Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [219]
With “Don” Stoughton—so named because of his subsequent appointment as Spanish consul—Lynch also assumed a leading role in the city’s small yet burgeoning Roman Catholic community. Probably fewer than a thousand Catholics lived in New York at the end of the Revolution. Ferdinand Steenmayer, a Jesuit, had slipped into the city during the war to celebrate Mass secretly in a house on Wall Street. With the elimination of restrictions on Catholic worship, Steenmayer gathered his flock in a loft over a Barclay Street carpenter’s shop. The postwar surge of immigration, virtually doubling the Catholic population overnight, prompted Lynch, Stoughton, and other lay leaders, led by Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, the French consul in New York, to arrange for the construction of St. Peter’s Church, the city’s first Roman Catholic house of worship. Lots were purchased on Barclay Street, and the cornerstone was laid in October 1785.
Only months behind Delafield and Lynch was Archibald Gracie. A Scot by birth, Gracie had gone to Liverpool and worked his way up to the position of chief clerk in the branch office of a London shipping house. When the war ended he decided to go into business for himself, setting off for New York with a cargo of textiles, tin ware, watches, cheese, and “fine London Porter and Liverpool Beer.” By the spring of 1784, not yet thirty years old, Gracie had a house and shop on Queen (now Pearl) Street and was taking an interest in the tobacco trade. He moved to Petersburg, Virginia, in 1785 but often came up to New York with cargoes of tobacco destined for transshipment to European markets. In 1793 he would move back to the city for good.
Cornelius Heeney left Ireland for New York in 1784 and found work as a bookkeeper with a furrier named William Backhouse. Backhouse taught him the business, and Heeney was soon dealing in skins and furs on his own account out of a store on Little Dock (now Water) Street. Both Backhouse and Heeney (another benefactor of New York’s Catholic church) were sometime associates of another young immigrant, a short, stout, square-faced German named John Jacob Astor.
The third son of a butcher in Walldorf, a small village near Heidelberg, Astor had left home at the age of seventeen to seek his fortune in London, where an older brother was established in a musical-instrument house founded by their uncle. When word arrived several years later of the signing of the Treaty of Paris, Astor quit London for New York, where another brother, Henry, had gone to provision Hessian troops and was now flourishing as a cattle trader and butcher (he would soon own the Bull’s Head Tavern on the Bowery). Jacob arrived in March 1784, not quite twenty-one years old, with a modest financial stake in hand. His marriage to Sarah Todd the following year brought him a connection to the Brevoort family and a small dowry. In 1786 he went into business selling imported flutes, pianofortes, and violins in a building on Queen Street owned by his mother-in-law, but his future lay in the fur trade.
PHOCION SPEAKS
Over the winter of 1783-84, moderate and conservative Whigs became increasingly fearful that radical assaults on the city’s Tories would impede economic recovery, perhaps even precipitate some kind of social cataclysm. There were also international repercussions. “Violences and associations against the Tories pay an ill compliment to Government and impeach our good Faith,” John Jay wrote from France. Unfortunately, said Robert R. Livingston, “violent Whigs” had gained the upper hand. Reasonable men—men of property and social position—still hoped “to suppress all violences, to soften the