Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [704]
Word also got back to New York that if officers weren’t bigoted, they were incompetent. Whitman was not alone in believing that many of the deaths were unnecessary: he called Burnside’s Fredericksburg operations “the most complete piece of mismanagement perhaps ever yet known in the earth’s wars.” The root of the problem, it seemed clear, was that most of those who raised, and therefore led, the volunteer regiments early in the war were not military professionals (who remained segregated in the regular army) but wealthy businessmen, socially prominent gentlemen, or successful politicians. Their only qualifications were their connections to the state governors who commissioned colonels and brigadiers. Many proved corrupt as well as incompetent, extorting money by making up fraudulent payrolls, forcing their men to answer to fake names, and pocketing their pay.
As word got back, enthusiasm for enlistment fell. The recruiting tent in City Hall Park was shut down for lack of business. And the federal government, faced with similar manpower problems throughout the North, began to explore the possibility of instituting a draft.
50
The Battle for New York
Working people in the city had their own miseries to contend with as the war ground on. In the boom’s first flush, jobs had been plentiful, especially for skilled workers, and wages decent even for manual laborers (a dollar a day versus fortythree cents in the army). People had been able to put a little something away in savings banks. But paper money, scarcity of goods, and incessant profiteering led to rampant inflation. Between 1860 and 1863 currency depreciated by 43 percent while wages rose a mere 12 percent. Beef nearly doubled in price; rents jumped 15 to 20 percent, coal went up more than 30 percent.
Wives and children of the absent volunteers found much of the money the Common Council had appropriated for their care rerouted to supplies and troops. As the relief program sagged, women demonstrated at City Hall and the homes of councilmen; in December 1861, when public relief was halted for a time, some two hundred desperate women gathered in Tompkins Square to insist that “you have got me men into the souldiers, and now you have to kepe us from starving.” Community self-help efforts—like a Jones’ Wood “festival” that drew sixty thousand who paid twenty-five cents apiece to aid those widowed and orphaned by the Battle of Bull Run—proved at best temporary expedients.
Shelter was a growing problem. During the war construction of housing declined sharply, just as expanding commercial and industrial operations ate into working-class territory in lower Manhattan. Those displaced jammed into uptown districts like the Fourth Ward (at 290,000 people per square mile, now the most densely populated place on earth), or the teeming East Side and West Side factory districts, or shantytowns above 50th Street, where thousands of squatters lived among the rocks and ravines. Working-class quarters grew steadily more wretched. An 1863 AICP report found the housing “dark, contracted, ill constructed, badly ventilated and disgustingly filthy.” Eighteen thousand lived in cellar apartments with floors of putrid mud.
In response, working people revived the labor movement and pushed for a greater share of wartime profits. In the fall of 1862 the city’s ship joiners and caulkers, coppersmiths, and hat finishers went on strike, launching the “advanced wages movement.” Leather workers in the Swamp walked out, as did men at the Manhattan Gas Works near the East River. By the spring of 1863 there were 133 union locals, up from thirty the previous year. Though small, they did well. When custom tailors went out in March, most first-class shops conceded at once (with the fateful exception