Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [265]
Hamilton’s funeral two days later was a poignant reminder of the political consensus he had once inspired in New York—and had subsequently done so much to destroy. The Democratic-Republican Common Council instructed “all classes of inhabitants” to suspend their usual business and ordered muffled bells to toll from dawn to dusk. At noon a long, somber funeral cortege wound its way through the streets toward Trinity Church. Every social group and civic organization—military officers, students of Columbia College, merchants, attorneys, the Society of Cincinnati, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, even the Tammany Society—was represented in the procession, trailed by a mass of “citizens in general.” Warships in the harbor fired their minute guns. Merchant vessels flew their colors at half-mast. Gouverneur Morris delivered a moving funeral oration at Trinity.
While tributes to Hamilton poured in from all over the country, Burr kept out of sight. Two weeks after the duel, facing a murder indictment and fearing his house would be attacked by a mob, he slipped out of town into obloquy everlasting.
22
Queen of Commerce, Jack of All Trades
American neutrality during the Napoleonic Wars paid off handsomely for New York. Despite persistent losses to belligerent navies and privateers, fifteen or so years of supplying distant combatants transformed the city into the nation’s premier port and marketplace.
In war-ravaged Europe, the demand for American products became almost insatiable. As early as 1795 Noah Webster reported that French purchases of meat, flour, leather, and cloth were opening a new era of affluence for the United States. Between 1795 and 1800, as a result of the Jay Treaty, the value of American exports to Great Britain trebled, while the United States emerged as the single most lucrative overseas market for British exports. The West Indies plantation economies, isolated from Europe, also grew more dependent on supplies of grain, meat, and timber from the mainland. West Indian officials coolly ignored attempts by their home governments to restrict neutral commerce and allowed American ships to come and go without interference.
Thanks to the turmoil in Europe, moreover, the United States captured much of the international carrying trade. Sugar from the West Indies, wine from Madeira, cotton and spices from India, manufactures from Europe—all of them and more crisscrossed the oceans in American bottoms by the turn of the century. From 1795 to 1800 American shipments of Caribbean sugar to Europe doubled—over six hundred U.S. ships engaged in trade with Saint-Domingue alone—while American reexports of European goods to Latin America grew by a factor of seven.
The consequences for New York were astounding. Between the early 1790s and 1807, the value of imports through the city rose from $1.4 million to $7.6 million. By the later 1790s New York had pulled decisively ahead of Philadelphia as the leading port of entry in the United States. In 1806 alone, the value of New York’s imports was almost twice that of Philadelphia’s. More striking still was the jump in exports through New York, which went from around $2.5 million in 1790 to $26 million in 1806, a tenfold increase. By 1799 the port handled nearly one-third the nation’s overseas trade; almost one-fourth its coasting trade also moved through the East River waterfront.
Little or none of this would have happened had Europe been at peace, or had the United States been dragged into war on one side or the other. But neutrality doesn’t explain why New York proved so much more successful than, say, Philadelphia or Boston in responding to heightened foreign demand for American products. How did the city become the principal link between the United States and world markets?
CONNECTIONS
Geography was part of the