Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [458]
The alliance of Jacksonians and Workingmen alarmed conservative Democrats like John Jacob Astor. Many broke ranks and condemned Jackson’s veto, thus splitting the Democratic Party. Jackson triumphed nevertheless in his 1832 reelection bid, winning 59 percent of the vote in New York City, and promptly declared full-scale war on Biddie’s “Monster.” He announced he would soon remove all U.S. funds from the BUS and transfer the money to selected state bank depositories.
During May and June of 1833 Jackson toured the Northeast to test his policy’s popularity. Huge and affectionate crowds turned out—nowhere more so than in New York City. When the president landed at Castle Garden, a hundred thousand people jammed the Battery and its adjoining wharves and housetops to watch Jackson mount a horse and lead a procession of cabinet members, governors, congressmen, and mayors across the wooden causeway connecting the old fort to Manhattan. Unfortunately for his followers, the moment Jackson reached dry land, the bridge collapsed behind him, tumbling the assorted notables into the shallow waters. No one was seriously hurt, and the grand parade of dripping-wet dignitaries proceeded up Broadway to City Hall Park, led by the president on horseback, with the crowds huzzahing lustily for Old Hickory. And when seven state banks were chosen to receive the federal deposits, three of the “pet banks” (as his enemies dubbed them) were in New York City.
Biddle struck back. Convinced that only a massive economic crisis would galvanize the citizenry into demanding that Congress overrule Jackson, he jammed on the fiscal brakes by engineering a credit contraction. Withholding loans and calling in debts, Biddie singlehandedly deflated the national economy, producing widespread financial prostration, especially hi New York. By Christmas, stocks on the NYS&EB were plummeting. “Panic prevails,” wrote Hone, who himself lost thirty thousand dollars in two months. With many dealers and merchants verging on bankruptcy, disaster rippled through the city; laborers were discharged by the hundreds.
Biddle remained remorseless. “All the other Banks and all the merchants may break,” he said, “but the Bank of the United States shall not break.” As he hoped, delegations of businessmen now descended on Congress with pleas to restore the deposits. The president declared that the distress was only affecting “brokers and stock speculators and all who were doing business on borrowed capital” and that “all such people ought to break.” When New York financiers went to plead with him in person, an angry Jackson thundered, “Go to Nicholas Biddle,” as he was the one with the millions.
Jackson’s opponents—National Republicans and Conservative Democrats—denounced the autocratic “King Andrew” and coalesced into a new “Whig” Party. The name, first suggested by Colonel Webb in the Courier and Enquirer, invoked Revolutionary-era resistance to King George III and gained rapid acceptance. In April 1834 the fledgling Whigs entered the political lists in New York City.
BANK RIOT
On the morning of April 8, voters slogged their way to the polls through rain-muddied streets. Over the next three days, for the first time in the city’s history, they would be casting ballots in a mayoral election; the city charter had been amended in 1833 to finally give New Yorkers the right to elect their own chief magistrate. With the Bank War at its height, the city’s election was widely viewed as a referendum on the president’s policies. Daniel Webster declared that Whig hopes for winning national power “rely mainly upon the success of the great struggle which is to take place in New York.”
The election would also measure the ability of Whig amateurs to compete with Tammany professionals. The new party’s inner circle was comprised chiefly of merchants, bankers, and