The Medici of the Republic Upper-class religion, fashion, domesticarrangements, invention of Christmas, Lafayette returns, Greeks revive, patricians patronize the arts and architecture ⠀䌀漀漀瀀攀爀Ⰰ 䌀漀氀攀Ⰰ 攀琀 愀氀⸀).

Interior of the new Park Theatre, 1822, watercolor by John Searle. Fire destroyed the

original Park Theatre in 1820, but its replacement, which opened the following year,

was no less fashionable. Searle’s portraits of the audience comprise a visual directory

of the Knickerbocker elite. William Bayard, the wealthy merchant who commissioned

the work, is standing in the first tier, behind the lady who has draped her shawl over the

rail. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

Yankees likewise vilified horse racing, another Knickerbocker enthusiasm that enjoyed wide

popular support. Although the state banned the sport in 1802 as a vestige of aristocratic dissipation,

Long Island gentry got the ban reversed, though only for Queens County, on the ground that it impeded

the improvement of breeds. The Union Course, out on the plains of Jamaica, soon became one of the

premier tracks in the country, famous for its huge purses and the multitudes who came out from the

city to watch, gamble, and carouse. In May 1823 the track tapped sectional rivalries by hosting a

match race between the fastest mount in the North, Eclipse, and a southern challenger, Henry. Some

twenty thousand spectators showed up, a million dollars in wagers allegedly changed hands, and the

Evening Post brought out a special edition to announce that Eclipse had carried the day. The victory

did nothing to dispel Yankee convictions that racing was wicked, and when the Union Course was

later bought and refurbished by Cadwallader Colden, the eminent Knickerbocker, they knew who to

blame for encouraging it.

Waltzing too was in disfavor. Exclusive, meticulously arranged dancing “assemblies” were no

less a feature of upper-class socializing than they had been before the Revolution, but the younger and

more adventuresome set now regarded the cotillion or quadrille (ancestor of the modern square

dance) as unbearably old-fashioned. They preferred the “valse,” which came to New York via Paris

in the 1820s and was thought quite daring because dancers whirled around the ballroom in couples.

Yankees and Presbyterian ministers denounced it as the devil’s work. Knickerbockers and

Episcopalians seemed less concerned, even tolerant.

Nothing raised Yankee hackles like Sabbath-breaking, however. True, the bustle and frivolity of



Sundays in New York had been a sore subject among devout residents for nearly two hundred years

now. But newcomers from Connecticut and Massachusetts had still-warm memories of communities

where families observed the Sabbath by abstaining from all forms of recreation, dining on cold

collations of Saturday-baked meats, and attending multiple church services. They could see, too, that

the city’s recent growth had spawned alluring new opportunities for diversion on Sunday—pleasure

gardens serving punch and wine, even to unescorted single women, and steam-powered pleasure

boats providing musical excursions around Manhattan (“a refinement, a luxury of pleasure unknown to

the old world,” their proponents preened)—all apparently aided and abetted, and some owned as

well, by easygoing Knickerbockers.

In 1821 the Rev. Spring and the Sabbatarians launched a boycott of newspapers that advertised

Sunday excursions and won the support of Mayor Stephen Allen. Then they got up a petition asking

the city to enforce biblical injunctions to keep the Sabbath holy by closing down pleasure gardens,

markets, livery stables, newspapers, and the post office. In time, they meant to sweep the Hudson free

of sloops and steamboats “filled with profaners of the Lord’s day.”

The reaction was swift and overwhelmingly negative. Most newspapers defended steamboat

excursions as innocent amusement. The Evening Post justified keeping markets open on Sunday as

necessary for the poor, who went unpaid until late Saturday and couldn’t afford iceboxes to keep fish,

meat, and milk fresh during hot weather. Thousands of residents signed a rival petition denouncing

clerical interference in public affairs as “highly improper,” while handbills and placards went up

around town attacking Spring and his ministerial allies as bigots. When Spring’s forces announced a

public rally at City Hall, the Mercantile Advertiser urged anti-Sabbatarians to show up en masse.

They did so, seized control of the meeting, and adopted a resolution stating that the citizens of New

York wanted the clergy to mind their own business. (“The excited multitude looked daggers at us,”

Spring recalled.) The Sabbatarians retreated, and the Knickerbockers congratulated themselves on

their stand for tolerance and bonhomie.

