Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [551]
Ruralites responded with defensive counterassaults. An upstate doctor, Joel H. Ross, addressing his What I Saw in New York (1851) to the young men and women fleeing farms and villages, warned that city life consisted of “trials, losses, frowns, failures, pestilence, poverty, and hypocrisy.” Places like New York, he said, were “to dwellers in the country, very like what white lights at night are to flies—brilliant and attractive, but certain ruin.” But the destiny of America, metrophiles rebutted, lay less in taming the continental wilderness and creating independent homesteads and small towns than in establishing large cosmopolitan cities that harbored the greatest diversity of human types. By these lights, New York was in the vanguard of American development. As George Francis Train boasted in 1857, it was “the locomotive of these United States,” pulling the rest of the nation faster and faster into the future: “twenty miles an hour—thirty—forty”!2
LONELY CROWDS, CONFIDENCE MEN
Amid the din of celebratory oratory, some city-based critics could be heard suggesting that the crowded life had some distinct minuses, among them anonymity. Boosters, to be sure, relished it for facilitating the pursuit of private pleasures. New York City “is the most free and easy place conceivable,” wrote Thomas R. Gunn, author of a treatise on the city’s boardinghouses. “The right to do as you d———n please,” Gunn exulted, “is nowhere so universally recognized or less curbed by authority.” Others, however, observed that one woman’s liberation was another’s loneliness.
Lydia Maria Child had her rhapsodic moments as she rambled Manhattan compiling the “Letters from New York” she dispatched to the Boston Courier, and she regularly praised the city’s “many agreeable sights and sounds.” Overall, however, she had a most un-flaneur-like perspective on street life. “It is sad walking in the city,” Child reported. “For eight weary months, I have met in the crowded streets but two faces I have ever seen before.” She discovered that in the city, “the loneliness of the soul is deeper, and far more restless, than in the solitude of the mighty forest.” Confluence didn’t guarantee connection, and indeed could underscore its absence. Child encountered much human suffering on her walks, “hungry eyes, that look as if they had pleaded long for sympathy, and at last gone mute in still despair,” but “the busy throng, passing and repassing. . . offer no sympathy.”
Crowding brought vulnerability too, especially in an era of humbug and flimflam. City people had to size up a stranger’s character from externals, which, like paper money, were all too easy to counterfeit. In 1849 William Thompson, a man of “genteel appearance,” struck up conversation on Broadway with a well-dressed stranger, greeting him as an old acquaintance. After a short time Thompson asked affably: “Have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until to-morrow?” The victim, embarrassed at having forgotten such an agreeable fellow, and reluctant to deny such a forthright request, handed over his timepiece, and Thompson faded away into the crowd. The city wasn’t yet vast enough to swallow him up forever, though, and when the mark happened upon Thompson a second time, he got him arrested, convicted, and sent to the Tombs.
A local journalist called Thompson a “confidence-man,” and the coinage achieved instant currency. New Yorkers’ reactions to Thompson were mixed. Some admired, even hailed his enterprise. But the phenomenon of the Confidence Man proved deeply worrying to many—it earned the longest entry in the National Police Gazette’s Rogue’s Lexicon—as it underscored the increasing difficulty city folk had in distinguishing benign stranger from malign trickster. Fortunately these were skills that could be improved with time. Those most vulnerable to being conned were newcomers, hayseeds, “greenhorns”—and innumerable guidebooks, pamphlets, and newspaper articles were