Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [695]
Equally notorious were the men of the Eleventh Regiment (the Fire Zouaves). Composed largely of volunteer fire laddies, the unit was commanded by Ephraim Elmer Ellsworth, the man who popularized the uniform of the Franco-Algerian Zouaves: red billowing trousers, loose tunics, sashes, and turbans. These b’hoys went boisterously off to war and, on arriving in Washington, promptly broke into taverns, ordered meals, and charged them to Jeff Davis. They redeemed themselves in Washingtonian eyes, however, when a building next to Willard’s Hotel caught fire. Ellsworth’s men, quartered nearby in a wing of the Capitol, leapt out the windows, broke into the engine houses, and reached the spot before the city’s firemen were even awakened, saving the whole structure. More to the point, they fought well at Bull Run, though after the rout hundreds melted away and returned to New York, denouncing their officers who had fled the scene of battle. The regiment was reorganized, and though it remained refractory and brawled repeatedly, in the end it returned to the fray.
African-American troops were conspicuously absent from that fray, though not for lack of trying. Back in May, black New Yorkers had started drilling on their own in a privately hired hall. Chief of Police Kennedy warned them that “they must desist from these military exercises, or he could not protect them from popular indignation and assault.” In July the community tried again. Three regiments of black soldiers were offered to Governor Morgan for the duration of the war. The black population of the state guaranteed their arms, clothing, equipment, pay, and provisions. The governor declined.
Overall, however, the outpouring of metropolitan manpower and firepower was tremendous. Walt Whitman was ecstatic. In a new poem (Beat! Beat! Drums!) that he read aloud at Pfaff’s in September, Whitman claimed that the “torrents of men” he’d seen marching off that summer represented “DEMOCRACY” in all its primal energy: “I have witness’d my cities electric; I have lived to behold man burst forth, and warlike America rise.”
ENTREPÔT AND WORKSHOP
The South was furious at its former ally. A Richmond Dispatch editorial entitled “Execrable New York” proclaimed it the inferior of “Sodom, to which, on account of its horrible profligacy of morals, it has often been likened,” because Sodom, unlike New York, had had at least one principled man “amid an unclean and accursed generation.” The Charleston Courier—railing at “the treacherous cowardice and hypocrisy of [its] merchants and Mammon-worshippers”—declared that “the interests of Christianity, civilization, humanity, and intelligent self-government, require that New York, the metropolis of shoulder-hitters, prize-fighters, blackguards and mercantile gamblers should be blotted from the list of cities.”
For a time it looked as if the Courier would get its wish. Southern crowds menaced the offices of northern firms until their occupants packed up and returned home. The Confederacy prohibited the payment of debts to northerners. Even merchants who refused to repudiate announced a suspension of remittances until the war’s end. By July trade had virtually ceased.1
Severed from its southern connection, New York’s manufacturing economy crashed, too. The East River shipyards and ironworks came to a standstill. Boot and shoe production was drastically curtailed. Half the two thousand workers in the carriagemaking trade, heavily dependent on southern slaveocrat orders, were laid off. The dry-goods business was prostrated—the hoop skirt trade had sent 75 percent of its product to southern belles—and by summer one-fourth of the jobbers in Manhattan had gone under. Even the ice industry was crippled by lack of orders from the South.
With thirty thousand idled,