What the Knickerbockers lacked was an organization comparable to the New England Society,

whose annual dinner to commemorate the landing of the Pilgrims gener​ated endless bragging about

Yankee virtues and Yankee achievements. More than a few Knickerbockers took up Freemasonry,

which combined fraternalism with a commitment to religious toleration and rationalism. By 1827

there were forty-five Masonic Lodges in New York, each of which met twice monthly, either at old

St. John’s Hall or at the imposing new Gothic-style Masonic Hall on the east side of Broadway,

between Duane and Pearl, nearly opposite the New York Hospital.

Eventually, in 1835—after two years of prodding by Washington Irving—the Knickerbocracy gave

birth to a club all its own, the St. Nicholas Society. One of its declared purposes was to gather

information on the history of the city, a subject that seemed to particularly interest old-guard New

Yorkers. What mattered to the wealthy merchant and former mayor Philip Hone, though, was the

promise “to promote social intercourse among native citizens”—meaning men of “respectable

standing in society” whose families had resided in New York for at least fifty years. A “regular

Knickerbocker Society,” Hone noted in his diary, would serve “as a sort of setoff against St.

Patrick’s, St. George’s, and more particularly the New England [societies].” Peter Gerard

Stuyvesant, great-great-grandson of Petrus, was elected first president, and three hundred men with

names conspicuous in the city’s history—De Peysters and Duers, LeRoys and Roosevelts, Lows and

Fishes—signed up at once. A second St. Nicholas Society soon sprang up across the East River,

rallying Sandses, Leffertses, Bergens, Suydams, Strykers, and Boerums to the defense of Brooklyn



against insolent and upstart Yankees.

E PLURIBUS UNUM



But not every question that roiled upper-class New York followed this pattern: partisan political

alignments cut across the Yankee-Knickerbocker boundary, as did controversies over such economic

issues as the tariff. More important still, none of these clashes of style, principle, or interest provoked

permanent rifts in New York’s upper registers. Numerous circumstances allowed old-timers to

fashion a detente with newcomers and construct a common class identity, rather as the wealthy Dutch

and English had worked out a rapprochement a century earlier.

The city’s galloping prosperity, for one thing, enabled Yankees and Knickerbockers alike to make

so much money so fast that their differences paled alongside their combined riches. In the buoyant

economy, profits rose to the top like cream: by 1828 the top 4 percent of taxpayers possessed roughly

half the city’s assessed wealth—more than the top 10 percent had owned a half century earlier. Then,

too, although New Englanders now ruled the wholesale and retail mercantile trade—LeRoy and

Bayard, the last great Knickerbocker firm, folded in 1826—their rivals hadn’t died out. Rather, they

moved nimbly into banking, lawyering, transportation, shipbuilding, insurance, the stock market, and,

above all, real estate. As ever, money begat money, and if the son of a rich man didn’t stay in the

family business, the family could get him off to a fast start in some other line of work. In fact, nine out

of ten affluent New Yorkers in the 1820s and 1830s were wealthy before they embarked on their

careers.

Besides money there was style, and nowhere were the commonalities among well-to-do gentlemen

and ladies in New York more plainly visible than in their evolving sense of fashion. Beginning in the

1790s the peacock regalia of eighteenth-century males—cocked hats, greatcoats with turned-up cuffs

and gilt buttons, embroidered waistcoats, snowy cravats, lace ruffles, buckskin knee breeches, silk

stockings, and shoes with silver buckles—had fallen rapidly out of favor. Well-dressed men now

favored trousers or close-fitting pantaloons (“pants”), along with double-breasted frock coats,

preferably in a circumspect black (a color once reserved for mourners and the clergy). They wore

their own hair, unpowdered, closed their shirts at the collar with the simple white neckcloths known

as “stocks,” and covered their heads with high-crowned top hats. Dandies affected tighter pants,

flashy vests, bright green gloves, and an eyeglass for inspecting curiosities—and were scorned by

etiquette advisers as effeminate. The trend was unmistakable. Aristocratic plumage had succumbed to

republican simplicity and bourgeois restraint: a gentleman conveyed social superiority through

consummate tailoring and impeccable grooming, not color and ornamentation.

