Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [251]
It was an uprising by some home-grown Manhattan “Indians,” however, that almost put an end to Washington’s neutrality policy.
REPUBLICAN SPIRITS
On October 12, 1792, several hundred New Yorkers in war paint, bucktails, and feathers had gathered solemnly around a fourteen-foot obelisk dedicated to the memory of Christopher Columbus. “Transparent devices” on each face of the obelisk depicted key events in the career of that “nautical hero and astonishing navigator”—Columbus receiving a compass from Science, Columbus wading ashore in America, Columbus at the end of his life, neglected by all but the “Genius of Liberty.” Many of those present would have recalled the figure of Columbus that led the Grand Federal Procession of 1788, but this ceremony— marking the three hundredth anniversary of his initial landfall—was the new nation’s first proper Columbus Day celebration. It was also one of the first public events staged by a new organization in town, the St. Tammany Society, or Columbian Order.
Twenty years earlier, back in the tumultuous 1770s, Philadelphia patriots had celebrated a St. Tammany Day in honor of the mythical chief Tamamend, whom the Delawares credited with carving out Niagara Falls and other heroic feats. After Independence, Tammany Societies arose in many parts of the country as vehicles for the expression of popular patriotism and republicanism; often they represented hostility to the Society of the Cincinnati, an elitist organization of former Continental Army officers. A Tammany Society had appeared in New York in 1786 or 1787 but languished until 1789, when the merchant John Pintard and a onetime Tory upholsterer named William Mooney took it over, charging it with a new sense of purpose.
One of his principal goals, Pintard told Thomas Jefferson, was to “collect and preserve whatever relates to our country in art or nature, as well as every material which may serve to perpetuate the Memorial of national events and history.” Two years later, in 1791, the society’s American Museum opened in an upper room of City Hall; when those quarters proved inadequate, the museum moved to the Merchants’ Exchange on Broad Street. Contrary to Pintard’s expectations, though, its holdings consisted mostly of stuffed animals and doleful curiosities like the “perfect Horn, between 5 and 6 inches in length, which grew out of a woman’s head in this city.” In 1795 the society washed its hands of the whole thing.
More fruitful was Pintard’s wish to put the society on a “strong republican basis” and to endow it with “democratic principles” that would help check the resurgence of New York’s “aristocracy” (a curious ambition given Pintard’s association with William “King of the Alley” Duer). Any citizen able to pay a small initiation fee and modest dues could join, and by the mid-nineties some five hundred residents of the city had done so. Some Tammany members were youthful lawyers and merchants, but most were “artisans” or “mechanics” (masters and journeymen in the skilled trades, as distinct from apprentices, cartmen, sailors, and laborers).
At first Tammany stuck to displaying its republican zeal via comic-opera appropriations of Native American nomenclature and ritual. Rank-and-file members, called “braves,” were assigned to “tribes.” They elected a board of directors or “sachems,” who in turn picked the society’s “grand sachem” (a position Mooney held for many years), and once a month they all congregated in their headquarters or “Wigwam” for an evening of eating, drinking, singing, storytelling, and debates on issues of current interest. The braves’ choicest moments were a handful of holidays—Washington’s Birthday, Independence Day, Columbus Day, Evacuation Day, and the society’s own Anniversary Day (May 12)—when they paraded through town in full Indian regalia, cheered patriotic orations, then sat down for