Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [338]
The West Battery was also designed to crossfire with the North Battery, which stood on the Hudson shore at the foot of Hubert Street (and whose walls of red Newark sandstone caused it to be nicknamed the Red Fort.) The North Battery, in turn, could crossfire with Fort Gansevoort, located further upriver near the foot of Gansevoort Street (and dubbed the White Fort because of its whitewashed brownstone walls).
All told, these installations, plus numerous mortar batteries and smaller forts sprinkled around on Bedloe’s, Ellis, and Staten islands, could train more than three hundred guns on enemy ships daring to enter the Upper Bay through the Narrows.
The day was fast approaching when they might be called upon to do so. In February 1812 Madison restored nonimportation against Great Britain. Two months later, on his recommendation, Congress adopted a ninety-day embargo that everyone knew to be the last step prior to an actual declaration of war. Everyone, that is, except the British government, which was just then preoccupied with rampant inflation, massive unemployment, labor unrest, and, early in May, the assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval.
On June 16 Perceval’s successor, Lord Castlereagh, finally got around to repealing all restrictions on neutral trade offensive to the United States. But Madison had already asked Congress for a formal declaration of war. On June 18, unaware of Castlereagh’s action, Congress obliged him. Southern and western members tended as a rule to vote aye; northerners generally voted nay.
Well-to-do New York received the news sullenly. The state’s congressional delegation had overwhelmingly opposed the declaration of war, and as one woman wrote, it came “like an Electric shock upon the great part of the people who have been too sanguine, in regard to peace Measures.” Some feared that the city’s defenses remained inadequate. In Broadway dining rooms and at the bar of the City Hotel, the greater concern was that a second conflict with Britain would inflict irreparable damage on the city’s wounded economy. As Gouverneur Morris would remind the New-York Historical Society, “war with the greatest naval power is no happy condition for a commercial people.” Four days before the declaration was finalized, the Evening Post published a memorial of protest signed by fifty-six of the city’s principal merchants.
The man who took the helm of national opposition to Madison’s war policy was the mayor of New York, De Witt Clinton. Clinton had been thinking for some time about a run for the presidency in 1812. Knowing he couldn’t expect much encouragement from Republicans, the bulk of whom would surely remain loyal to Madison, Clinton had been making himself attractive to the Federalists, and they in turn had expanded their popular base by presenting themselves as the party of order, prosperity, and peace. In the spring of 1812 the Federalists put his name into nomination against Madison. Antiadministration Democratic-Republicans in the state followed suit. When war broke out only weeks later, Clinton was positioned as the candidate of bipartisan moderation and prosperity—willing to defend the nation’s honor yet unwilling to put its commerce at risk in an ill-advised struggle with the former mother country.
New York City Democrats (as the urban Democratic-Republicans had begun calling themselves) rallied patriotically around President Madison. Indeed Tammany Hall—the party headquarters maintained by the Society of St. Tammany—and the Long Room of Bram Martling’s Tavern on Chatham Street (Park Row) became bastions of the “Martling Men” or “Bucktails” (terms soon synonymous with “Tammanyite”), whose efforts to wrest the party away from Clinton would torment him for years to come.
Tammany belligerency reflected