Female fashion followed a similar trajectory. Heavy brocaded skirts with whaleboned bodices

and hooped petticoats, all the rage in the mid-eighteenth century, yielded during the first two decades

of the nineteenth to lighter, neoclassical designs inspired by the French empire and then the Greek

struggle for independence. Their objective was a free and natural silhouette: high-waisted dresses of

sheer white muslin, featuring low rounded necklines and a bandeau (precursor of the bra) that

emphasized the bosom, typically worn with a shawl and with the hair piled up in reckless masses of

curls. After 1830, however, the prevailing taste retreated to more constrained, less revealing styles.

Waistlines became lower and narrower, necklines rose, and the natural contours of the body were

concealed with boned corsets, voluminous skirts, layers of petticoats, padded bustles, and enormous

leg-of-mutton sleeves. Modesty now required that hair be pulled back, drawn into a demure knot, and

covered with a frilly bonnet.



Shared tastes in costume were accompanied by a similar determination to settle in neighborhoods

where the better sort of people, Yankees and Knickerbockers alike, could insulate themselves from

the seamier elements of urban life. In 1820 the choicest addresses in town still lay on the lower west

side of Manhattan, along Broadway (from Bowling Green up to Chambers), Greenwich Street (which

paralleled the Hudson), and the quiet, tree-shaded blocks in between. From here gentlemen could

easily walk to their places of business on Wall Street or Hanover Square, and their families could

walk to one of the many houses of worship nearby—the great Episcopal bastions of Trinity and St.

Paul’s on Broadway, say, or perhaps the First Presbyterian Church on Wall, Brick Presbyterian on

Beekman Street, St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church on Barclay Street, John Street Methodist, the

Dutch Reform triplets (Old South on Exchange Place, Middle on Liberty Street, and Old North on

William Street), South Baptist on Nassau Street, or Shearith Israel on Mill Street, still the only

synagogue for New York’s four hundred Jews. Also within easy walking distance was the Battery.

Spruced up in the early 1820s with lawns, shade trees, and an ornamental iron railing, it remained the

city’s premier park and promenade. Its appeal was further enhanced in 1824, when the city acquired

Castle Clinton from the federal government and leased it out as a “place of resort,” tethered to the

Battery by a wooden bridge ninety paces long and illuminated by gas lamps. Two years later,

refurbished as a theater, it became Castle Garden. The high price of tickets to the Garden’s varied

performances guaranteed respectable audiences.

Throughout the 1820s some of New York’s most prominent Yankees and Knicker-bockers nestled

around the Battery and its adjacent blocks, so many that Bowling Green was irreverently dubbed

Nobs’ Row. Other affluent families settled along Broadway itself. In 1828 over one hundred of the

city’s five hundred richest men lived there.



Broadway between Park Place and Barclay Street, 1831 (now the site of the Woolworth

Building), directly opposite City Hall. The private house on the right was occupied by



Philip Hone, who had settled there a decade earlier, when Broadway was still lined

with fashionable private residences. Only a half-dozen years later, surging commercial

growth—marked by the expansion of the adjacent American Hotel and construction of

Astor House one block to the south—would transform the neighborhood. (© Museum of

the Gty of New York)

Among them was Philip Hone, who had retired in 1821 at the age of forty from the auctioneer

business with money enough to purchase a house directly across from City Hall (making for an

effortless commute during his 1825 term as mayor). Even the censorious Mrs. Trollope loved

Broadway, that “noble street.” Though lacking “the gorgeous fronted palaces of Regent-street,” it was

nevertheless “magnificent in its extent.” Its “neat awnings, excellent trottoir [sidewalk], and welldressed pedestrians” were so appealing that she might have moved there herself, she confessed,

“were it not so very far from all the old-world things which cling about the heart of an European.”

Roosevelts, Astors, Grinnells, and Aspinwalls were nonetheless quite content to occupy the elegant

three-story row houses that fronted blocks running west from the strip of Broadway adjacent to City

Hall Park down to the Hudson shore.

Yet for all its charms, lower Broadway was losing its exclusivity in these years. Clerks,

shopkeepers, and laborers trod its excellent trottoir on their way to and from work. Pigs wandered

over from all-too-near poor neighborhoods. Commerce and the business district expanded rapidly

northward. Old private homes were converted to boardinghouses for young merchants, clerks, and

out-of-towners. The growing number of shops, hotels, restaurants, and theaters produced, said the

Mirror, a “confused assemblage,” mixing people of high and low degree.

