Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [328]
Few New Yorkers were so nimble. By the spring of 1808, some 120 firms had already gone out of business, the sheriff held a record twelve hundred debtors in custody (five hundred owing sums less than ten dollars), and a pandemic of unemployment was savaging the city’s laboring population. Over the winter of 1807-8 the tally of destitute persons was said to have grown tenfold. Residents grimly spoke of the crisis as “O Grab Me”—“embargo” spelled backward.
“BREAD OR WORK”
No one suffered more than sailors. There were, Lambert reported, “above 500 vessels in the harbor, which were lying up useless and rotting for want of employment” while thousands of seamen were “destitute of bread.” Unable to find shore jobs, many braved the icy winds to fish for food off the Battery. Early in January 1808 a committee of the Common Council declared that the municipal government should do something “to alleviate the evils which must result from a suspension of the ordinary vocations of the laborious part of the community”—perhaps by hiring “industrious persons” to improve Broadway.
Shortly thereafter, on Saturday, January 9, unemployed Jack Tars rallied in the Park, then paraded through the streets with placards that demanded “bread or work.” They dispersed peacefully after presenting a petition to the mayor that was respectful but laced with hints of menace. If municipal authorities failed “to provide some means for our subsistence during the winter,” they said, “we shall be necessitated to go on board foreign vessels.” What was more, many of them could no longer pay their boardinghouse bills. “By what means shall we discharge these debts? Should we plunder, thieve or rob, the State prison will be our certain doom.”
A special session of the Common Council promptly organized relief operations. By Thursday a soup kitchen had been built; by Friday the almshouse was supplying food to over a thousand of the unemployed, five times more than the week before. By early February nearly six thousand were lining up for rations at the almshouse three times a week—receiving a quart of soup, a pound of bread, and three-quarters of a pound of beef. The program was terminated in the spring, then started up again the following fall. All told, between 1807 and 1809 municipal expenditures for relief climbed from forty-six to seventy-eight thousand dollars—a 70 percent increase.
The city also initiated the nation’s first work-relief project for persons “who are capable of labouring and who are destitute of occupation.” The street commissioner hired workers to help fill the Fresh Water Pond, raise streets and lots near Corlear’s Hook, lower Murray Hill, and dig the foundation for City Hall. The Common Council also devised a plan for the Navy Yard to hire unemployed seamen, at city expense, paying them not with money but “victuals, drink, fuel, candles, and accommodation for lodging.” Many tars, however, feared being “trepanned”—kidnapped—by the navy, and only fifty-three accepted the offer. They did, on the other hand, flock to a War Department program, initiated at the urging of city authorities, which hired men to work on forts around the city.
Private relief organizations like the Humane Society contributed to the relief effort as well. To coordinate their work, forty civic leaders formed the General Committee of the Benevolent Associates for the Relief of the Poor. In December 1808 it organized a new, broadly based Assistance Society, which promised “to combine moral improvement by the recommendation of religion, with temporal relief distributed in the most economical and cautious manner.” In the last week of February 1809, the society provided food, clothing, and fuel to over eight hundred indigent families (after first dispatching visitors to investigate the applicants).
It was beginning to look, however, as if no amount of governmental ingenuity or private charity could save New York from Jefferson