Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [519]
In 1855 an American filibuster named William Walker seized control of Nicaragua, installed himself as president, and revoked Vanderbilt’s charter, transferring it to competitors who promised to pay more. This audacity made Walker a hero in New York—some Boweryites went down to join him—but it earned him the enmity of the ruthless and powerful Commodore. Without setting foot outside New York, Vanderbilt underwrote an invasion of Nicaragua by four other Central American republics, and Walker’s hated American Phalanx was overthrown in 1857.
Most New York businessmen worried that such tactics could lead to war with Spain or Great Britain, but armed diplomacy became an acquired taste among some big merchants and railroad financiers, including August Belmont, Prosper M. Wetmore, Royal Phelps, and John A. Dix. Cheered on by such prominent editors as James Gordon Bennett and John Louis O’Sullivan (of the Democratic Review), these “Young Americans” clamored for further expansion, especially in Central America and the Caribbean. It was the Manifest Destiny of the United States, they said, to spread republicanism, Christianity, and progress around the world—by trade if possible, by force if necessary.
In Asia, force seemed particularly appropriate, England having demonstrated its efficacy by ramming unwanted drugs into China during the Opium War. (The Lows and other China traders had also been smuggling in Turkish opium in exchange for tea, using fast little schooners turned out by the East River yards, and after Britain’s success they too expanded their operations.) All New York celebrated when Commodore Matthew C. Perry took the navy’s East India Squadron to Japan in 1853 and bullied the shogun into opening his country to American trade. Perry was almost a native son, having spent a decade at the Brooklyn Navy Yard pioneering the application of steam power to warships. Besides, he was Belmont’s father-in-law. New Yorkers could be forgiven for thinking that Tokyo too was now an economic satellite of Manhattan.
From around the world, commerce poured into New York City. In 1849 over three thousand ships sailed or steamed into the harbor from more than 150 foreign ports—three times the number that had arrived in 1835—and they carried with them half the nation’s imports and departed with nearly one-third its exports. In the Gold Rush decade (1849-59), ship tonnage through the port jumped another 60 percent.
As trade grew, so did the size and tempo of the waterfront. By 1850 a collar of piers, wharves, docks, and slips circled Manhattan below 14th Street—sixty on the East River, another fifty or more on the Hudson. Those along the East River were favored by sleek Liverpool packets and great square-rigged clippers, those on the west by deeper-draw coastal and transatlantic steamships (the Collins Line pier, for example, lay at the foot of Canal Street). East side or west, however, there was never enough room to accommodate the thousands of vessels now moving in and out of the port every year. At its busiest, the harbor looked (to landlubbers anyway) dangerously anarchic: pilots and crews jockeying for berths while schools of sloops and lighters darted in and out among canal boats, schooners, yachts, barges, ferries, and two-thousand-ton steamers that plowed along at speeds approaching twenty miles per hour.
It wasn’t any calmer on shore, either. In 1857, 598 licensed hacks, forty-five hundred carts, and 190 express wagons competed to tote cotton bales from southern packets to steamers heading to Liverpool; lug finished bolts just in from Manchester to storage warehouses, Pearl Street wholesalers, or Broadway retailers; carry ice, coal, or wood to consumers; haul brick, stone, and earth to construction projects; and fetch passengers from ferries and steamer berths. The number