More and more wealthy residents thus began a long, reluctant march uptown in search of more

hospitable enclaves. One destination was Hudson Square, also known as St. John’s Park, which had

been opened by Trinity twenty years earlier but had failed to attract residents. In 1827, however, the

vestry decided to sell rather than lease lots and deeded the square itself to purchasers. They poured in

by the score, threw up a tall iron fence around the square, and landscaped it with catalpas,

cottonwoods, horse chestnuts, silver birches, flowerbeds, and gravel paths. The neighborhood for

blocks around soon bristled with Hamiltons, Schuylers, Delafields, Tappans, and other prominent

families whose elegant brick town houses afforded refuge from the sweaty commotion of the city

below. Nothing else in New York so closely approximated the beauty and exclusiveness of the great

squares of London’s West End. It was, according to one contemporary report, “the fairest interior

portion of this city.”



Battery Park, 1830. A field of fashionable bonnets and top hats, well-behaved children,

carefully maintained grounds—everything in this scene of the Battery conveys its

continuing prominence as a hub of respectable New York. (© Collection of The NewYork Historical Society)

A second destination for rich urban refugees lay even further uptown, where Broadway sliced

through Bleecker, Bond, Great Jones, and East 4th streets, just below John Jacob Astor’s Vauxhall

Gardens. Building sites on this northern frontier of the city were ample enough for patrician-sized

dwellings with commodious yards, gardens, and stables; one guidebook announced that they “may

vie, for beauty and taste, with European palaces.” Arguably the most desirable addresses lay along

Bond Street, where Jonas Minturn built the first house in 1820. Its white marble facade set the pattern

for the expensive three-and four-story residences that stretched the length of the street, from

Broadway to the Bowery, by the mid-thirties.

Bond Street’s principal rival was the wide nine-block sweep of Bleecker Street from the Bowery

to Sixth Avenue, and in 1828 the portion of Bleecker between Mercer and Greene streets became the

site of New York’s first experiment with terraces—grand residential blockfronts of the kind seen in

the most fashionable London neighborhoods. Christened LeRoy Place in honor of the Knickerbocker

merchant Jacob LeRoy, its Federal-style row houses sold for a hefty twelve thousand dollars. But

LeRoy Place was promptly eclipsed by the resplendent La Grange Terrace, completed in 1833 on the

west side of Lafayette Place (itself opened by the canny Astor only half a dozen years earlier). Also

known as Colonnade Row, for its magisterial procession of two-story Corinthian columns, La Grange



Terrace consisted of nine residences that sold for as much as thirty thousand dollars apiece. They

were reportedly “the most imposing and magnificent in the city.”



St. John’s Chapel and Hudson Square, from the New York Mirror, April n, 1829. This

genteel bastionbounded by Hudson, Varick, Ericsson, and Laight streets— fell abruptly

out of fashion after 1850 and was sold to Commodore Vanderbilt, who built a four-acre

freight depot on the site in 1866. It is now overrun by automobiles exiting the Holland

Tunnel, and the memory of McComb’s chapel is recalled only by St. John’s Lane, a

block east. {© Museum of the City of New York)

The exodus of well-to-do New Yorkers out of lower Manhattan took a toll on many downtown

churches—even Gardiner Spring moved up to Bond Street—and their denominations, Yankee and

Knickerbocker alike, moved quickly to establish new congregations uptown. A Dutch Reformed

church opened on the corner of Houston and Greene streets in 1825; the Bleecker Street Presbyterian

Church, just east of Broadway, in 1826. The Episcopalians consecrated the stately, Gothic-style St.

Thomas’s at Houston and Broadway in 1826, followed ten years later by the sumptuous St.

Bartholomew’s, at Lafayette and Great Jones.

