USA > New York > A short history of New York State > Part 22
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democratic agrarianism. Probably his most interesting novel on a New York theme was The Dutchman's Fireside, which gives a realistic portrait of Sir William Johnson. His Book of St. Nicholas (1836) includes several stories of Dutch life in colonial New York.
New York City attracted several other literary figures. William Cullen Bryant, who was regarded as America's foremost poet during the 1830's, drew his chief inspiration from his youth in the Massachusetts hill country, but in 1825 he came to New York and won renown as editor of the New York Evening Post. His support for the rights of labor, abolition, and other liberal causes will be taken up in the discussion of political developments after 1825. Fitz-Greene Halleck was another poet who wrote in the style of the English romantics.
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was the most famous American novelist of his day and second only to Sir Walter Scott as a romantic storyteller. The unforgettable characters Natty Bumppo and Uncas were drawn from his memories of Cooperstown during its first settlement. Cooper relied heavily upon New York themes for his novels of sea, forest, and the Revolution. The Spy (1821), his first successful novel, described the civil war in Westchester County between Tories and Patriots. In The Pioneers (1823) he reproduced the settlement of Otsego County and thinly disguised his own father, Judge William Cooper, as Judge Marmaduke Temple. This novel began the famous series of Leatherstocking Tales devoted to the adventures of the frontier scout, Natty Bumppo.
Cooper regarded his writings primarily as vehicles for his opinions of American life and manners. The irascible novelist managed to affront many of his countrymen with his strong criticisms. Most interesting for students of New York history is the trilogy called The Littlepage Manu- scripts. Cooper, who had ardently professed democracy and repub- licanism in Europe, rushed to the defense of the landed aristocracy when the antirent wars threatened their holdings in the 1840's. Satanstoe (1845) is a sympathetic portrayal of genteel life in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Chainbearer (1846) describes the difficulties of the landholder in developing his frontier tracts, and The Redskins (1846) is hardly more than a tirade against the defaulting tenants.
Painters, sculptors, architects, and musicians of the time were either European in origin and training or relied heavily on European models. We shall discuss the beginnings of these arts in the chapter devoted to cultural developments between 1825 and 1860.
The professions, ministry, law, and medicine, were severely disrupted by the Revolution. During the next four decades the numbers in each
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of these callings grew rapidly, in line with the population growth, but there was a general decline in professional standards. The looser ties with English professional groups and the weakness of theological, law, and medical schools contributed to the lowering of standards.
Lawyers in the 1780's were unpopular with the masses, largely because of their zeal in collecting debts for creditors and land agents. Gradually the legal fraternity won more public acceptance and many young men found the law the best entrée to a political career. The English distinc- tion between attorney and solicitor vanished. The training of young men was casual and unsystematic. Students read law in the office of a lawyer, frequented the courts, and mastered a few texts.
James Kent was the most eminent lawyer in the state. As chancellor of New York, he influenced the course of American law by establishing the written decision as normal court procedure. His opinions in equity cases were widely followed throughout the country. After his retirement from the bench Kent wrote his Commentaries on American Law, which called for more safeguards around property rights.
The legislature in 1806 gave the state medical society loose power over the admission of doctors to practice. Most doctors received their training by serving as apprentices to established physicians. The in- adequacy of such training led to the founding of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1807, and a few years later Fairfield Medical College opened its doors to young men in the Mohawk Valley, but standards in the colleges were as low as the practice outside.
Class lines between 1783 and 1825 lost much of their earlier rigidity with the decline of the landed aristocracy, the influx of Yankees, and the emergence of a free labor system. No other northern state experi- enced as great a social revolution as New York. It moved rapidly from a highly stratified society to a democratic commonwealth providing a large equality of opportunity to all groups in the population.
The landed aristocracy, whose domination of social and political life has been described in an earlier chapter, found its influence on the wane. The Revolution had split its ranks, a majority remaining loyal to the King. Many of the Loyalists fled to Canada. Most of those who remained found themselves stripped of their property and political power. Egali- tarian and democratic ideas were spreading. George Clinton, a supporter of Jefferson, captured the governorship for seven terms; and the demand for manhood suffrage won its place in the Constitution by 1821. As com- merce and manufacturing grew, a new aristocracy of wealth appeared, made up largely of immigrants from New England.
