Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [674]
The building boom halted abruptly, leaving even Fifth Avenue mansions half completed and masses of construction laborers out of work. Merchant princes cut costs by firing servants in droves. Seagoing black cooks and stewards found themselves drydocked in the Coloured Sailors Home—its proprietor wrote—given “the great revulsion in the commercial affairs.”
By September 1857 estimates of New York unemployment ran as high as forty thousand. By late October Hunt’s Merchant Magazine calculated the figure in Manhattan and Brooklyn had risen to a hundred thousand. As word on local conditions reached Europe, immigration damped down from 460,474 in 1854 to 123,126 in 1858.
Unions proved powerless to halt or slow the devastation. Indeed most laboring organizations broke up altogether, and trade union activity virtually ceased. Out-of-work mechanics pawned their tools; women their household goods, with one paper noting that “many a worthy home this winter will be half-stripped of the cherished things on which the good wife had prided herself.” Army recruiters were besieged by unemployed men. Women had no such option, though their need was greater—the contraction having cut female employment by almost half, versus 20 percent for males. At one point in midpanic, an advertisement ran for girls willing to work in the West, and within a week, over a thousand applied. Other “opportunities” lay closer to home: Dr. William Sanger estimated that the recession drove perhaps a thousand women to street whoring, and the numbers of women in prison rose accordingly.
Joblessness meant homelessness: adamant landlords turned out those who didn’t pay their rents. The AICP estimated that during three severe winter months of 1857-58 forty-one thousand were forced to seek shelter in police stations. Thousands more were forced out of respectable lodgings into crowded tenement apartments, and slum conditions surged. Industrial Home Owners Society Number One foundered in the hard times, as did many of the cooperatives, caught between soaring interest rates and assorted swindlers, and many participants lost their life savings.
One thing that did not collapse was the price of food, as the breakdown of the credit system prevented eastward shipments of western grain. Standing amid the economic ruins, even the AICP’s Hartley was forced to admit that New York “presented a more appalling picture of social wretchedness than was probably ever witnessed on this side of the Atlantic” and that “we were now brought to realize something of the distress which, at times, has often been experienced in European cities.”
“PAPER BUBBLES OF ALL DESCRIPTIONS”
Analyses of the crisis varied. James Waddell Alexander, pastor of New York’s largest Presbyterian church, announced that the panic was God’s work. Many Wall Streeters agreed and hied to their churches to pray for relief. By mid-winter, merchants and clerks were jamming lunch-hour prayer meetings at the local John Street Methodist Church. The Journal of Commerce encouraged more readers to participate: “Steal awhile away from Wall Street / and every worldly care, / And spend an hour about midday / in humble, hopeful prayer.” By February 1858 the noonday prayer meetings were attracting huge crowds. Soon a full-scale revival was in progress, an urban camp meeting in which bookkeepers and bankers, their wives, and their children huddled together and sang the old hymns, trying to create an island of stability amid the economic storm.
Horace Greeley adopted a structural explanation, though lacing his economic analysis with a dose of moralism, and the Tribune editor’s listing of presumed causes is all the more impressive for having been issued in the summer of 1857, several weeks before the collapse. One of the country’s biggest problems, Greeley argued, was its excess of imports over exports, an imbalance he believed had been fueled by the