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By Root 7419 0

clerks, and cash boys on the consumption end—though as the war generated a male labor shortage, women entered the sales force for the first time. In some ways the cast-iron palace, the largest worksite under one roof in the city, resembled a gigantic factory. Reviewers noted the clerks were placed on a strict regimen during their twelve-hour days and that Stewart treated his “employees as cogs in the complicated machinery of his establishment. . . . The men are numbered and timed.” All the latest technology was deployed: steam engines heated all the floors, pumped water to the laundry, and powered the sewing machines in the carpet-manufacturing department. At night the building was brilliantly illuminated by gaslight chandeliers.

In summer many New Yorkers traveled north to Saratoga on Daniel Drew’s sumptuous new steamboats. There the women arranged fancy dress balls while the men indulged in liquor, races, and gambling at establishments created by John Morrissey, the Democratic politico, boxer, casino operator, and now turfman.

In fall, back in the city, the great hotels were glittering and crammed. Hundreds of contented Republican males packed the Astor House’s smoke-filled, gas-lit Rotunda Bar each evening, to banter and drink tap-beer and eat roasted meat before heading out for evening expeditions. Pleasure seekers might take in the theater, the city’s flourishing bawdy houses, or an opera at the Academy of Music. After 1862, they could dine at Lorenzo Delmonico’s latest and most luxurious restaurant, in the converted Moses Grinnell mansion at Fifth and 14th, one block west of Union Square.

For the ladies, there were days at the milliner’s or department stores. Wartime fashion ran to carriage cloaks of moire or amber velvet, to sable or mink furs, and to gowns of organdy, grenadine, and brocade silks in deep and brilliant magenta, gold, or fuchsia. Hoop skirts blocked traffic, which is why Mme. Demorest’s Imperial “dress-elevator” was immensely popular: its weighted strings allowed women to raise or lower their skirts at will, thus clearing New York’s mud and slush.

Even charitable occasions could be turned into festivals of consumption. In April 1864 the U.S. Sanitary Commission held a Metropolitan Sanitary Fair to raise money for its activities. Organized by the wives of leading businessmen, it was held in two buildings erected at Union Square (with interior decoration by the young architect Richard Morris Hunt). For three weeks, an estimated ten to thirty thousand daily shoppers thronged the stalls, raising $1,365,000.

The extravagance did provoke some opposition. A Harper’s 1864 article called “The Fortunes of War” denounced the “suddenly enriched contractors, speculators, and stock-jobbers” who were “spending money with a profusion never before witnessed in our country, at no time remarkable for its frugality.” The magazine rebuked those who used gold and silver dust to powder their hair and noted caustically that the price of a dinner at Delmonico’s or Maison Doree could “support a soldier and his family for a good portion of the year.” At a May 1864 Cooper Union meeting called by the Women’s Patriotic Association for Diminishing the Use of Luxuries, various speakers denounced the purchase of foreign superfluities while young men were dying on the Potomac, and all assembled pledged to reject imported luxuries. But the campaign was a flop: many promoted republican simplicity, but few were prepared to practice it.

REFORMERS AT WAR! THE SANITARY COMMISSION

Reformers—environmentalists and moralists alike—saw the great contest as an opportunity to educate the United States into a grander understanding of nationhood. In New York City they had fought to promote the public welfare. Now the war would allow them to apply, on a continental scale, ideas and programs they had developed while fighting metropolitan poverty and squalor.

The object of their reform efforts was the Union Army. Armies, they believed, were like cities: in both, vast numbers of men, mostly undisciplined workers, were packed into small deprived