Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [504]
Protestant die-hards quickly won control of the new Board of Education and ruled that classroom readings from the King James Bible were not precluded by the ban on sectarianism. Catholics also lost the battle for funding of their church schools. So Hughes returned to the task of building up a parochial school system, staffed primarily by nuns, that would parallel the city’s network. At Hughes’s request Mother Madeleine Sophie Bar at founded the Convent of the Sacred Heart in 1841 and opened an academy on Houston and Mulberry, near the cathedral.
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVES
Bishop Hughes’s brief foray into politics, combined with the pressures of hard times, had reawakened New York’s slumbering nativist movement, which now dramatically asserted its power.
At first, the panic had actually soothed anti-immigrant anxieties by diminishing the influx of Irish. “Times is hard and wages low,” an Ulster-American warned his relatives back home, and the word got around. In 1837 forty-eight thousand crossed over; in 1838 only eleven thousand did. Still, the stream of new arrivals helped swell relief rolls, increase taxes, and heighten competition for scarce jobs and housing. Hughes’s Carroll Hall gambit of 1841 raised fears of Catholic political ambitions, and in spring 1842 newly reelected Mayor Morris rewarded Irishmen for their support by giving them jobs and licenses in the public markets.
Enraged Anglo-Protestant butchers, suddenly facing Irish competitors, spearheaded an anti-immigrant offensive. By August an American Republican Party was up and running, and in November its candidates received an astounding 22.9 percent of the vote for local offices. Spurred by this showing, a wide variety of New Yorkers clambered aboard the new party. Merchants, professionals, editors, and shopkeepers—furious at high taxes, financial profligacy, patronage abuses, outright corruption, and the yielding of Democrats and Whigs to Catholic pressure—hailed the American Republicans as a party of municipal reform. Small masters and journeymen in as yet unindustrialized trades like building, butchering, blacksmithing, and shipmaking signed on as well, in hopes that halting the immigrant flow might forestall the capitalist reorganization of work that had devastated the tailors, printers, and shoemakers. The new party also exalted the artisanal republican values of manly independence, Christian brotherhood, and craft solidarity and promised to restore the Trades to prominence.
What tied these disparate groups together was a shared Protestant culture, a nostalgic belief that New York City had been a far better place just after the Revolution, and a conviction that the evils now afflicting it—rising rates of crime, pauperism, and immorality—were foreign imports. The party’s platform reflected these premises. The American Republicans wanted to extend the naturalization period to twenty-one years, effectively eliminating foreigners from politics and reserving government offices and market licenses to citizens. The nativists aimed to repeal the 1842 school law to guarantee preservation of Bible reading and “nonsectarian” religion in the schools. The party also promised budget cuts, tax reductions, law and order, sobriety, bipartisan appointments, and an end to corruption.
In 1844 the American Republicans ran publisher James Harper for mayor. An ideal candidate, Harper was native born and a devout Methodist, head trustee of the John Street Church. He was staunchly anti-Catholic: his firm had brought out Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures. He was a temperance man, a Washingtonian. Harper cast himself as “a mechanic”—he was a member of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen