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By Root 8409 0

Docks (1803-6), and the sumptuous new St. Katharine’s Dock (1823) beside the Tower of London, which allowed direct unloading from ship to warehouse—all of which were linked directly with England’s inland waterways via. the new Regent’s Canal (1812-20). But such enterprises were fantastically expensive—the London Dock Company alone spent 1.2 million pounds—and technically unnecessary in New York. The tides of the Thames (and Liverpool’s Mersey) rose and fell twenty feet. The vast dock enclosures were designed to accept vessels at high water and then, by closing their locks, keep them afloat when the tide receded. New York’s rivers and estuaries fluctuated only four or five feet. This allowed the city to make do with less costly, less sightly, and less healthy versions.

1. Not everyone in the black community got behind this effort. Douglass later recalled being told by another escapee that “New York was full of slaves returning from the watering places of the North, that the colored people were not to be trusted; that there were hired men of my own color who would betray me for a few dollars; that there were hired men on the lookout for fugitives; that I ought not to think of going upon the wharves or into any colored boarding house, for all such places were closely watched.” Ruggles hid Douglass in his home.

1. Whigs also passed a law in 1838 that threw open the right of incorporation—including all its privileges and immunities—to anyone who could meet minimal requirements. In this Whig magnates had the support of Loco Foco radicals, who were convinced that they were ending the monopolization of banking and attendant legislative corruption by special interests. In fact, they had opened the door to concentrations of capital and accumulations of corporate power far beyond anything they were capable of imagining.

2. One of those who left town after the first disappointment was a freed slave named Isabella Van Wagenen, who over the previous decade had been a housekeeper and cobeliever of James Latourette, a Manhattan fur merchant who had broken with the Methodist Church to lead a New York group of Wesleyan perfectionists. After that, she became a member of the Kingdom of the Prophet Matthias, an anti-Finneyite cult. In June 1843, having renamed herself Sojourner Truth, she commenced an itinerant ministry, traveling first to the City of Brooklyn, then out into Long Island, where Millerite camp meetings proved receptive to female preaching, and then up to New England, where she began her abolitionist career.

1. In 1845 Thaddeus Hyatt patented a unique lighting system that neatly complemented Bogardus’s creation. Thick glass discs set within iron grilles were placed in the sidewalk in front of a warehouse, letting natural light into the basement and avoiding the need for gas lighting and its attendant fumes.

2. Artificially carbonated soda water, made by Noyes Darling and first served at the Tontine Coffee House in 1809, became a serious industry in the thirties, with the arrival of Englishman John Matthews, whose factory at First Avenue and 26th Street became the nation’s leading plant for production of soda water, bottles, glasses, and designs for soda fountains. Natural effervescent mineral water, discovered in upstate New York in the 1780s, was also popular; it was known as seltzer, after Sellers, a village in Prussia associated with the drink.

3. Singer introduced a family machine in 1856. Home sales were sluggish at first, until Singer offered them at half price to ministers’ wives and to sewing societies connected with churches, after which sales to “respectable” women picked up. Singer also sold abroad, arguably becoming the first multinational corporation in the process. Sales agencies were installed in Paris in 1855 and Rio in 1858, and remittances from abroad helped tide the company over during domestic recessions. By 1861 Singer was doing more business in Europe than in the United States.

1. Observers often presented “crowds” as socially undifferentiated organisms, seldom providing