Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [342]
New York boiled with activity. Marshaled by the Committee of Defense, its residents rallied to construct additional forts, breastworks, and blockhouses on Brooklyn Heights, upper Manhattan, and other newly defined danger points. City artisans, organized by trade, contributed over a hundred thousand days’ worth of free labor. Patriotic ladies, lawyers, cartmen, merchants, and shopkeepers felled trees, dug trenches, and hauled artillery. The “free people of color” offered their collective services to the Committee of Defense and assisted in the erection of fortifications on Brooklyn Heights. In response to a congressional appeal for volunteers to defend New York, some 23,000 militiamen meanwhile flocked in from the surrounding countryside. From dawn to dusk they drilled and paraded, and the City Council appropriated money to pay them until they could be officially mustered into the regular service.
At the end of August, an enemy column burned Washington. The tension in New York became excruciating. “Your capital is taken!” cried one newspaper. “In six days the same enemy may be at the Hook. . . . Arise from your slumbers!. . . This is no time to talk!” Even Federalists professed their willingness to bear arms. “The enemy is at our doors,” Rufus King announced, “and it is now useless to enquire how he came there.” Gouverneur Morris, though, testily informed King that “anything like a Pledge by Federalists to carry on this wicked War, strikes me like a Dagger to my Heart.” When Morris learned that antiwar Federalists in New England planned a secret convention in Hartford at the end of the year, he rejoiced at the possibility of a New York-New England confederation. The Hartford Convention, he declared, was “a star in the East . . . the dayspring of freedom and glory. The traitors and madmen assembled at Hartford will, I believe, if not too tame and timid, be hailed hereafter as the patriots and sages of their day and generation.” (This wasn’t the first time Morris flirted with sedition, but it was the last: he died less than a year later, having attempted to relieve a urinary obstruction by forcing a whalebone through his penis.)
Inside of two weeks, however, the sense of crisis in New York subsided. The British were turned back at the gates of Baltimore. Captain Thomas Macdonough’s victory in the Battle of Lake Champlain removed the threat of an attack from Canada. Militiamen who had come to fight for the city soon started for home, and the Committee of Defense began to plan its final report to the Common Council.
PEACE! PEACE! PEACE!
One frigid evening in mid-February 1815, in the middle of a concert at the City Hotel (a witness recalled), “the door of the concert-room was thrown open and in rushed a man breathless with excitement. He mounted on a table and, swinging a white handkerchief aloft, cried out ‘Peace! Peace! Peace!’ The music ceased, the hall was speedily vacated, I rushed into the street, and oh, what a scene! In a few minutes thousands and tens of thousands of people were marching about with candles, lamps, torches, making the jubilant street appear like a gay and gorgeous procession.” Over the next several days, in the wake of word that American and British commissioners had agreed to a treaty of peace, the still-rejoicing residents were treated to a spectacular display of fireworks from Governors Island and the erection of elaborate transparencies on public buildings and private houses depicting the long-awaited return of prosperity.
No one worried about the actual terms of the treaty: it was enough that the war had ended and that life could begin to return to normal. But what did “normal” mean—and how, exactly, was the city going to prosper now that the strife in Europe, the foundation of its expansion following independence, had ended as well?
27
The Canal Era
New York’s postwar recovery proved to be quick and convincing, though