Even these houses of worship were inaccessible to affluent New Yorkers who fled still farther

away from the city, all the way up Third Avenue until it dwindled to a country lane in the higher

latitudes of northern Manhattan. In May 1831 their mansions caught the eye of Alexis de Tocqueville

and Gustave Beaumont, two Frenchmen who had come to explore America’s jails and America’s



democracy. As their steamboat from Providence cruised past the East River shore, the two marveled

at the “unbelievable multitude of country houses, big as boxes of candy,” whose grassy lawns and

orchards sloped down to the water. More and more of these bucolic summer retreats had become fulltime residences, from the Stuyvesant estate just below 14th Street (where boys still filched pears

from trees planted by old Petrus), and the thirty-acre Phelps estate at Kip’s Bay between 29th and

31st streets, all the way up to Archibald Gracie’s lovely Federal-style mansion between 86th and

90th streets. By the 1820s these regions had so many permanent inhabitants that St. James’s Church—

a wooden Trinity outpost at 69th and Lexington—began year-round worship.

The isolation that wealthy New Yorkers sought in their uptown encampments made travel into the

city something of an ordeal. Bond Street merchants and bankers occasionally walked the two miles

down to Wall or Pearl. Yet daily commuting required swifter, less tiresome transportation, and

absent the use of a private carriage or cabriolet (a two-wheeled vehicle drawn by a single horse), the

alternatives proved sadly limited. One option was to suffer through an uncomfortable ride atop one of

the stagecoaches that ran downtown from the corner of Broadway and Houston Street. Another was to

hail one of the licensed hackney carriages that congregated at stands by the Park, Bowling Green,

Trinity Church, and Hanover Square. Hacks weren’t plentiful, though (only 180 served the entire city

in 1828); they weren’t cheap; and as Mrs. Trollope discovered, “it is necessary to be on the qui vive

in making your bargain with the driver; if you do not, he has the power of charging immoderately.” At

the least, a Bond Street gentleman might spend two hundred dollars a year getting to and from work.

The demand for better transportation between the downtown business district and elite uptown

neighborhoods inspired New York coachmakers to introduce the omnibus, an innovation that had

recently appeared in London and Paris. Seating a dozen or more passengers, and drawn by huffing

teams of two or four horses, the first of these boatlike vehicles began rumbling along Broadway from

Bowling Green to Bond Street in 1829. The idea caught on quickly. Within a decade there were over

a hundred omnibuses in operation along the city’s principal thoroughfares, gaily painted and sporting

heroic names like the General Washington, the Benjamin Franklin, and the Thomas Jefferson. Philip

Hone, who himself had moved uptown to the corner of Broadway and Great Jones Street, reveled in

the ease with which they allowed him to get downtown. “I can always get an omnibus in a minute or

two by going out of the door and holding up my finger,” he said.

Although omnibus means “for all” in Latin, this was class, not mass, transit. It cost twelve and a

half cents for a one-way trip down to Wall Street, which was cheaper than the hacks but well beyond

the reach of common laborers earning a dollar a day. Even well-to-do passengers found things to

complain about, to be sure: grime, unpadded benches, poor ventilation in the summer, no heat in the

winter, an often maddeningly slow pace through downtown traffic, and frequent overcrowding. For

people living on their estates north of town, omnibuses were no use at all.

SPHERES OF INFLUENCE



Nor were the omnibuses generally able to get gentlemen back uptown in time for dinner. Until 1830

or so, dinner had been the main meal of the day for upper-class New Yorkers, served enfamille at

two or three in the afternoon, followed by a light and informal supper in the early evening. As the

distance between home and office increased, however, men of affairs found it more convenient to

make a quick midday snack of oysters or clams bought from street vendors (“Here’s your fine clams,

as white as snow, on Rock​away these clams do grow”) or to have “lunch” together at businessdistrict restaurants like Dyde’s on Park Row or the Porter House on John Street. Back home,



meanwhile, wives and small children made do on cold meat, soup, bread, cheese, and other breakfast

leftovers. “Dinner” now waited until Father returned in the early evening, while supper was pushed

back to nine or ten o’clock or abandoned altogether.

The rescheduling of dinner was accompanied by changes in the consumption and presentation of

food that would make the meal as much an emblem of gentility as restraint in fashion or a choice

address. Guests no longer arrived to find the table already laden with dishes, which the genial host

would dispense, amid much communal passing of plates. Instead, servants (who no longer ate with the

family) distributed dishes in a carefully specified order: first soup and fish, then meat and vegetables,

finally pies and puddings, which Americans had begun to call “dessert.” The new manners did

encounter some opposition—“This French influence must be resisted,” Philip Hone declared—but the

more ceremonial and “refined” mode eventually prevailed.

