Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [314]
Democratic-Republican masters parried such thrusts by stirring popular resentment against the poor as well as against the rich. Like riches, poverty implied a whole range of dangers to republican values and institutions—dependency, sloth, ignorance, immorality—and was thus a condition to be feared and despised by free people. The economic dislocations of the 1790s and 1800s, robbing even the most industrious workingman of the certainty that his labors would keep him and his family out of the almshouse, made it all the more urgent to hold the line. By 1800 no one in New York condemned poverty more insistently than those who seemed at greatest risk of winding up poor themselves.
In 1803 Mayor Edward Livingston proposed the creation of municipally owned and operated workshops where immigrants, ex-convicts, widows, and the indigent could learn such crafts as shoemaking or hatmaking. Reducing unemployment, Livingston reasoned, would reduce crime and vagrancy. Outraged mechanics protested that competition from Livingston’s workshops would drive hard-pressed masters as well as journeymen out of business, rewarding “idle and dissolute” elements of society at the expense of the most industrious. After a huge uproar, the state legislature quietly tabled Livingston’s proposal.
The impact of the turmoil in the trades was magnified by the movement of masters and journeymen alike into a wider world of political and social discourse. An upswing in literacy rates during the 1780s and 1790s opened new, assertively artisanal markets for the printed word, and a string of local papers—the New York Journal (1787-1800), the Argus (1795—1800), and others—geared their contents toward a politically conscious mechanic readership. Record numbers of artisans were also buying books and magazines, and they accounted for half the initial subscriptions to the New-York Magazine (1790-97), among whose contributors were such eminent radicals as Joseph Priestly, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Erskine.
Equally important was the parade of radical emigres that passed through the city in the 1790s, along with numerous representatives of popular societies—United Irishmen, United Englishmen, Friends of the People, Levellers—that blossomed all over the British Isles in the early 1790s, only to be crushed in spasms of official repression and mob violence. Republican France was their inspiration, Thomas Paine their idol, the Rights of Man their creed, and when they reached New York they were still full of fight. Grant Thorburn remembered how he and a party of other young men, members of the Scottish Friends of the People, were rounded up and put on a boat to New York in 1794. “We had some hot characters among us,” Thorburn wrote, “which all the waters of the Atlantic could not cool.”
Like John Daly Burk, editor of the Time Piece, and James Cheetham, editor of the American Citizen, these firebrands gave a powerful impetus to the militancy of New York artisans by identifying their concerns with an international struggle for political and social justice. Foreign and home-grown radicals likewise rubbed elbows, compared notes, and cemented friendships at Hocquet Caritat’s famous bookstore on Broadway. The energy and excitement they generated there inspired Caritat to found a circulating library from which the principles of the Enlightenment and the ideals of the French Revolution could be disseminated at modest charges to working people