Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [341]
As the second winter of war approached, New York was once again like a city under siege. As during the embargo crisis of 1807-9, hundreds of vessels lay idle along the waterfront. Shuttered shops and stores lined every street, and on Broadway the cacophonous traffic of carts and wagons and carriages subsided to a mere rumble. Because profiteers had diverted so much of the city’s essential supplies to the British in Canada, food and fuel were almost prohibitively expensive. Unemployed working people deluged municipal authorities with appeals for relief, and in December a committee of gentlemen, including Thomas Eddy and John Pintard, organized the Fuel Association to provide the “meritorious” poor with firewood; over the next several months the association distributed wood to three thousand addresses in the city. “The times are very hard,” said one resident. “Money almost an impossibility. The necessaries of life are very high. . . . We are obliged to use beans steeped in hot molasses. Many are living on black butter-pears, apples and quinces stewed together—the poverty in the city is very great.”
Militarily, moreover, the first eighteen months of war had gone badly. Except for Captain Perry and a young frontier general named William Henry Harrison, American field commanders committed one blunder after another, allowing the enemy to capture Detroit, repulse two assaults on Montreal, and burn Buffalo. When Napoleon abdicated in April 1814, further humiliations seemed certain. His Majesty’s government, able at last to concentrate on the American theater, immediately shifted fourteen thousand veterans across the Atlantic and began massing naval forces off Sandy Hook and Gardiner’s Bay. As the summer began, New York braced for another British invasion.
Mayor Clinton and his Federalist allies extracted every ounce of political capital they could from the situation. They assailed Madison for getting the country into the war, and they assailed him for failing to wage it with vigor and dispatch. Time and again, they reminded the city’s mechanics of the years just after independence, when “industrious laborers had work, and having work they had money; and having money their wives and children were well clothed and well fed and well warmed. These were Federal times.”
Maybe so. But as in the mid-1770s and the mid-1790s, that sort of argument could not overcome the combination of nationalist pride and hatred of Great Britain that was integral to popular culture in New York. With every British victory, every new hardship, Clinton and the Federalists lost rather than gained credibility. In the charter elections at the end of 1813, branded by Republicans as the “Peace Faction—or to use a more correct term—the enemy,” their majority on the Common Council evaporated. The following spring, they lost control of the state legislature as well. Many a mechanic, it was observed, had come to the conclusion that “his children can freeze, but he must not let the Tories in.”
Over the summer of 1814, with the war’s opponents now effectively silenced, New Yorkers made ready for the expected British invasion. By the beginning of August, if not before, it was known that the enemy intended to strike down through Lake Champlain while diversionary forces harassed the Atlantic ports—meaning that the fortifications erected in the city between 1807 and 1812 were not likely to be of much use. On August 11, with the blessings of the City Council, thousands of residents turned out for a meeting to consider what ought to be done. After an impassioned speech by an aged Marinus Willett recalling popular resistance to British tyranny forty years earlier, it was agreed to form a Committee of Defense consisting of representatives from every ward. Like its Revolutionary predecessors, the committee was empowered by direct popular consent to form new military companies through the “voluntary enrollments” of ablebodied citizens, to organize citizens