. The remaining colonial aristocrats, such as the Van Rensselaers and
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the Livingstons, admitted some recruits to the inner circle. William Cooper of Cooperstown and Peter Smith of Peterboro married daughters of the Livingston clan. Alexander Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler despite his questionable family origin. The landed aristocracy sometimes sent younger sons to administer their frontier tracts, spreading the prin- ciples of federalism and the Episcopal church into the wilderness. The old aristocracy found able defenders among property-minded newcomers such as Alexander Hamilton, James Kent, and James Fenimore Cooper. No Livingston ever defended the old regime of landed wealth more vehemently than James Kent at the constitutional convention of 1821 or James Fenimore Cooper in his antirent novels.
By 1825 the merchant-shipping families were competing for social eminence with the landed aristocrats. Their wealth enabled them to live luxuriously and to cultivate genteel manners. Some Manhattan merchants erected suburban homes farther up the island and sent their wives to Saratoga Springs for the summer season. Tutors taught the daughters French and etiquette and prepared the young men for Columbia, Yale, and Harvard.
Lord Chesterfield set the standards of propriety for New York's upper classes, but French ideas in dress prevailed. The influx of hundreds of French refugees from Santo Domingo and France resulted in the spread of French tastes in cooking, ballroom dancing, and music. During the 1790's, when George Washington held "court" at New York, the gentle- men wore smallclothes, silk stockings, and silver buckles. And when the terrorized nobles of France disguised themselves in workingmen's panta- loons, Americans adopted similar attire. By 1825 only a few diehards retained the old style. In the 1790's women in the upper classes also shifted toward simplicity in dress, discarding whalebone and heavy petticoats. By 1820 the trend was reversed and the ladies went back to stays, bustles, and stomach boards.
Keeping house was a full-time occupation for the wives of the aristoc- racy as it was for all housewives in that period. The problem of securing reliable servants became even more difficult after the decline of slavery and indentured servitude. Few domestics, moreover, could be trusted to supervise the endless round of household duties. Carrying in water, keep- ing the fireplace supplied, cleaning the iron pots, pans, and kettles, and making candles, soap, and carpets were only a few of the tasks.
Below the aristocracy of birth and of wealth were the members of what we loosely call the middle class. Independent farmers formed the most numerous element in this group, and their manner of life has been indi- cated in the chapter on pioneer agriculture. The middle class in the vil- lages and the cities included shopkeepers, clerks, tavern keepers, skilled artisans, manufacturers, and most of the professional people. From this
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group came most of the future leaders of the cultural and business life of the state.
The lower classes included farm laborers, apprentices, slaves, and, later, free Negroes, day laborers, and the most recent immigrants. Life for these people was grim but somewhat relieved by the hope that the way upward was not entirely blocked for the most able and for their children.
Although many social and civic problems, such as the education of the young and the control of fires, faced village and city trustees in this period, only a few tentative steps toward improvement were taken by 1825. The trustees of Rochester, who required that each householder keep a bucket for every two fireplaces, placed chief reliance in the volun- teer brigades. Public health measures were virtually nonexistent. Citizens drew water from springs, wells, or cisterns or bought their water from street carriers. Pigs and cows roamed the dirty unpaved streets despite the legal bans. The new cities found it necessary to establish markets in order to get farmers' wagons out of the streets. In 1822 Rochester ordered property holders along the commercial blocks to build a twelve-foot sidewalk to protect pedestrians from the filth.
The problems of antisocial behavior, ill health, and intemperance af- fected both urban and rural New York. The transient population along the wharves and the canals and the rough men patronizing the grog- houses and taverns provided most of the criminal elements. Municipal authorities strengthened the night watch, but no uniformed police had appeared by 1825. The sheriff maintained order in the countryside, call- ing out his posse when necessary.
