Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [396]
The urban mission movement expanded steadily in the next few years, with the waterfront and its “vastly wicked” sailors drawing particular attention. Stafford helped organize both the New-York Marine Missionary Society (1817) and the Port of New York Society for Promoting the Gospel Among Seamen (1818). Together they erected the interdenominational Mariner’s Church (1819) on Cherry Street near the East River docks. In 1821, even more aggressively, the New-York Bethel Union began holding nightly prayer meetings aboard wharfed ships and in sailors’ boardinghouses and offering comfort to families whose breadwinners had been lost at sea. In 1822 many of the new missions came together in the United Domestic Missionary Society, which four years later took the lead in founding the nationwide American Home Missionary Society.
SPREADING THE GOOD NEWS
In 1816 a group of prominent reformers—Henry Rutgers, David Low Dodge, Divie Bethune, Gardiner Spring, Richard Varick, and Governor De Witt Clinton, among others—founded the American Bible Society (ABS) for the purpose of printing and distributing Bibles throughout the United States. New York was deemed the appropriate headquarters city for such an organization—indeed, the ABS constitution required that twenty-four of its thirty-six managers reside in Manhattan or vicinity—because of the advanced state of its printing industry. In particular, New York printers had been the first in the country to adopt a revolutionary new British technique called stereotyping.
Formerly, a printer set a page by locking movable type into a form that would be disassembled once the required number of impressions for a given press run had been taken. In stereotyping, however, the printer made a mold of the page before disassembling the form, then cast a metal plate that could be inserted in the press over and over again, whenever a new printing was wanted, so the page would never have to be reset. (The plate was the stereotype itself, from the Greek stereo, or solid; thus “stereotype” would come to mean any often-repeated concept or image.) It was an expensive process but made good economic sense with books destined for massive and repeated print runs. Not surprisingly, one of the first objectives of the ABS was to acquire a full set of “well-executed stereotype plates” of the Bible, and within a few years the presses in its sumptuous Nassau Street headquarters, nicknamed Bible House, were producing tens of thousands of Bibles every year. Completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 ensured that the reach of Bible House would extend into every corner of the developing West.
Nor did the ABS neglect the widening war on irreligion in the city itself. It too believed that pauperism could be defeated by the Word, and it helped organize an expanding network of local groups—including the New-York Female Auxiliary Bible Society (1816), the Female Juvenile Auxiliary Bible Society (1816), the New-York Union Bible Society (1816), the New-York African Bible Society (1817), and the New York Marine Bible Society (1817)—whose members distributed Bibles in slums, brothels, grogshops, gambling dens, hospitals, and jails. Sometimes they ran into trouble. “A respectable man, not long since, who was distributing Bibles,” the Rev. Stafford reported in 1817, “was attacked, knocked down, and had his clothes literally torn off, and was so beaten as to lose considerable blood.” Sometimes they were laughed at by sailors brandishing books by “Hume, Gibbon, Paine,” and other infidels. Nor did Jews appreciate being the target of conversion drives: printer Solomon H. Jackson’s The Jen (1823-25), the first Jewish periodical published in the United States, consisted mainly of monthly diatribes against Christian missionaries.
Their biggest problem, however, often proved to be the Bible itself—too big, too long, too complex to be a convenient instrument of urban evangelism. Not so the pamphlets and booklets distributed by the New York Religious Tract Society, founded back in 1807 by many of the same men who subsequently created the American