Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [320]
Taken up by George and De Witt Clinton, themselves of Irish extraction, Emmet gained admission to the bar, over the protests of Federalist attorneys, and soon emerged as one of the city’s most popular and successful lawyers as well as a potent force in Democratic-Republican party. Rufus King had bragged of winning the “cordial and distinguished Hatred” of United Irishmen like Emmet. He was right, and in election after election, Emmet’s blistering denunciations of King as a British collaborator helped Clintonians win the burgeoning Irish vote.
One thing the Irish vote could not do, however, was elect Catholics to public office. A naturalization clause in the 1777 state constitution had required all new citizens of the state to “abjure and renounce all allegiance and subjection to all and every foreign King, prince, potentate, and state, in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil.” Although this requirement was superseded by the U.S. Constitution ten years later, it had meanwhile been incorporated into a test oath required of all state officeholders—meaning that Catholics could become citizens but were effectively barred from serving in the legislature. They protested in vain until 1806, when Francis Cooper became the first of his faith to be elected to the Assembly. The congregation of St. Peter’s rounded up thirteen hundred signatures for a petition protesting the oath, De Witt Clinton won passage of a bill to abolish it, and Cooper took his seat.
Political victories, in turn, exacerbated tensions on the street. On Christmas Eve of 1806, less than a year after Cooper’s victory, fifty members of the Highbinders (or Hide Binders)—a nativist gang of apprentices and propertyless journeyman butchers—gathered outside St. Peter’s to taunt worshipers leaving midnight Mass. The watch prevented a serious disorder, but on Christmas Day, Irishmen fearing a Highbinder attack armed themselves with cudgels, stones, and brickbats. When the watch attempted to disperse a crowd on Augustus Street (now the site of the Municipal Building), a bloody skirmish broke out, and one watchman was killed. The Highbinders and a nativist crowd now invaded “Irishtown,” wreaking havoc until the magistrates managed to restore order.
Tensions on the street encouraged the Irish to greater political exertions. In 1807, when the anti-immigrant Rufus King stood for election to the Assembly, Emmet denounced him as a “royalist” and a “political dupe” of the British. King haughtily announced he would “enter into no explanations, leaving the Public to decide between me and these foreigners.” The voters decided emphatically against him and torpedoed his subsequent bid in 1808 for the governorship as well.
“HONEST FOLKS IN THE PIT”
One of those who took part in the 1806 Christmas riot against Irish Catholics was William Otter, a young plasterer’s apprentice from England, but he was there for pleasure, not principle. Otter was a rowdy, one of a growing number of young men who scorned journeymen’s associations, radical bookshops, and Methodist chapels. They preferred instead to go out on “sprees”—nighttime forays into the city’s brothels, rum holes, and oyster shops that often ended in drunken brawls. As Otter recalled in the careful notes he kept of these adventures, he and his mates once went to Mr. Green’s “for the express purpose of raising a row and were gratified to our heart’s content.” On another, they descended on Mr. Drake’s, where they “broke every glass in the whole house, and cleared it of men, women, and children,” then “scampered off to a grog-shop.”
Among their favorite targets were the city’s now-numerous dancehalls. “The dancing fever began to rage in Harman street,” Otter remembered, and he and his gang began dropping in at places like Mrs. Cunningham’s or the “Negro dancing cellars” on Bancker Street. Horace Lane, a white sailor, also recollected his 1804 visit to one such establishment: a “small