Life expectancy in this period was a fraction of its present figure. Disease ravaged the population almost completely unchecked and little understood. Disorders almost unknown today were commonplace. Small- pox left its ugly scars on thousands, while tuberculosis filled ten times as many graves in proportion to the population as it did in 1952. Malaria, sometimes called the "shakes" or "Genesee fever," riddled the frontier population. Typhoid and many other contagious diseases struck every community, and cholera hit the seaports. Only one-half of the children reached their fifth birthday-a sobering statistic in the light of modern advances.
Medical attention, if available, was practically worthless. The results of the common practice of bleeding the patient were often worse than the diseases themselves. Anesthetics were unknown and gangrene fol- lowed many of the operations performed by inexpert surgeons with primitive instruments. Toothaches were universal and dentistry primi- tive. Travelers noted that few adults had a full set of teeth. The real burden of maintaining health in the family fell upon the overworked housewife, who fed molasses and sulphur to her children and acted as
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midwife to her neighbors. A community was likely to find it necessary to lay out the cemetery long before it got around to building a school or a church.
Hard drinking was the custom of many New Yorkers, to an extent that might shock even the broad-minded modern. There was little social or religious disgrace attached to heavy consumption of alcohol. Ministers, along with other callers, sampled the householder's best and the ubiquitous barrel of whisky appeared at church raisings as well as at bees for the construction of barns and houses. Parents served ardent spirits and liquors at births, weddings, and funerals. At frolics the dancers and huskers often stopped to take a drink. Taverns along the turnpikes and groghouses or groceries in the cities became centers for carousing.
Intemperance was encouraged by the availability of a wide variety of beverages at low cost. Gentlemen stocked up on port, madeira, claret, and burgundies. Cider was the favorite of all classes, sometimes serving as legal tender in frontier settlements. The poorest farmers had rum and applejack, and whisky was cheap. Almost every township had its distillery and groceries sold "wet goods" as readily as dry goods.
Drinking excesses disturbed many reformers, notably Dr. Billy Clark of Moreau, Saratoga County, who founded the first temperance society in America in 1808. Dr. Clark hoped to cut down the heavy drinking among the lumberjacks in his community. Shortly thereafter, young Lyman Beecher, Presbyterian clergyman of East Hampton, Long Island, began his long crusade against intemperance. These reformers had only local successes and were unable to change in any appreciable measure the drinking customs of the period.
Intemperance was not confined to drinking if the following breakfast fare was typical:
Sausage with boiled fish, eggs, dried beef, dried mutton, slices of ham, tongue, bread, butter, cheese, short cakes, buckwheat cakes, sweetmeats of various sorts, and many other things, make up the breakfast fare of the year, and, a dish of beef steakes is frequently added.
The changes accompanying the Revolution and the rise of New York to first rank in population, agriculture, and commerce broke up the fairly fixed pattern of colonial society. The aristocracy lost its economic and political supremacy. In its place emerged a democratic commonwealth of freeholding farmers and aggressive hard-driving businessmen. In the welter of social change many of our modern problems emerged. The face of New York began to take on its contemporary lineaments.
PART THREE
New York in the National Period, 1825-1865
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Chapter 18
Politics, 1825-1846
My God, I knew that my political adversaries thought me a scoundrel, but I never till now supposed that my friends did .- THURLOW WEED, 1839
THE labyrinthine windings and turnings of New York politics were at no time more in evidence than in the second quarter of the nineteenth cen- tury. Personal politics continued as in previous decades, but political groups came more and more to be unified by a common ideology and less by the personal magnetism of one or two great leaders.
The principal issues of the period were the chartering of banks, the construction of canals, and, in the 1840's, the question of prohibiting the extension of slavery into the territories. These issues split the Democratic party, which controlled the state most of the time between 1825 and 1848. The more radical wing led by Martin Van Buren and Silas Wright stood for careful scrutiny of bank charters, a cautious attitude toward spending public money for canals, and for the prohibition of slavery extension. The radical Democrats (later called Barnburners ) drew their strength from the farmers and laborers and mechanics. The Hunker, or conservative, wing of the Democrats reflected the wishes of those who favored the promotion of business interests and who wished to keep on good terms with the national leaders of the party. Because they had to rally support from all the states, the national leaders opposed a firm antislavery position, and this opposition embarrassed their supporters in New York.
