Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [503]
Hughes wanted to restore public funding for church schools. This would relieve depression-aggravated poverty and end Catholics’ second-class status in the city. The bishop soon discovered an ally in Governor Seward. An ardent advocate of Irish freedom and Irish immigration, Seward believed education was crucial for assimilating and elevating the arriving poor. Less high-mindedly, the governor knew that if Whigs were to sustain their depression-era victories, they would have to break Tammany’s grip on the city’s Catholic Irish.
In January 1840 Seward recommended funding for schools in which children “may be instructed by teachers speaking the same language with themselves and professing the same faith.” Catholic leaders promptly applied to the Common Council, which controlled distribution of school monies. They promised, if funded, to limit religious instruction to after-school hours and to require parental approval. A Hebrew congregation and a Scotch Presbyterian church joined the appeal.
Cautious aldermen arranged a debate. A battery of Protestant lawyers and divines supported the current arrangements as a satisfactory separation of church and state. Hughes, standing alone, gave a three-and-a-half-hour speech arguing that Catholics’ religious liberties could be upheld only in Catholic institutions. Appealing to Loco Foco antimonopoly sentiments, Hughes also cast the PSS as unacceptably authoritarian, paternalistic, and undemocratic—a “complex monopoly, of mind, and money, and influence, in the city of New York.” Nevertheless, a nervous Democratic council turned him down.
Hughes appealed to Albany, where the Whig legislature and governor backed a school decentralization plan giving each ward authority to decide what kind of schools it wanted. The PSS countered that—given the city’s shifting population—New York needed more, not less, uniformity in its schools. Besides, the Catholic claim was unconstitutional. Also it was unrepublican, one Protestant paper said, to train up children “to worship a ghostly monarchy of vicars, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and Popes!” Renascent nativists formed (in May 1841) the American Protestant Union (led by S. F. B. Morse) to back candidates in the upcoming November elections who were deemed safe on the school issue.
With Tammany waffling and city Whigs backing away from Seward, Hughes decided to enter politics directly. Days before the election, he called a meeting in Carroll Hall, which endorsed ten of the thirteen Democratic nominees for the Assembly but ran independent Catholic candidates for the three remaining slots. All ten joint selectees won, but the Carroll Hall ticket drew sufficient Democratic votes away from the contested trio to let three Whigs win. Hughes had demonstrated two things conclusively to the Democrats (who had regained both houses of the legislature): given the roughly equal strength of Whigs and Democrats, Catholics held the balance of political power in New York City, and they would not hesitate to wield that power against Tammany.
Democrats, accordingly, passed the Maclay bill on April 9, 1842. It authorized each ward to elect commissioners who would supervise local schools and, acting together, constitute a citywide Board of Education. It also barred the teaching of any sectarian doctrine. Seward signed the bill. For the first time in its history, New York City had an education system financed entirely from the public treasury and directly controlled by the people.
Some of the people were less than pleased, however. On the night Seward signed, crowds stoned Hughes