Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [409]
Clintonians and Tammanyites competed for popular support. The governor focused on wooing the Irish, with the aid of his good friend Thomas Addis Emmet. Clinton had successfully sponsored the bill abolishing the Test Oath (something Catholics in Ireland would struggle for another two decades to achieve) and had let it be known, through the Shamrock Friendly Association, that jobs in canal construction awaited Irish immigrants.
Tammanyites’ initial response to the Clinton-Irish alliance was a knee-jerk nativism. Not only did they refuse to court the Irishmen crowding into the Sixth Ward, but in 1817 the Wigwam’s General Committee flatly refused to nominate Emmet for an Assembly position. On the night of April 24, two hundred Irishmen expressed their displeasure by breaking into Tammany Hall, destroying most of the furniture in the Long Room, and sending several Tammanyites to the hospital before the arrival of the mayor and police ended the brawl. Forcibly alerted to their self-destructive chauvinism, Tammany now began to woo the Protestant Irish. Eldad Holmes, prominent banker and sachem, gave a toast at the St. Patrick’s Day dinner of the Hibernian Provident Society, hitherto a Clintonian hotbed, and slowly the party began to make some inroads.
When the surge of popular sentiment for electoral reform came along, moreover, Tammanyites and Bucktails rushed to head it. They initiated and won a referendum—over Clinton’s ill-advised resistance—that decreed the holding of a constitutional convention in 1821. The convention laid an ax to the hated Council of Revision. It also abolished the Council of Appointment and transferred the choice of most local officials to local voters—though reserving selection of the mayor of New York to that city’s Common Council. These decisions were relatively easy. The suffrage issue proved more contentious.
The most radically democratic delegates demanded an immediate end to all constraints on white male suffrage. In response, the upstate landed gentry, led by Chancellor James Kent, mobilized forthrightly against the “evil genius of democracy.” In particular they pointed to “the growth of the city of New York,” which in itself should have been sufficient, Kent declared, to “startle and awaken those who are pursuing the ignis fatuus of universal suffrage.” New York, after all, was home both to “men of no property” and to “the crowds of dependents connected with great manufacturing and commercial establishments.” If the poor were enfranchised, they would seek to plunder the rich, debtors would try “to relax or avoid the obligation of contracts,” and factory workers would become the electoral adjutants of industrialists.
Many New York City delegates had their own reservations about total enfranchisement, given the rising numbers of impoverished residents against whom the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism was then inveighing. In the end, moderate forces led by Van Buren conferred the suffrage on all twenty-one-year-old white males who had lived in their district for six months and had either paid taxes, served in the militia, or worked on the roads.
The proposed constitution was impressively endorsed at the polls. In 1822 De Witt Clinton, facing clear defeat, retired from the governorship rather than run again. His good friend John Pintard reflected sourly that power had passed to those with “no stake in society” and that New York City would “hereafter be governed by a rank democracy.” In fact, Clinton would have one last hurrah. His triumphant opponents, unable to resist kicking him when down, removed him from the Canal Board, a patent injustice that won him instant martyrship and, in 1824, reelection as governor. By 1826, nevertheless, calls for total eradication of the remaining restrictions on voting had become irresistible, and a constitutional amendment completed the democratization of New York’s political system.