Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [339]
At the end of June, gangs of sailors roamed the waterfront attacking crewmen from Spanish and Portuguese vessels, on the theory that because their nations were allies of Britain, they were now enemies of the United States. Mayor Clinton moved swiftly to crush the disorders, however. Warning that “anarchy and tyranny” went hand in hand, he put the city’s constables, firemen, and militia on alert; at the next sign of trouble, he announced, they would be called out by signal rockets launched from the cupola of City Hall. The sailors grumbled and cursed—whose side was the mayor on, anyway?—but Clinton remained presidentially firm.
Although senior New York Federalists like Rufus King and John Jay still weren’t quite sure about Clinton, they proved to be in the minority. John Pintard and Gouverneur Morris, Clinton’s de facto managers, summoned Federalists throughout the Northeast to support the mayor as the party’s best hope of political resurrection and the only chance for maritime states to escape a ruinous war. In mid-August, at a meeting of the Friends of Liberty, Peace, and Commerce in Washington Hall, Morris went so far as to advocate secession of the northern states from the Union if Madison could not be stopped. A month later, when the Federalists gathered for a three-day national convention at Kent’s Tavern on Broad Street, Morris played a key role in persuading the delegates to endorse Clinton.
When election day came, however, even with the Federalists on his side, Clinton could muster only eighty-nine electoral votes to Madison’s 131. Besides New York, which he held thanks to the labors of a thirty-year-old upstate legislator named Martin Van Buren, Clinton carried New Jersey, all of New England except Vermont, and Maryland. Although the race was tighter than the final tally suggests—had he carried Pennsylvania, the mayor would have become president—the outcome was a clear warning to Clinton and his friends that if respectable New York didn’t approve of the war, much of the rest of the United States did.
THE WAR OF 1812
The war effort required two things above all else from New York City, money and skilled manpower; it got the first reluctantly, the second with enthusiasm.
For Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, financing the war proved to be a hellish task. As military expenditures ballooned, a British naval blockade cut deeply into tariff revenues that remained the federal government’s main source of income. In the past, Washington might have borrowed from the Bank of the United States, but in 1811 the Democratic-Republican Congress refused to renew its twenty-year charter. Opponents charged that much BUS stock was held in England and that the national bank had been hobbling boom-era venture capitalists by restricting the availability of credit. Proponents of development urged that federal deposits be transferred to the growing number of state banks, to use as a basis for expanding loans. In New York State, the legislature incorporated ten new banks between 1810 and 1812, including the chiefly Federalist Bank of America, the primarily Democratic-Republican City Bank of New York, and the Mechanics’ Bank, dedicated to supplying artisan entrepreneurs with capital.
After the demise of the BUS, the federal government was forced to borrow from private lenders.