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Many nativists doggedly refused to doubt Monk’s story until Colonel William Leete Stone, the mildly antipapist editor of the Commercial Advertiser, examined the convent in the fall of 1836 and pronounced the priests and nuns completely innocent. Monk’s star now faded quickly, but not before it had helped spark another outburst in the streets.

In 1836, with excitement still running high, a nativist crowd resolved to attack St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Forewarned, the faithful rallied. The church’s cemetery had just been enclosed by a high brick wall, in which loopholes were now cut for muskets. More armed men lined Prince Street, the expected avenue of attack. Others tore up cobblestones and hoisted baskets full of them to the upper stories along the route. As the anti Catholic army roiled up the Bowery, its advance scouts reported back on the fearsomeness of the Gaels’ military preparations and the fortress-like impregnability of their walled cathedral. Disheartened, the nativists retreated, and their movement, for the moment, subsided.

LIFE ALONG THE COLOR LINE

On July 4, 1827—Emancipation Day—all the city’s black churches held services of prayer and thanksgiving. The largest celebration was in African Zion Church (at Church and Leonard). In his oration, church trustee William Hamilton placed the day in historical context, recalling the bloody events of 1741, the complex relation of blacks to the Revolution of ‘76, and the years of postwar degradation. Then he joyously proclaimed that “this day we stand redeemed from a bitter thralldom.” “No more,” he rolled on, “shall the accursed name of slave be attached to us—no more shall negro and slave be synonimous [sic].”

Then the celebrants quietly dispersed, refraining from a more public jubilation lest they be assaulted by whites hard at their Independence Day revels. Instead they gathered the next day, four thousand strong, near St. John’s Park. Then they paraded through the principal streets to Zion Church and on to City Hall, where the grand marshal, with drawn sword, saluted the mayor as the crowd roared cheers.

The city’s blacks called for making July fifth their annual day of commemoration and reserving the fourth for bitter reflection on the continuing disparity between America’s rhetoric and its reality. For as the Rev. Peter Williams Jr. said: “Alas! the freedom to which we have attained is defective.” It remained the case, he sadly observed, that in New York City “the rights of men are decided by the colour of their skin.” Even the briefest of strolls around segregated Manhattan would have quickly confirmed the accuracy of Williams’s assessment.

All the new forms of transport drew the color line. Blacks were banned from cabins on Hudson River steamers and restricted to the exposed deck, on spring day and stormy night alike. The Rev. Williams himself had been refused passage on an American packet bound for Europe and been forced to sail on an English vessel. Blacks were not allowed on street stages, and when a black man hailed one of the new omnibuses going up Broadway, the driver warded him off with a whip, convulsing white bystanders with laughter.

Many commercial facilities were also off limits to African-American New Yorkers. Vauxhall Gardens flatly denied them admission; the Park Theater sequestered them in a roped-off section. An English visitor in 1819, questioning a black barber as to why he had rejected a prospective black customer, was told that if he hadn’t the shop would have lost all its white patrons. A black minister was refused a cup of tea by a “foreigner in a cellar cookroom” as the “customers would not put up with it”—customers who included agents of the American Bible Society.

Blacks were barred from the Free School Society’s institutions, as well as the charity schools of most denominations. A light-skinned African-American Presbyterian minister found his children rejected from Presbyterian schools “on account of their complexion, they being mixed blood, a few shades below the pure white.” The