During this period a host of new parties emerged. Fear of the Masonic Order stirred up a whirlwind of protest in western New York. Solicitude for the rights of property and distrust of Jacksonian democracy pro- moted the creation and the growth of the Whig party, a strange congeries of differing factions. Under the skillful leadership of Thurlow Weed the Whigs captured control of the state government in 1838, holding power till 1841. Again in 1846 the Whigs took advantage of Democratic feuds to
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capture the governorship. Like the Democrats, the Whigs suffered from factionalism, one wing favoring the restriction of slavery in the ter- ritories. Several minor parties were formed. Enthusiasm for humanitarian reform led to the creation of the Liberty, Prohibition, and Free Soil parties. Loss of status and the desire for free public education led the workingmen to organize a party and to exert some political influence within the Democratic party under the Locofoco banner. Resentment against the leasehold and alarm at the flood of immigrants spawned the Antirenters and the Native Americans.
Two of the most bitter political foes in this era were Van Buren and Weed. In 1824, when Weed's machinations defeated the Albany Regency and placed John Quincy Adams in the presidency, Van Buren determined to support Andrew Jackson for the presidential office in 1828. Conse- quently, he joined forces with Jackson's faithful ally, De Witt Clinton, and was partially responsible for the latter's re-election as governor in 1826. This political partnership was cut short by Clinton's death on February 11, 1828.
Meanwhile, New Yorkers were shocked at the mysterious disappear- ance of William Morgan, a resident of the state who had published a tract revealing some of the secrets of the Masonic Order. The tract vanished with Morgan. Feeling ran high against the Masons, although the more responsible members of that organization obviously were baffled and chagrined by the episode. Both Clinton and Jackson were high-ranking members of the Masonic Order. This was an opportunity Weed seized as he helped to fan the flames of resentment into the Anti- Masonic party.
The elections of 1828 were crucial, for both the presidency and the governorship were at stake, together with the political patronage con- trolled by those high offices. On the national scene the struggle was be- tween the followers of Andrew Jackson and those of John Quincy Adams. The Jacksonians first called their organization the Democratic Republican party, but within a half-dozen years "Republican" was dropped and from that day to the present it has been known as the Democratic party. The Adamsites took the name National Republicans, which was later changed to Whigs. The Bucktail organization within New York re- mained firmly under the control of the Regency, which, powerfully in- fluenced by Martin Van Buren, swung its support to Jackson. In order to corral the greatest possible number of votes in New York State, Van Buren himself agreed to run for governor, with the understanding that he would resign after election to accept appointment as Jackson's secretary of state if the Democratic plans were successful. For lieutenant governor the Bucktails nominated Enos T. Throop, a circuit judge of excellent reputation.
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Thurlow Weed saw clearly that the Anti-Masons would have to com- bine with the National Republicans if the Jackson-Van Buren alliance were to be defeated, but his frantic efforts to have both parties select identical candidates for state offices failed. Very likely the concealed manipulations of Van Buren prevented the fruition of Weed's plans. The National Republicans selected Smith Thompson, an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, and Francis Granger, a man highly regarded by the Anti-Masons, for governor and lieutenant governor, respectively. The Anti-Masons named Granger for governor and "Honest John" Crary for lieutenant governor. Both parties supported Adams for president. Van Buren and Throop were elected, although their vote was less than the combined votes of their National Republican and Anti- Masonic opponents. On the national scene Jackson was successful, and in New York he won twenty electoral votes to Adams' sixteen. Nearly a half century later Weed stated that this victory, with its prestige and patron- age, enabled the Democrats to control New York for years.