Food preparation too changed in upper-class households. Breads, hoecakes, and johnny cakes,

once made in an open hearth, were baked in new cast-iron cookstoves, using the new “refined” white

flour that came down the Erie Canal from the new Rochester mills. Meat wasn’t boiled in a pot or

spitted over a fire, as in the past, but oven-roasted and served with fancy sauces. The mistress crafted

ornate pastries and compotes from recipes gleaned out of increasingly complex domestic manuals like

Lydia Maria Child’s Frugal Housewife (1829). Costly imported porcelain and silverware, once

reserved for guests or special occasions, were now considered de rigueur for everyday use.

Changes in the dinner ritual were further evidence that for upper-class New York households

“work” and “home” increasingly occupied distinct social spaces, one ruled by men, the other by

women. By the 1820s the downtown commercial district was well on its way to becoming a separate

male preserve—virtually empty of respectable families, and scrupulously avoided by respectable

women except for shopping expeditions to lower Broadway or visits to the Ladies’ Dining Room of

the City Hotel. John Pintard, then living over the offices of the Mutual Insurance Company on Wall

Street, realized that his wife and daughter were “nearly prisoners during the hours of business in Wall

Street.” In 1832 a popular guide to the city advised “distant readers” that no women appeared in its

pictures of the area because women rarely went there. So, too, the Mirror reported a few years later

that “the sight of a female in that isolated quarter is so extraordinary, that, the moment a petticoat

appears, the groups of brokers, intent on calculating the value of stocks, break suddenly off, and gaze

at the phenomenon.”

This was as it should be. Decent women didn’t belong in the heartless, bare-knuckled free-for-all

that raged downtown, for according to the conventional wisdom, proclaimed over and over again in

the pulpit and in the press, nature designed the female of the species to be pacific, nurturing, and

cooperative. Her proper sphere was the Home, and her duty— essentially a refinement of the ideal of

republican motherhood—was to make the Home a haven for her weary husband and a nest where she

imbued her children with Christian love and humility. A genteel household was thus the very

antithesis of the marketplace yet indispensable to it, a place where men returned at the end of the day

to be refreshed for battle the next and where the young acquired the moral armor they would need as

adults.

THE DOMESTICATION OF CHRISTMAS



Wealthy New Yorkers didn’t invent this new cult of domesticity, which was a characteristic of

emerging bourgeois culture throughout the Atlantic world. They did, however, give it Christmas—a



holiday that became synonymous with genteel family life and a quintessential expression of its central

values.

For 150-odd years, probably since the English conquest, the favorite winter holiday of the city’s

propertied classes was New Year’s Day (as distinct from the night before, which was an occasion for

revelry and mischief among common folk). Families exchanged small gifts, and gentlemen went

around the town to call on friends and relations, nibbling cookies and drinking raspberry brandy

served by the women of the house. Sadly, according to John Pintard, the city’s physical expansion

after 1800 rendered this “joyous older fashion” so impractical that it was rapidly dying out.

As an alternative Pintard proposed St. Nicholas Day, December 6, as a family-oriented winter

holiday for polite society. In Knickerbocker’s History, Pintard’s good friend Washington Irving had

identified Nicholas as the patron saint of New Amsterdam, describing him as a jolly old Dutchman,

nicknamed Sancte Claus, who parked his wagon on rooftops and slid down chimneys with gifts for

sleeping children on his feast day. It was Salmagundi-style fun, of course: although seventeenthcentury Netherlanders had celebrated St. Nicholas Day, the earliest evidence of anyone doing so on

Manhattan dates from 1773, when a group of “descendents of the ancient Dutch families” celebrated

the sixth of December “with great joy and festivity.” Certainly nothing remotely like the Sancte Claus

portrayed by Irving had ever been known on either side of the Atlantic.

Mere details were no obstacle to Pintard. On December 6, 1810—one year to the day after the

publication of Irving’s History— he launched his revival of St. Nicholas Day with a grand banquet at

City Hall for members of the New-York Historical Society. Their first toast was to “Sancte Claus,

goed heylig man!” and Pintard distributed a specially engraved picture that showed Nicholas with

two children (one good, one bad) and two stockings hung by a hearth (one full, one empty)—the point

being that December 6 was a kind of Judgment Day for the young, with the saint distributing rewards

and punishments as required. St. Nicholas Day never quite won the support Pintard wanted, and he

eventually ran out of enthusiasm for the project. Sancte Claus, on the other hand, took off like a

rocket. Only a few years later, in a book for juveniles entitled False Stories Corrected, he was

already under attack as “Old Santaclaw, of whom so often little children hear such foolish stories.”

