madison is reelected. Nonetheless, the country seethes with debate led by Federalists such as Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts, whom the Democratic-Republicans accuse of “secretly advocating, and insidiously trying to effect, a disunion of the United States.”

1813:
The focus moves to actions on the Great Lakes of Ontario and Erie, and there are a series of military thrusts at Canada. York (present-day Toronto) is twice invaded and burned, but never held. On the southern Tennessee frontier there are battles with the Creek Indians, who are urged on by the Spanish in Florida. Pensacola on the Gulf Coast is eventually occupied and will prove to be the only territory America permanently acquires in this war. At sea, however, the British begin to exploit their superiority of numbers and their patrols make coastal trading perilous. Americans are forced to use their terrible roads to conduct vital interstate business. As a result, there are shortages everywhere, along with price gouging and wild speculation, while overseas trade has come to a virtual standstill.

1814:
In January the British offer to negotiate and a peace commission is established, but progress is slow. Federalists continue to protest the war, particularly the Canadian strategy, and continue to be called disloyal by the Democratic-Republicans. Meanwhile, except for those gone privateering—given government permission to prey on enemy shipping—the oceangoing merchant vessels of the great shipping companies lie rotting in harbor, escaped slaves help British troops harass and plunder the Chesapeake area, and the British make plans to invade what is now Maine.

In the face of all this the American government is virtually bankrupt. A failed earlier financial experiment means there is no national bank to bail them out, and in a time of no reliable paper currency, curtailment of trade has led to there not being enough coin money in circulation.

One other vital development has taken place before the story opens, though few realize how crucial it is to be to the future of the new nation. The moneymen—traders in various types of risks and commodities—long accustomed to holding wild and rowdy auctions under a buttonwood tree (a sycamore) on Wall Street, realized they were responsible for rampant speculation and the resultant bubble bursting and financial panic, all bad for business. In 1792 the twenty-four most powerful such traders drew up what they called the Buttonwood Agreement, which laid the foundation for a structured market in securities (known as scrip). Early in 1793 these pioneers of what would be the New York Stock Exchange built the elegant new Tontine
^*
Coffee House on the corner of Wall and Water streets, and moved their trading activities into an upstairs room. They continued to meet and do business there during the anxious days of the war.

The stage is now well and truly set for pirates and lovers, thieves and heroes, men—and indeed women—with ambitions big enough for young America’s city of dreams.

*A tontine is a financial arrangement whereby a fixed group takes shares in an investment—in this case the coffeehouse—paying out pro rata as each dies or drops out; the last one standing gets the whole shebang.

Characters

The Doctors

Joyful Patrick Turner:
Son of Morgan Turner, one-time privateer and later hero of the Revolution. Joyful was raised in the Chinese trading colony of Canton until age sixteen, when he was sent home to New York to become a physician. One of the early graduates of the Medical Department at Columbia College (known as King’s College before the Revolution), he is thirty when the story opens and has been a ship’s doctor for six years.

Andrew Turner:
A hero of the Revolution, a doctor and a surgeon. At seventy-five he is a member of the Common (city) Council, and a respected voice in New York’s affairs. Andrew is Joyful’s cousin, and was his patron when he first came to New York from China.

The Canton Traders

Gornt Blakeman:
A man in his prime at forty-some, and owner of the most important stagecoach company in the nation. A trader with a countinghouse on Hanover Street, Blakeman is a man who would be king.

Lansing “Bastard” Devrey:
Cousin to Joyful and Andrew, and the illegitimate son of the deceased Sam Devrey, who was a doctor and hero of the Revolution as well as a lifelong bachelor. Lansing, called Bastard by one and all, was not acknowledged until he was twenty-eight and Sam was on his deathbed. When the story opens, Bastard is thirty-seven and head of Devrey Shipping. Once enormously wealthy and still owner of the elaborate house on Wall Street built by Will Devrey in 1706, Bastard has squandered much of his fortune and put the rest in thrall to the speculators of Wall Street. Nonetheless, he believes himself a prince among men.

John Jacob Astor:
Known by all as Jacob Astor. German by birth, Astor arrived in New York via London in early 1783 when he was just twenty, and soon began trading in furs. In a short time he had a warehouse in Montreal, capital of the fur trade, as well as a countinghouse on Little Dock Street in New York City. Dabbling in the China trade quickly led to a fleet of ships and subsequently a worldwide mercantile empire. Early on he became a speculator in Manhattan property. At the time of the story he is the young nation’s first tycoon, the richest man in America, and has recently built himself a palace in the rural reaches of Broadway between Vesey and Barclay streets. Could he not then become an emperor?

The Women

Manon Vionne:
Daughter of one of the many Protestant Huguenot families who came to America to escape persecution in Catholic France, Manon is lovely, but she is also smarter than most men and unable to hide it. Some think that’s why she is unmarried and un-promised at twenty-two.

