Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [329]
UNLAWFUL COMBINATIONS AND RIOTOUS ASSEMBLIES
While protests against the embargo poured into Washington from every corner of the country, Jefferson defiantly bore down, tightening enforcement of the law until he exercised near-dictatorial powers. By the beginning of 1809, however, Congress was in open revolt. On March 1 it killed the fifteen-month-old embargo, adopting in its place a Non Intercourse Act that permitted trade with all nations except Britain and France. It also provided for the resumption of trade with whichever of those two agreed to respect neutral rights. Jefferson, in one of his last official acts as president, resignedly signed the measure. New York greeted the news with ringing bells, fireworks, and cannonades.
Business picked up a bit in the months to come, but not enough to neutralize anxiety and contentiousness in the city. One symptom of the mood was the increased appeal of the “mechanic preachers” who had been active in New York since the turn of the century. Seasoned evangelists like Jesse Lee and Johny Edwards drew record crowds after 1808—Lee said he “never knew so great a revival of religion in the city before”—while the messianic Amos Broad preached to exuberant throngs of worshipers (mostly apprentices and mechanics) in his new hall on Rose Street. Alarmed municipal authorities tried to crack down on these meetings, so inconsistent with established religious practices, and when Edwards and the female evangelist Dorothy Ripley sponsored an open-air revival in May 1810, a squad of city marshals dragged Ripley off the pulpit while she cried out, over and over, “Lord have mercy upon them; Lord have mercy upon them for Christ’s sake!”
Violent outbreaks against African Americans became common. In 1807, and virtually every year thereafter, the trustees of the AME Zion Church pleaded with the City Council to do something about the gangs of white working-class youths that routinely harassed worshipers on Sundays; the Common Council wondered whether a watch box should be built outside the church. The Abyssinian Baptists faced similar problems.
Paralleling this new eruption of racial hatred were sharply rising tensions between masters and journeymen. As unemployment caromed through the trades after 1807, the bricklayers, printers, carpenters, cordwainers, masons, tailors, and cabinetmakers were plunged into a succession of acrimonious confrontations and strikes. Journeyman printers established a New York Typographical Society, whose 120 members protested that they were “sinking in the estimation of the community” and denounced master printers for employing half-trained apprentices and “full-grown men (foreigners).” Journeyman house carpenters issued an 1809 manifesto asserting that “every class of society ought to be entitled to benefit in proportion to its usefulness.”
The most significant clash took place among the city’s shoemakers. In 1808 the Journeyman Cordwainers’ Society expelled one of their members for nonpayment of dues and “raising a rumpus” during a meeting. The society’s by-laws required the offender’s employer, the firm of James Corwin and Charles Aimes, to discharge him at once or lose the services of all other members. Corwin and Aimes obliged, which might have ended matters, except they refused to fire the man’s apprentice as well. When the journeymen in their shop awoke to the fact that this apprentice was now doing a journeyman’s work for less than a journeyman’s wages, they walked out. Then, discovering that the city’s master cordwainers had banded