Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [249]
21
Revolutions Foreign and Domestic
The summer and fall of 1789 found New York agog with the news of revolution in France. Parisian rioters sack the Bastille! The National Assembly issues a Declaration of Rights! The nobility surrenders feudal privileges! For many residents, this was the death knell of despotism and the dawn of the republican millennium. Manhattan crowds hailed “the Friends of revolution throughout the world,” and French liberty caps enjoyed a sudden vogue. The new Uranian Society, founded by thirty recent Columbia graduates to debate current events, resolved that the French Revolution was a blessing to mankind. Even Alexander Hamilton was caught up in the excitement. “As a friend to mankind and to liberty I rejoice in the efforts which you are making,” he confided to Lafayette.
By the autumn of 1792 the situation had grown more complicated. Prussian and Austrian forces had invaded France; fighting had broken out in the streets of Paris; Louis XVI had been arrested; a new National Convention had abolished the monarchy and proclaimed France a republic. The winter of 1792-93 brought still more astonishing intelligence: the Prussians and Austrians had been repulsed; Louis had been guillotined for treason; France had declared war on Great Britain, Spain, and Holland. In the summer of 1793 word came that Maximilian Robespierre’s radical Jacobins were preparing a campaign of terror against all enemies of the Revolution.
These distant events were made startlingly immediate by the arrival in New York of a stream of political refugees or émigrés—Bourbon absolutists, constitutional monarchists, and republicans, among them such literary and political luminaries as Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, the due de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Victor-Marie du Pont de Nemours, Chateaubriand, Volney, and Prince Louis Philippe, the future monarch. “The City is so full of French,” observed the English traveler William Strickland in 1794, “that they appear to constitute a considerable part of the population.” A French and American Gazette was founded in 1795 as a bilingual paper; the following year it became the purely French Gazette Française.
The ferment of revolution was at work nearer home too, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti). Inspired by appeals for liberty, equality, and fraternity and by the April 1792 decree abolishing slavery, Saint-Domingue’s 450,000 blacks rose against their masters. Troops sent from France to restore order were routed by insurgents under the command of Toussaint Louverture. By the end of 1793, 90 percent of the colony’s forty thousand whites, royalists as well as republicans, had fled to the United States. All told, four or five thousand people, creole planters and black servants alike, debarked in New York City.
Like the French, the exotic Domingans were a conspicuous addition to the population. John F. Watson, an early nineteenth-century antiquarian, remembered well how their appearance caused frissons of excitement among townsfolk who thought they had seen everything: “Mestizo ladies, with complexions of the palest marble, jet black hair, and eyes of the gazelle, with persons of exquisite symmetry, were to be seen escorted along the pavements by white French gentlemen, both dressed in the richest materials of West India cut and fashion; also coal black negresses in flowing white dresses, and turbans of ‘muchoir do madras,’ exhibiting their ivory dominos, in social walk with white, or mixed Creoles.” Altogether, Watson recalled, they formed “a lively contrast with our native Americans, and the emigres from old France, most of whom still kept to the stately old Bourbon style of dress and manner; wearing the head full powdered a la Louis, golden headed cane, silver-set buckles, and cocked hat.”
Maintaining such appearances wasn’t easy, even for the most eminent émigrés. Many found work as dancing masters, fencing masters, milliners, musicians, gunsmiths,