Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [459]
Democratic orators branded Whiggery a tool of the city’s elite and portrayed the coming contest as “one of the rich against the poor” (William Cullen Bryant) or the “bank aristocracy against the people” (George Henry Evans). Whigs retorted that Democratic ranks too were laced with men of wealth and position—starting with the Democrats’ mayoral candidate, banker Cornelius Lawrence—though they did not deny their party’s affiliation with the rich and influential, and indeed denounced Lawrence as a traitor to his class.
Whigs were well aware, however, that winning the mayoralty would require popular support. Some Whig employers bluntly relied on economic muscle, threatening to dismiss employees who voted Democratic. Others solicited support on the basis of converging class interests—the old Alexander Hamilton strategy. At a Masonic Hall rally Whigs appealed to the traditional interdependence of merchants and “all trades connected with commerce”—winning some converts among cartmen, draymen, porters, sailors, ship carpenters, coopers, stevedores, riggers, and longshoremen. Whigs also appealed to American-born workers’ growing resentment of the Catholic Irish. Tammany, they said, was using the new immigrants to consolidate municipal power, and in fact Irishmen had flocked to the party that had courted them.
With the stage thus set for confrontation, James Watson Webb, the combative Courier and Enquirer editor and former soldier, took command of Whig troops. On Tuesday, April 8, pro-Whig sailors fitted out a float-size frigate. They named it the Constitution, mounted it on wheels, attached Whig pennants to its rigging, and hauled it through the streets with two bands and five hundred seamen following along behind. The parade marched through Broadway and Greenwich Street, picking up a thousand more supporters from among the vast pool of idled employees (Whig employers had decreed afternoon business shutdowns for the duration). After being vigorously cheered at the Merchants’ Exchange on Wall Street, the crowd headed into the heavily Democratic Sixth Ward. At the polls there, Whigs insulted the locals, with one invader shouting, “We should get along well enough if it were not for the low Irish.” Words led to blows, and the Whigs were driven from the area. Webb proclaimed the repulsion a “REIGN OF TERROR” in his Courier and Enquirer, and at a Masonic Hall conclave that evening, Whigs resolved to march en masse into Democratic terrain the next day.
On Wednesday hundreds of Whigs proceeded “in military order” into the heart of the Sixth Ward, bellowing epithets such as “damned Irish.” Gaelic Democrats retaliated by attacking Whig headquarters on Broadway. In the ensuing battle, shots were exchanged and many were injured. The Tammanyite crowd then headed to Wall Street, determined to destroy the Courier and Enquirer’s office. Webb, forewarned, erected a barricade of bundled papers and retired to the roof with thirty young merchants, seventy muskets, one hundred pistols, and six loads of paving stones. When rioters filled the street below, Webb threatened to shoot the first man who moved toward his property, and eventually the crowd dispersed.
On the third and final day of the election, fifteen hundred Whig freemen again did battle with Jacksonians armed with clubs and brickbats, and when the mayor tried to intervene he was knocked to the pavement and struck on the head with a stick. Hundreds of youthful Whigs now cleaned out the gun shops on Broadway and marched to the state arsenal at Elm and Franklin streets, led by such prominent merchants as Simeon Draper. They broke in and began passing out arms. Irishmen raced to the site. Soon an estimated twenty thousand merchants, mechanics, cartmen, and laborers filled the area. “We were indeed in the midst of a