On January 6, 1829, the Fifty-second Legislature assembled in Albany firmly under Regency control and listened to the message of Governor Van Buren. This message contained several interesting recommendations, of which two were enacted. Under the Safety Fund Law all banks were required to contribute to a state fund which was used to liquidate the obligations of banks which failed. The scheme was successful until the fund was exhausted by the Panic of 1837. Perhaps the New York safety fund can be considered a forerunner of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, established over one hundred years later by the federal gov- ernment under the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The second enactment required that presidential electors be chosen on a state-wide basis rather than by district. Thereafter the presidential nominee receiving the greatest number of votes throughout the state would get all the electoral ballots to which New York was entitled. Henceforth, because of this all-or-none law and because of the large number of electoral votes allotted to New York, political parties were often willing to make special concessions to win the support of the Empire State.
After serving seventy-one days of his two-year term, Van Buren re- signed as governor to become Jackson's secretary of state, and the guber- natorial duties passed into Throop's hands. The acting governor asked for a reform of the criminal code, taking the enlightened position that criminals should be reformed rather than punished. Although the legisla- ture refused this request, Throop did obtain a law abolishing imprison- ment for debt after he was elected governor in 1830.
Although William Henry Seward, then twenty-nine years old and al- ready associated with Thurlow Weed, was elected to the state senate in
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1830 Anti-Masonism was on the wane. The Working Men's party, led by Fanny Wright and Robert Dale Owen, which had shown surprising strength in New York City the year before, died as a political force about this time. The "Workies" had demanded improved educational op- portunities for the poor, laws to protect the rights of labor, and the abolishment of imprisonment for debt. Unquestionably, the anticlerical and agnostic viewpoints of Wright and Owen did much to alienate their followers, but the increasingly liberal attitude of the major parties toward the workingmen's demands was a significant factor in the downfall of the party.
When dissonance within Jackson's cabinet led Van Buren to resign as secretary of state in April 1831, the president nominated him for minister to Great Britain, but the Senate refused confirmation. Most of Van Buren's political enemies thought the incident would end his public career. Said Vice-President John C. Calhoun, "It will kill him, kill him dead; he will never even kick!" The astute Thurlow Weed was of a dif- ferent opinion and predicted that the public would consider Van Buren to have been martyred for political reasons and that as a result he would "be nominated for Vice-President, and hazzahed into office at the heels of General Jackson." In May of the following year the accuracy of Weed's prediction began to appear, as the Democratic national convention, after naming Jackson for re-election, nominated Van Buren for vice-president on the first ballot. William L. Marcy was the Democratic candidate for governor of New York. The Anti-Masons and National Republicans joined in support of Henry Clay for president, and this year they com- bined in supporting Francis Granger for governor of New York, as Thurlow Weed had wanted them to do in 1828.
During the campaign of 1832 Thurlow Weed made a cause célèbre of Marcy's trousers. While Marcy was a state judge, he had sent his pants to a tailor for repair and had entered the charge of fifty cents in his expense account, paid from state funds. Throughout New York anti- Marcy forces displayed pantaloons with a white patch on the seat bear- ing the numeral "50." The paramount issue, however, was really Jackson's veto of a bill to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States. This action appealed to the labor groups, which regarded the national bank as a monstrous monopoly, and to local bankers, who anticipated federal funds would be deposited in their own institutions if the charter were not reissued. The Democrats won easily, Marcy became governor, and once again a New Yorker, in the person of Martin Van Buren, was vice- president of the United States.
After this campaign it was obvious that the Anti-Masonic movement had run its course, and in the next few years its supporters allied them- selves with other anti-Jacksonians. Many Anti-Masons, including such
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outstanding men as Weed, Seward, Granger, and Millard Fillmore, merged with the National Republicans. The anti-Jacksonian forces adopted the name Whig, during the municipal elections of 1834, when New York City was permitted for the first time in history to elect its own mayor. The Democrats elected their candidate, Cornelius V. R. Lawrence, by the scant margin of some two hundred votes, but the Whigs won con- trol of the Common Council and thus control of the patronage of the city, which amounted to over a million dollars a year. When the Na- tional Republicans and other antiadministration forces met in Syracuse during August of that year, they formally adopted the title Whig and nominated Seward for governor. In spite of their vigorous efforts, how- ever, the Democrats re-elected Governor Marcy and retained control of the legislature. The Albany Regency had maintained its hold on the state.
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