Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [363]
Waltzing too was in disfavor. Exclusive, meticulously arranged dancing “assemblies” were no less a feature of upper-class socializing than they had been before the Revolution, but the younger and more adventuresome set now regarded the cotillion or quadrille (ancestor of the modern square dance) as unbearably old-fashioned. They preferred the “valse,” which came to New York via Paris in the 1820s and was thought quite daring because dancers whirled around the ballroom in couples. Yankees and Presbyterian ministers denounced it as the devil’s work. Knickerbockers and Episcopalians seemed less concerned, even tolerant.
Nothing raised Yankee hackles like Sabbath-breaking, however. True, the bustle and frivolity of Sundays in New York had been a sore subject among devout residents for nearly two hundred years now. But newcomers from Connecticut and Massachusetts had still-warm memories of communities where families observed the Sabbath by abstaining from all forms of recreation, dining on cold collations of Saturday-baked meats, and attending multiple church services. They could see, too, that the city’s recent growth had spawned alluring new opportunities for diversion on Sunday—pleasure gardens serving punch and wine, even to unescorted single women, and steam-powered pleasure boats providing musical excursions around Manhattan (“a refinement, a luxury of pleasure unknown to the old world,” their proponents preened)—all apparently aided and abetted, and some owned as well, by easygoing Knickerbockers.
In 1821 the Rev. Spring and the Sabbatarians launched a boycott of newspapers that advertised Sunday excursions and won the support of Mayor Stephen Allen. Then they got up a petition asking the city to enforce biblical injunctions to keep the Sabbath holy by closing down pleasure gardens, markets, livery stables, newspapers, and the post office. In time, they meant to sweep the Hudson free of sloops and steamboats “filled with profaners of the Lord’s day.”
The reaction was swift and overwhelmingly negative. Most newspapers defended steamboat excursions as innocent amusement. The Evening Post justified keeping markets open on Sunday as necessary for the poor, who went unpaid until late Saturday and couldn’t afford iceboxes to keep fish, meat, and milk fresh during hot weather. Thousands of residents signed a rival petition denouncing clerical interference in public affairs as “highly improper,” while handbills and placards went up around town attacking Spring and his ministerial allies as bigots. When Spring’s forces announced a public rally at City Hall, the Mercantile Advertiser urged anti-Sabbatarians to show up en masse. They did so, seized control of the meeting, and adopted a resolution stating that the citizens of New York wanted the clergy to mind their own business. (“The excited multitude looked daggers at us,” Spring recalled.) The Sabbatarians retreated, and the Knickerbockers congratulated themselves on their stand for tolerance and bonhomie.
What the Knickerbockers lacked was an organization comparable to the New England Society, whose annual dinner to commemorate the landing of the Pilgrims generated endless bragging about Yankee virtues and Yankee achievements. More than a few Knickerbockers took up Freemasonry, which combined fraternalism with a commitment to religious toleration and rationalism. By 1827 there were forty-five Masonic Lodges in New York, each of which met twice monthly, either at old St. John’s Hall or at the imposing