Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [372]
Lafayette swung through New York again the following July on his way south. Speaking at the city’s Independence Day celebrations, he assured his listeners that of all the wondrous improvements he had seen on his journey thus far, “Nowhere can they be more conspicuous than in the state of New York, in the prodigious progress of this city.” Another busy week ensued, including a trip to Brooklyn, where he picked up and kissed six-year-old Walter Whitman (or so the poet insisted in later life). Lafayette returned to New York a third and final time in early September for another round of sightseeing (Columbia College, the Academy of Arts, the hospital, the almshouse) and a spectacular sendoff that was soon to become the talk of the country: a grand fete at Castle Garden on the evening of September 14, at which six thousand guests danced until two in the morning.
For upper-class New Yorkers, Lafayette’s three visits, each carefully staged-managed, constituted a running advertisement for the legitimacy of the municipal social system. They demonstrated that huge crowds of citizens could assemble peacefully to honor a national hero—or, as Cadwallader Colden forthrightly put it, that an “exhibition of bayonets is not essential to the preservation of order in New York.” They affirmed, too, that even the city’s wealthiest residents hadn’t forgotten their Revolutionary antecedents and remained fully committed to the cause of constitutional republicanism around the world.
Not coincidentally, rich New Yorkers were already deeply involved in marshaling popular support for the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman empire. Since raising the standard of revolt in 1821, the Greeks had won support from radicals and reformers throughout Europe by presenting themselves both as heirs of Athenian democracy and as Christian crusaders against the heathen Turks. In 1823 a meeting of sympathetic New Yorkers set up a Greek Committee, chaired by William Bayard, to raise money for the rebels, while another group, headed by Chancellor James Kent, appealed to Congress to recognize Greece as an independent nation. They were soon joined by a long line of wealthy Yankees and Knickerbockers.
By the mid-twenties, even as Lafayette made his triumphant rounds of the city, New York was in the grip of a Greek mania. The Greek Ladies of Brooklyn and New York erected a twenty-foot Grecian Cross on Brooklyn Heights. Churches and schools took up collections, theaters gave benefit performances, and tickets were sold for a military ball (“as exclusive an affair as was practicable”). Politicians made speeches, and poets churned out verses on Greek themes; Mordecai Noah wrote a play, The Grecian Captive or the Fall of Athens, in support of “the present struggle for liberty in Greece.”
There was money to be made as well as raised. In 1824 Greek agents in London asked LeRoy, Bayard, and Company to arrange manufacture of two fifty-gun frigates in New York. The firm placed the order with Eckford and with Smith and Dimon, two local yards, and once again a fund-raising frenzy swept the city. In October 1825, with the ships ready to sail, the Greeks discovered the final bill was twice as high as the price they’d been quoted, having been inflated by fat commissions and brokerage fees, and the builders refused to release the vessels until the sum was paid. The rebels were forced to sell one of the frigates to the U.S. Navy in order to redeem the other. Both purchasers soon discovered that the vessels had been constructed using cheap green timber