Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [737]
In 1870 the legislature embarked on its last and most ambitious venture into urban reconstruction by appointing a Staten Island Improvement Commission to transform the malaria-plagued and hard-to-reach territory into New York’s premier suburb. A “committee of experts,” including Olmsted (an old Staten Island hand) and architect Henry Hobson Richardson, offered a fourteen-point, multimillion-dollar scheme to drain lowlands, improve ferry service, and build a comprehensive network of roads and parks, as well as suburban domestic neighborhoods, for the “class of people . . . able and willing to pay an advanced price for land and for improvements.” The island’s far-flung villages, however, proved unwilling to underwrite the experts’ approach, and though piecemeal improvements were undertaken, the grand plan was never implemented.
WHITE MEN SHALL RULE AMERICA!
New York radicals’ boldest intervention in civic affairs involved political rather than physical reconstruction. In tandem with Republican initiatives in the South and other states, New York’s radicals pressed for giving the black population the right to vote. African Americans, in their churches, newspapers, and state conventions, had been demanding the suffrage as a fair return for their war service, and many radicals agreed a debt was due. The elimination of the existing $250 property qualification, moreover, might add eleven thousand blacks to the rolls, virtually all of whom would vote Republican. This was a bloc of considerable consequence, given that Republican Governor Reuben Fenton had won by only eight thousand votes in 1864 and that Democratic presidential candidate Horatio Seymour would carry the state by just nine thousand votes in 1868. The bulk of these potential Republicans, moreover, lived in the Democratic strongholds of New York City and Brooklyn.
Radicals first raised the issue at the state constitutional convention in 1867. Democrats, spearheaded by Henry C. Murphy of Brooklyn, resisted furiously. Playing a “scientific” race card, Murphy trotted out a “craniological” analysis that purported to prove the existence of superior and inferior breeds of man. Giving blacks the vote, Murphy argued, would lead to social equality, race mixing, and the collapse of civilization. Republicans countered that granting political rights would lessen the likelihood of amalgamation—which they too rejected—by granting blacks dignity. “There is no danger,” one radical argued, “of the intermingling of the race by a man who respects his own blood.”
Democrats pressed their racist campaign during the November 1867 elections. Banners at Tammany campaign rallies read NO SUFFRAGE NOR NEGRO EQUALITY! WHITE MAN’S GOVERNMENT FOR WHITE MEN! WHITE MEN SHALL RULE AMERICA! Riding the backlash, Democrats handily captured the state assembly and missed retaking the state senate by a mere two votes. When a proposed state constitutional amendment authorizing black suffrage was finally submitted to the electorate, in November 1869, the Daily Eagle asked the white man in the street: “Are you willing to declare by your vote that you are exactly and precisely the equivalent of a negro, neither more nor less?” The answer was a resounding no. New York repulsed black voting by 70.4 percent.
THE END OF RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION IN NEW YORK
The same 1869 election that defeated black suffrage gave Tweed Democrats control of both the Assembly and the Senate, completing their conquest of the state (Tweed’s protege, New York Mayor John Hoffman, had captured the governorship in 1868). Tammany’s forces, marshaled by Grand Sachem Tweed, a state senator since 1867, now proposed a new city charter that