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By Root 7516 0

brought misery to small tradesmen, common laborers, journeymen, seamstresses, and their families. Their “incessant application to labor,” as the Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors put it as early as 1788, “will not enable them to subsist themselves, and their families, and at the same time, secure a small provision for their support during a temporary failure of supplies.” A writer in the Daily Advertiser in 1791 observed, “Many of our small tradesmen, cartmen, day labourers and others dwell upon the borders of poverty and live from hand to mouth.” In January 1797 “Six Hundred Journeymen Mechanics and Tradesmen now out of Employ” petitioned the city that they were, “in consequence of the season, without work; and many of them, by reason of large families, in want of sufficient FIRE and FOOD.”

The revolution in the organization of work that lay at the bottom of this phenomenon didn’t occur overnight, and the city’s vibrant economy served—up to a point—to cushion its impact. Yet every year the gulf between rich and poor grew wider. At the beginning of Washington’s first term, in 1789, already more wealth was concentrated in fewer hands than at any time prior to independence. The richest 2 percent of the population—a mere eighty-eight individuals—owned almost 25 percent of the city’s total assessed wealth. The richest 20 percent owned nearly 75 percent; the poorest 50 percent owned under 7 percent. By 1800 the richest 20 percent owned almost 80 percent of the city’s wealth. The bottom half owned under 5 percent.

In that bottom half, moreover, were numerous small masters, journeymen, and apprentices for whom the advent of capitalist production had meant not prosperity and respectability but traumatic decline. Instead of the decent independence they could have expected a generation earlier, they now found themselves slipping into the ranks of casual wage-laborers, domestic servants, food hawkers, tea-water men, chimney sweeps, seamen, deckhands, and the other propertyless poor who lived on the margins of society. They had to compete with immigrants and freed blacks for jobs. When too old or too sick for work of any kind, they had to apply to the city for outdoor relief or—perhaps the crudest blow of all to a respectable mechanic’s aspirations of independence—beg for shelter in the almshouse. Given that the number of city households headed by women grew by 30 percent during the 1790s—from one in twelve to one in nine—it appears that quite a few workingmen simply disappeared, perhaps to look for work elsewhere in the country but leaving their wives and children behind. As in the past, women—sick, abandoned, or widowed—outnumbered all other residents of the almshouse.

Worse was yet to come. After 1800 wage rates in New York leveled off, then fell, sinking to eighty cents a day by 1805. The cost of food, fuel, and shelter continued nonetheless to climb, stripping innumerable laboring people of the last hope that they could maintain a decent standard of living. A string of extremely hard winters around the turn of the century deepened the distress caused by a string of yellow fever epidemics. Scarcely a winter now passed in which city officials didn’t have to find food, fuel, and medical care for thousands of destitute residents.

It was becoming more and more apparent, in short, that the expansion of opportunity for some New Yorkers meant its constriction for others.

23

The Road to City Hall

The revolution did little to change either the structure or orientation of municipal government. Aldermen continued to be elected by freeholders and freemen of the corporation (until the right of representation was expanded in 1804), and the Common Council was still composed overwhelmingly of merchants and lawyers, with a sprinkling of substantial master craftsmen. Its standing committees—like Lamps, Streets and Roads, Public Buildings, Auditing of Accounts—carried on as they had before the Revolution, supplemented, as necessary, by special committees for, e.g., repair of the Brooklyn ferry house, improvements at the Battery,