Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [244]
Yet by the end of the summer, the loss of the capital had been forgotten. Passage of the funding and assumption bills restored between forty and sixty million dollars in hitherto virtually worthless certificates of indebtedness to face value— a sudden accession of wealth that bathed the city (or at least its successful speculators) in prosperity. Even the state government had invested a couple of million dollars in securities that, redeemed at par, brought a tidy sum into the treasury. Eager investors were meanwhile bidding up the price of the new 6 percent and 3 percent federal securities, dreaming of fortunes to come.
To a visiting British diplomat, the city’s future seemed utterly secure, capital or no capital. New York, he said, “is certainly favored to be the first city in North America, and this superiority it will most assuredly retain whatever other spot be made the seat of government.”
It was an arresting thought: henceforth the United States would have two centers, one governmental, the other economic. This separation of powers, as emphatic as anything in the Constitution, had no parallel in the Western world. London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Madrid, Lisbon—these were capitals in the fullest sense of the word, hubs of national politics, business, and culture (only the rivalry between Moscow and St. Petersburg even vaguely resembled the American case). That New York already promised to become the first city of the United States, independent of the apparatus of state power, was an augury of its uniqueness. Nowhere else in the republic would the marketplace come to reign with such authority, or painters and politicians alike bow so low before the gods of business and finance. No longer the capital city, its destiny was to be the city of capital.
THE PROBLEM OF MANUFACTURES
Some New Yorkers wanted the city to become a center of industrial manufacturing too—filled with English-style factories, not just the small artisanal workshops with which it had long been well supplied. In January 1789, over “wine, cakes, etc.” at Rawson’s Tavern on Water Street, a committee of prominent businessmen formed the Society for the Encouragement of American Manufactures, commonly known as the New York Manufacturing Society. The promotion of industry was nothing new: the nonconsumption and nonimportation movements twenty-five years before had inspired similar projects, none of which met with much success. Yet the inception of a new federal government, President Washington’s words of encouragement for the country’s infant textile industry, and the strength of the city’s capital market suggested that large-scale manufacturing was an idea whose time had come. Even Governor Clinton, idol of the state’s rural republicans, had been heard to say that “the promotion of manufactures is at all times highly worthy of the attention of government.” No one was surprised when nearly two hundred investors bought up all Manufacturing Society stock at twenty-five dollars per share.
Before the year was out, the Manufacturing Society had opened a textile factory on Crown (later Liberty) Street. It had a carding machine and two hand-operated spinning jennies, and it employed fourteen weavers and 130 spinners, an impressive labor force by contemporary standards; it was also said to have cost $57,500—almost as much as the city had spent to renovate Federal Hall. A young Derbyshire immigrant named Samuel Slater offered to build and install, from memory, the spinning jennies whose design the British government guarded as carefully as the crown jewels. The factory’s managers turned him away, however, and within a year or two were forced to close their doors. Slater moved on to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where he built the first successful cotton mill in the United States for the firm of Almy and Brown.
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