Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [362]
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The Medici of the Republic
When Frances Trollope wrote about New York in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), she praised the city’s upper class as a “small patrician band”—“the Medici of the Republic”—whose refined manners and genteel way of life met the highest European standards. The Medici were flattered, not least of all because Mrs. Trollope had endorsed their belief that they were better than everyone else, yet had remained true to the nation’s republican heritage. What she didn’t relay to her readers were the conflicting denominational sensibilities and ethnic allegiances that divided the snug little patriciate into at times competing factions.
One camp consisted of the recent arrivals from New England, who were inclined toward evangelical reform and found the Presbyterian Church an acceptable substitute for the Congregationalism of their native region. The other comprised old-stock Anglo-Dutch and Huguenot bluebloods—dubbed Knickerbockers after the character in Irving’s history—who tended to think of religious zeal as fanaticism and felt most comfortable in the Episcopal fold. As one of them would tartly put it: “Our graceless Knickerbockers danced around the May-Pole in the Bowery, while the Puritan Anglo Saxons burned witches at Salem.”
A characteristic point of conflict between Yankees and Knickerbockers was their attitude to the theater. Knickerbockers loved the stage, and a performance at the Park Theater—which Mrs. Trollope identified as the only house in town “licensed by fashion”—was certain to bring out an abundance of Beekmans, De Lanceys, Kents, LeRoys, Bayards, Livingstons, and Van Renssalaers. More than eighty can be identified in the painting that John Searle made of the Park’s audience one night in 1822. Pious Yankees, however, are conspicuously absent from Searle’s canvas, having no doubt heeded the admonition of the Rev. Gardiner Spring, pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church (just up the street from the Park), that playgoing encouraged licentious habits, especially among the young. Spring’s views were shared by Arthur Tappan, a successful silk merchant and evangelical who felt about vice (according to his younger brother, Lewis) as he would about a toad in his pocket. Although his annual income reached as high as thirty thousand dollars during the 1820s, Tappan pointedly poured his money into charity rather than preening display or self-indulgence. His usual lunch consisted of a cracker and a tumbler of cold water. He held his clerks to equally strict standards, insisting that they attend divine service regularly (twice on Sundays), get home by ten each night, and never, ever, visit a theater or consort with actresses.
Interior of the new Park Theatre, 1822, watercolor by John Searle. Fire destroyed the original Park Theatre in 1820, but its replacement, which opened the following year, was no less fashionable. Searle’s portraits of the audience comprise a visual directory of the Knickerbocker elite. William Bayard, the wealthy merchant who commissioned the work, is standing in the first tier, behind the lady who has draped her shawl over the rail. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Yankees likewise vilified horse racing, another Knickerbocker enthusiasm that enjoyed wide popular support. Although the state banned the sport in 1802 as a vestige of aristocratic dissipation, Long Island gentry got the ban reversed, though only for Queens County, on the ground that it impeded the improvement of breeds. The Union Course, out on the plains of Jamaica, soon became one of the premier tracks in the country, famous for its huge purses and the multitudes who came out from the city to watch, gamble, and