Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [425]
Evangelical Presbyterians also figured prominently in forging an alternative to the Episcopalian stronghold of Columbia College. Despite its central location, Columbia in the 1820s drowsed on the margins of New York’s intellectual life, expounding the classics to upper-class boys destined for careers in the clergy. But its critics were growing more numerous and vocal. Mercantile and professional families wanted their sons trained for commerce, not the cloister. Workingmen and democrats sought equal educational opportunity for all residents. Old Jeffersonians like Albert Gallatin argued that no proper college could function under clerical control. Powerful evangelicals like Eleazar Lord and the Rev. Samuel H. Cox pressed for a Presbyterian version of Columbia.
In the autumn of 1830 a three-day “literary and scientific convention” convened in City Hall to discuss proposals for a municipal institution of higher learning comparable to the new University of London (1826). After some sharp debate, the hundred-odd delegates agreed on a plan for a University of the City of New York (now New York University). When both the state and city governments refused to provide financial support, the university’s trustees raised a hundred thousand dollars from private donors, hired faculty, and tapped Gallatin to serve as its first president. Less than a year later, however, Gallatin resigned in disgust. Evangelical Presbyterian and Reformed ministers had succeeded in drawing up a curriculum for the university that neglected the “rational and practical” learning he considered essential. By 1832, as classes got underway in rented quarters in Clinton Hall (at Nassau and Beekman streets), it was no surprise that twice as many Presbyterian students registered as those of any other denomination. Three years later, the university moved into its first permanent home, a white marble Gothic Revival building on Washington Square designed by A. J. Davis.
SPIRIT VERSUS SPIRITS
By the mid-1820s the massive growth of western grain production, combined with improved technologies of distillation and ever more efficient means of transportation, left New York awash in cheap liquor. It also triggered a new eruption of concern over the scope and consequences of excessive drinking. John Pintard remarked as early as 1821 that “grovelling drunkenness increases among the lower vulgar owing to the reduced prices of ardent spirits.” Growing numbers of well-to-do residents—already in revolt against the swilling customary on New Year’s and other holidays—were alarmed that alcohol was taking a heavy toll among their own kind as well, eroding ambition, dissipating wealth, and spawning domestic violence. So, too, manufacturers challenged the customary drinking rights of their employees as a threat to higher profits, while journeyman unionists and freethinkers denounced drunkenness as an obstacle to effective organization in the trades.
It was evangelical merchants and industrialists, however, who would inspire and lead the city’s first temperance movement. Hat manufacturer Joseph Brewster, for one, was an idealistic and determined Finneyite who also calculated that banning alcohol from the workplace could boost profits by up to 25 percent. He moved his family from a 4th Street mansion (today’s Old Merchant’s House museum) to a shabby Bowery dwelling on Rivington Street, joined one of the free Presbyterian churches, and began to hand out abstinence tracts (he slipped one inside each hat he sold) and to lead raiding parties on nearby saloons. Lewis Tappan likewise organized