Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [397]
In 1825 the New York Tract Society combined forces with the New England Tract Society to form the American Tract Society (ATS). Like their counterparts in the ABS, the directors of the new group readily agreed to set up headquarters in New York, knowing that the Erie Canal would ensure them easy access to western settlements—and because the city was home to wealthy benefactors like textile importer Arthur Tappan, banker Moses Allen, and merchants David Low Dodge, Anson Phelps, and Thomas Stokes. Tappan and Allen paid for the construction of Tract House on Nassau Street, which, like the ABS’s nearby Bible House, held the organization’s offices, foundry, bindery, and stereotype-finishing functions. (The availability of stereotyping in Manhattan, the directors said, had been “a powerful argument in favor of union.”) It was likewise Arthur Tappan’s gift of five thousand dollars that led, in 1826, to the installation of New York’s first steam-powered press on the fourth floor of Tract House. By 1829, four years before Harper Brothers became the first commercial publisher to install one, the Tract Society had sixteen of the machines, all built by Robert Hoe, soon the country’s leading manufacturer of printing presses.
The offspring of this marriage of technology and evangelism was an unprecedented outpouring of printed matter—six million tracts (61 million pages in all) in 1829 alone, plus better than three hundred thousand Bibles. No less impressive was the invention of marketing and distribution techniques, later the norm in American business, by which the evangelicals moved their wares from New York to the rest of the country. Corps of agents in every state, organized into hundreds of local branches, handed out Bibles and tracts door to door, founded circulating libraries, advertised in newspapers, and even made special deliveries to sailors and boatmen aboard whalers, packets, ferries, canal barges, and steamboats. There was even a Tract of the Month program that offered “book dividends” to subscribers.
In New York itself, the American Tract Society considered the systematic distribution of its publications to be “the lever which shall move the foundation of Satan’s empire in this city” (and in Brooklyn too, which got its own auxiliary Tract Society). In 1829 the ATS launched a “General Supply” campaign whose goal was to place in the hands of every resident a copy of a different tract every month. Each ward had a committee and a chairman and was divided into districts encompassing sixty families each. Each district (over five hundred in all) was assigned a team of distributors who received printed instruction cards, forms for reporting back to the central committee, and a supply of the tract of the month. By March 1829 the ATS had visited all 28,771 families in the city. Only 388 declined to take a tract. Evidently, as the secretary of the ATS put it, “The concentration of tract work in New York was what God designed.”
OFF TO SCHOOL
Complementing the labors of missionaries and tractarians came a new burst of interest in the use of schools to combat pauperism and licentiousness: children who acquired good moral training at an early age (it was said) would become productive, law-abiding, self-supporting adults. The difficulty—as Eddy, Pintard, Clinton, and other reformers began to appreciate soon after the turn of the century—was that New York still had no system of public education