Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [408]
In April 1829, for seven thousand dollars, Wright bought the old Ebenezer Baptist Church on Broome Street near the Bowery, in the heart of an artisanal neighborhood. She remodeled it to include a Greek-columned facade and rechristened it the Hall of Science; its front window, which faced a Bible repository across the street, was cheekily festooned with pictures of radical heroes (Paine, Shelley, Godwin). On April 26 Wright gave an opening address dedicating the hall to promulgating “universal knowledge” and to helping working people apply rational standards to the problems of the age.
The Hall of Science, a radical counterpart of the gentry’s athenaeum and the evangelicals’ missions, offered a day school and a deist Sunday school where working-class youngsters could learn reading, writing, and arithmetic using texts shorn of biblical reference. Its main focus, however, was adult education. The Hall of Science had a bookstore and a circulating library, well stocked with editions of Wright’s pamphlets. It offered speeches and debates every Sunday—admission ten cents—and the twelvehundred-seat hall was regularly filled. Free lectures were offered as well on mathematics, anatomy, geometry, chemistry, natural history, and debating, all aimed at preparing workingmen to think, speak, and legislate for themselves.
ARISTOCRATS AND DEMOCRATS
Political activism was the more attractive to crowds at the Hall of Science because in the late 1820s remaining constraints on popular participation had just been dismantled. Even after the 1804 law had lowered suffrage requirements for city dwellers, large numbers of tenants, clerks, journeymen, and laborers had still lacked sufficient property to vote. Indeed the growth of propertylessness worsened the situation. As of 1821 threequarters of New York City’s male population could not vote for governor or state senator (women couldn’t vote at all), and even the less rigorous requirements for casting a ballot for assemblyman or congressman still barred roughly a third of the electorate. Popular participation was further circumscribed by the fact that power to select most state, county, and municipal officials—nearly fifteen thousand in all as of 1821, including the mayor of New York City—was still vested in the Council of Appointment consisting of the governor and four senators. The Council of Revision, yet another undemocratic body, retained the right to veto any act of the legislature.
The 1819 recession had quickened demands for political reform. Debtors petitioned the state legislature for assistance but were refused. Many believed this disregard for their interests was a function of the property qualifications that disfranchised them. A clamor went up for ending electoral restrictions, now characterized as undemocratic holdovers from the colonial era.
What finally battered down the old constraints was the thrust and parry of electoral politics. The Federalists’ opposition to the War of 1812 had been their undoing, and they did not long survive the truce. Their Democratic-Republican antagonists, however, soon divided into two factions: those who backed De Witt Clinton, and those who followed Tammany Hall and the upstate Bucktails led by Martin Van Buren, a successful country lawyer who had defended tenants and small landowners against the Hudson River manor lords.
Tammanyites and Bucktails denounced Clinton as an aristocrat. With his autocratic style and ruthless wielding of the Council of Appointment’s patronage power, Clinton, his enemies charged, was bent on perpetuating the eighteenth-century patrician system of family and personal factions. The Democrats, on the other hand, proclaimed themselves