Other New Yorkers of Pintard’s ilk were meanwhile taking a second look at Christmas as a

substitute for New Year’s Day. Since the Reformation, Protestants had dismissed Christmas as

another artifact of Catholic ignorance and deception: not only was the New Testament silent on the

date of Christ’s birth, they noted, but the Church had picked December 25 to coincide with the

beginning of the winter solstice, an event traditionally associated with wild plebeian bacchanals and

challenges to authority. Wellbred New Yorkers in the early nineteenth century weren’t so vehemently

opposed to Christmas as Petrus Stuyvesant had been, and often marked the day with private family

devotions, dinners, and “Christmas logs.” Patricians with New England roots knew that churches

there had recently begun a movement for public worship on December 25 to counteract the spread of

popular rowdyism. Then came Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1819), a collection of short stories

that not only gave to American literature the characters of Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle but

sparked widespread interest in Christmas as a cozy domestic ritual.

It remained only to get Sancte Claus into the picture, and that was the achievement of another of

Pintard’s friends, Clement Clarke Moore (still fuming over the intrusion of Ninth Avenue into his

beloved country estate, Chelsea). During the winter of 1822, Moore wrote a poem for his children

entitled “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American.



Moore’s saint was an obvious derivative of Irving’s—“a right jolly old elf” who sneaks down the

chimney of a gentleman’s house in the dead of night, not to rob him but to put toys in the stockings

hung up by his children. Moore had him arrive on December 24, however, a small revision that deftly

shifted the focus away from Christmas Day with its still-problematic religious associations.

A friend sent “Visit” to an upstate newspaper for publication, other papers picked it up, and within

a decade it was known throughout the country (though Moore didn’t acknowledge writing it until

some years later). In the meantime, genteel New Yorkers embraced Moore’s homey, child-centered

version of Christmas as if it they had been doing it all their lives. “A festival sacred to domestic

enjoyments,” the papers called it; a time when men “make glad upon one day, the domestic hearth, the

virtuous wife, the innocent, smiling merry-hearted children, and the blessed mother.” In 1831, his

earlier promotion of December 6 long since forgotten, Pintard asserted that the new rituals of

Christmas were of “ancient usage” and that “St. Claas is too firmly riveted in this city ever to be

forgotten.” (Christmas trees reached New York in the mid-thirties, courtesy of German Brooklynites;

they were popularized by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, the novelist, who wrote the first American

fiction including a Christmas tree in 1835.)

PARLOR BUSINESS



Despite its prominence in the consciousness of upper-class New Yorkers, the ideal of a genteel

household—quarantined from the rough-and-tumble of commerce by distance, nurturing mothers, and

yuletide cheer—often collided with the day-to-day realities of household affairs. Only the very

wealthiest women, for example, had enough servants to relieve them entirely of cooking, cleaning,

laundering, and other menial chores. John Pintard employed an all-purpose maid, but his wife and

younger daughter were responsible for sewing, tailoring, preserving food, baking, liming the

basement, whitewashing fences, clearing the yard, and basic carpentry. Increasingly, moreover, even

rich families were replacing lifetime African-American retainers with part-time or seasonal help,

typically Irish, and the mistress of the house needed to be as adept as her husband in recruiting and

managing a wage-labor force. Everyone had stories of servants who stalked out in a dispute over

their duties or pay or were lured away by promises of better accommodations. When John Pintard’s

“unfaithful, ungrateful” maid left without notice, he found it “vexatious in the extreme” and (as was

his wont) formed an organization in 1825 to deal with the entire “problem”—the Society for the

Encouragement of Faithful Domestic Servants.

Business and public affairs were no more absent from the genteel home than labor. If the back

parlor remained a family sanctum, the dining room and front parlor, where children were allowed

only on Sunday mornings, hosted a good deal of work-related socializing. New York gentlemen often

entertained one another at home and although Mrs. Trollope deplored the exclusion of women from

these male affairs as “a great defect in the society” that “certainly does not conduce to refinement,”

they were nonetheless a vital forum for the private exchange of views about economics and politics.