Eugenie LaMont Fischer:
A twenty-four-year-old widow. Beautiful as well as clever, she has been forced by circumstances to live by her wits. Eugenie is struggling to maintain a fine household on Chatham Street, while she searches for a husband who can take over her debts and support her in style.

Delight Higgins:
A stunning woman of mixed race; in the accepted term of the time, a mulatto. This subjects her to the laws governing blacks, but Delight claims to have been born free in Nova Scotia. (She admits to twenty-nine, though she may be older.) Delight runs a gambling club and discreet parlor house—i.e., a bordello—known as the Dancing Knave on semirural Rivington Street. It is an area that speculators hope to make fashionable after the war.

Holy Hannah:
An ageless creature living in a shack in the no-man’s-land between the city and the heavily wooded Manhattan wilderness to the north. Hannah is given to quoting Old Testament scripture, but only a few know her precise history. Though she has never married, Holy Hannah is known to care for a brood of children.

The Jewel Merchants

Maurice Vionne:
Father of Manon—whom he fears to be condemned by her intelligence to spinsterhood—and the most respected of the cluster of mostly Huguenot gold- and silversmiths and jewel traders to be found in the vicinity of Maiden Lane.

Mordecai Frank:
A goldsmith, Frank is a member of the tiny but well established Jewish community who have been in the city since it was Peter Stuyvesant’s Nieuw Amsterdam. Like Vionne, Frank deals in precious gems when they come his way. He is an elder of Shearith Israel on Mill Street, the first, and at the time the only, synagogue in New York.

The Opium Dealers

Jonathan Devrey:
Molly, his twin sister, vanished sixteen years before—a never-explained mystery—leaving Jonathan the sole heir to the elegant apothecary shop in Hanover Square, where perfumes and handmade soaps are sold along with herbal simples and curatives. Jonathan inherited as well the recipe for a secret elixir, which many in the city are convinced they cannot do without. Small wonder. It is almost pure laudanum, an opium derivative made from the seeds of ripe poppies.

Thumbless Wu:
A Cantonese and among the first Chinese to come to New York.

Ah Wong:
Jacob Astor’s butler, and head of the Chinese family Astor has brought over to be servants in his fabulous Broadway mansion.

The People of New York City—
Including Members of the Professions,
Politicians, Mechanics, Wage Earners, And Seafarers

Will Farrell:
A twelve-year-old boy employed as a lookout for Devrey Shipping.

Peggety Jack:
A one-legged former tar in charge of Devrey Shipping’s dockworkers.

Captain Finbar O’Toole:
An Irishman who came to America at the age of ten. Four years later he joined Washington’s army and served under Morgan Turner. After the war he became a merchant sea captain and made frequent trips to Canton.

Barnaby Carter:
A member of the craftsman-small-
business-owner class known as mechanics, he owns a workshop that produces stagecoach bodies.

Lucretia Hingham Carter:
Wife of Barnaby and one of the town’s numerous abortionists.

Henry Astor:
A butcher, cattle trader, and Jacob’s elder brother. Henry arrived in New York during the Revolution with a British commission to provision the Hessian mercenaries. At the time of the story he remains important in the meat trade, much of which is centered on his Bull’s Head Tavern and the adjoining abattoir and stockyards located on the Bowery just above Chatham Square.

Francis Xavier Gallagher:
Another butcher, but one who has as well a different trade: organizing (and exploiting) newly arrived Irishmen who think because the man known as F.X. also happens to be Irish, he can be trusted.

Tintin:
A shadowy figure recently arrived in the city and rumored to be one of Jean Laffite’s pirate captains. Laffite is head of a renegade colony based in the secluded islands of Barataria Bay, south of New Orleans. The Baratarians prey on Spanish commerce and dispose of their plunder—which often includes slaves—through merchant connections on the mainland.

Jesse Edwards:
An eleven-year-old powder monkey on the brig
Lawrence
during the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie. He later lives in New York.

Tammy Tompkins:
A tar who served on the
Lawrence
in 1813.

Samson Simson:
The first Jewish member of the bar, he studied law at Columbia under Aaron Burr. An elder of the Mill Street Synagogue, Shearith Israel.

Reverend Zachary Fish, Absalom, Joshua et al.:
Members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church—called by all Mother Zion—located in the already notorious Five Points section of the city.

Patrick Aloysius Burney:
An Irish laborer who lives in Five Points.

Slyly Silas Danforth:
A scrivener, and perhaps the most clever forger in New York City.

Adele Tremont:
A Huguenot widow who works as a mantua-maker and dresses the most fashionable women of the city.

Vinegar Clifford:
A chucker-out—a bouncer—who retired as the city’s public whipper shortly before the story opens, when New York abolished flogging as an official criminal punishment.