Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [319]
No black antislavery organization per se emerged, though the community occasionally engaged in direct action. When Madame Jeanne Mathusine Droibillan Volunbrun, an emigre slaveholder, tried to ship twenty slaves south in 1801 in violation of state law, hundreds of city blacks, led by “French Negroes,” threatened to “burn the said Volunbrun’s house, murder all the white people in it and take away a number of Black Slaves.” The crowd was dispersed by fifty watchmen, two dozen blacks went to jail, and Madame Volunbrun’s slaves went south as planned.
“IRISHTOWN”
In much the same way that racism prompted the black community to circle its wagons, nativism prompted Irish immigrants to coalesce around the Roman Catholic Church. Probably fewer than a thousand Catholics lived in New York at the end of the Revolution. Ferdinand Steenmayer, a Jesuit, had slipped into the city during the war to celebrate the Mass secretly in a house on Wall Street. With the elimination of restrictions on Catholic worship, Steenmayer gathered his flock in a loft over a Barclay Street carpenter’s shop. The postwar surge of immigration, virtually doubling the Catholic population overnight, prompted Dominick Lynch, Thomas Stoughton, and other lay leaders, led by Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, the French consul in New York, to arrange for the construction of St. Peter’s Church, the city’s first Roman Catholic house of worship. Lots were purchased on Barclay Street, and the cornerstone was laid in October 1785. Although the founders of St. Peter’s had envisioned a multiethnic congregation, the massive influx of Irish immigrants after the 1798 rebellion, boosting the number of Catholics in the city to some 10,000 by 1806, soon gave the new church a distinctly Hibernian orientation.
That was a matter of no small importance, because ethnic hostilities had mounted in tandem with the growing crisis in the trades. The Catholic Irish, abjectly poor, desperate for work, and alarmingly numerous, made a perfect scapegoat for the economic and social pressures rending mechanic republicanism—better even than the city’s relatively smaller and more marginal black population. Virulent anti-Irish sentiment spread rapidly among the city’s white Protestant laboring population during the 1790s and was further encouraged by the Federalist Alien and Sedition Acts. During the final years of the century, journeymen and apprentices revived the pre-Revolutionary Pope’s Day festivities and repeatedly marched about town bearing straw-stuffed effigies designed to mock St. Patrick. These “Paddy processions” met with militant resistance, often terminating in wild brawls and arrests. In 1709, only a year after the French-backed rebellion in Ireland had been crushed, marchers invaded the Irish neighborhood along lower Harman Street (East Broadway), touching off a melee that resulted in one fatality and many serious injuries. Three years later, after another explosion, the Common Council passed an ordinance outlawing the flaunting of Paddies or other insulting effigies.
In the new century, a set of gifted revolutionary leaders arrived from Ireland, among them lawyers Thomas Addis Emmet and William Sampson, physician William MacNeven, and printer John Chambers. Though all were Anglicans except for MacNeven, they helped make the Irish Catholic community a political force in New York. Emmet, perhaps the United Irishmen’s most gifted orator, had been arrested for his part in the abortive uprising of 1798. The British proposed deporting him to America, but Ambassador Rufus King persuaded the Adams administration to exclude Emmet and the other Irish “Jacobins.” As a result, Emmet spent nearly four years in prison (during which time his brother Robert was hanged and beheaded for conspiring