Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [705]
Employers and their spokesmen fought back. Horace Greeley, despite his long history of support for working people, insisted that workmen had a right to combine and refuse the wages employers offered but were not entitled to strike. The U.S. Economist and Dry Goods Reporter branded work stoppages as “despotic on the business of their employers.” Labor was a commodity like any other. Its price should be set by the natural laws of supply and demand.
To boost supply and weaken labor’s bargaining ability, employers brought additional workers to the city. Most focused on Europe—during the war Secretary of State Seward’s consuls abroad often acted as emigrant agents—but some, like Peter Cooper, urged Lincoln to send up southern blacks. A Tammany mass meeting censured employer efforts “to bring hoards of Blacks from the South, as well as Whites from Europe, to fill the shops, yards and other places of labor and by that means compel us to compete with them for support of our families.”
Employers also repeatedly hired strikebreakers to defeat the new unions. African American New Yorkers were used in disputes at the Staten Island ferry, the Custom House, and, most particularly, on the waterfront. In March 1863 laborers at the Erie Railroad’s Hudson River docks struck, seeking a share of the company’s vaulting prosperity. The railroad hired blacks to move the cotton bales accumulating at Pier 36 at the foot of Duane Street, until a thousand white strikers drove them off.
Increasingly, white workers argued that blacks had no legitimate claim whatever on laboring jobs. In August 1862 two to three thousand people from predominantly Irish South Brooklyn threatened to burn the Watson and Lorillard tobacco factories at the foot of Sedgwick Street unless several hundred black women and children left the plants. When the companies refused, they besieged the buildings and were only prevented from setting fires to “roast the niggers alive” by the arrival of police.
THE POLITICS OF EMANCIPATION
To these growing strains along class and race lines was added the shock of emancipation. In September 1862, when Lee’s invasion of Maryland was turned back at Antietam, Lincoln used the good news to issue a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. On January 1, 1863, the Proclamation itself was promulgated, though it freed no slaves, applying as it did only to areas beyond the reach of federal power.
New York City’s blacks and abolitionists were nevertheless ecstatic. At an “Emancipation Jubilee” at Cooper Union, Henry Highland Garnet read the Proclamation aloud to a cheering crowd. Lewis Tappan, the now seventy-five-year-old patriarch of the city’s antislavery movement, gave a moving review of the long history of the struggle in what would prove to be his last public appearance.
Black and white abolitionists were considerably less enthusiastic about Lincoln’s zealous campaign to get African Americans to leave the country voluntarily. An emigrationist minority applauded a late 1862 Lincoln-promoted plan to transport five thousand blacks to lie a Vache, a small island off Haiti, until the effort, run under contract by Leonard Jerome and other prominent New York businessmen, proved a disastrous failure. But most New York blacks flatly rejected the colonization project. The Colored Citizens of Queens County notified Lincoln that America was their native country and they had no intention of leaving it. Emancipation, rather, spurred black demands to join the army and fight for the total liberation of the slaves.
Emancipation also roiled the city’s political waters. Republicans had been of two minds on slavery. Many of those who joined up before the war held fast to their moral and cultural repugnance