White, Green, and Black Catholics and nativists, drawing the color line, white slaves and smoked Irish, abolitionists and the underground railroad.

republican bent. Each July fourth, Hibernian painters, coopers, tailors, and cordwainers paraded

proudly, displaying their ethnic insignias. Until 1830 the HUBS celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with a

procession that wended its through the city’s Irish neighborhood from Harmony Hall to old St.

Patrick’s Cathedral. After that its destination was Father Varela’s church on Ann Street (though a

Cuban, Varela was hailed as a fellow nationalist and appointed as chaplain of the HUBS). After the

parade and church services, celebrants moved on to the plebeian McDermott’s Sixth Ward Hotel for

open house festivities (covered in the Truth Teller) that were in sharp contrast to the more exclusive

dinners of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick at Bank’s Coffee House or Niblo’s Garden.

In the late 1820s and early 1830s, the marchers’ ranks were rapidly reinforced. In 1827, when

Britain repealed all restrictions on emigration, over twenty thousand Irish had flocked to the new

world. By 1835 over thirty thousand Irish were arriving in New York each year, the majority of them

poor, unskilled, male, young, and—for the first time in New York City’s long history of Gaelic

immigration—Catholic. Fed by this influx, the Church expanded at an unprecedented pace. “The

Catholics have a considerable establishment in New-York,” Tocqueville noted. It included such new

additions as St. Mary (1826) on Grand Street, for the shipyard workers, and St. Joseph (1829) on

Sixth Avenue, which served Greenwich Village contractors and builders. By 1833 Felix Varela’s

mission church to the Irish had evolved into two parishes, St. James and Transfiguration—the latter

centered from 1836 in a former Presbyterian church on Chambers Street. (St. Paul’s Catholic Church

in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was completed the same year.) The diocese also established a “national”

parish, a multiethnic response to a multinational city. In 1833 Bishop John Dubois approved

construction of the tiny but quasi-autonomous St. Nicholas Church on East 2nd Street for the three

thousand resi​dent Catholic Germans who had up till then had worshiped, unhappily, with the Irish

and French.

Newly fortified, the Catholic community displayed a new feistiness in its relations with the

Protestant majority. In 1834, for instance, Bishop Dubois suggested to the Public School Society that

at least in PSS No. 5 (on Mott Street near St. Pat’s) it remove defamatory language from schoolbooks

and allow after-hours use of the building for religious instruction, in order to “ensure the confidence

of Catholic parents.” Dubois promised the trustees he had no sectarian motives, no desire to

proselytize, but the PSS insisted that its pan-Protestantism was truly “nonsectarian” and refused any

accommodation. Balked, the hierarchy continued its piecemeal construction of an alternative

parochial school system.

“POPERY OUGHT ALWAYS TO BE LOATHED AND EXECRATED”



As New York’s Catholic Church changed during the 1820s—became more working class, more

militant, more Irish, less middle class, less French and Spanish, less respectable—anxieties and

resentments rose in various Protestant quarters. These concerns were heightened at decade’s end by a

particular confluence of events. Catholic emancipation in England (1829) generated a flood of

antipopery books and tracts decrying the new license; many of these were exported to New York,

where they agitated local activists. The advent of Finney’s revivals exacerbated tensions by

generating millennial enthusiasm and heightening denominational aggressiveness. The sudden spurt of

Irish Catholic immigration seemed menacing too, in the light of Vatican support for various

reactionary European governments. Some believed it signaled an attempt by monarchists and despots

to establish a beachhead in New York City, as a step toward infiltrating and overthrowing the

republic.



In January 1830, accordingly, a small group of clerical and lay militants established the

Protestant, an avowedly anti-Catholic weekly. In its initial number of January 2, 1830, the Rev.

George Bourne declared that the paper’s goal would be to expose the papacy’s “present enterprising

efforts to recover and extend its unholy dominion, especially on the western continent.” This initiative

was followed, in January 1831, by formation of the New York Protestant Association under the

leadership of the Rev W. C. Brownlee, a Dutch Reformed pastor. The group began disseminating

anti-Catholic literature and, in 1832, sponsoring public meetings to discuss the history and character

of popery. Attendance at these biweekly gatherings soon swelled from three hundred to fifteen

hundred (not counting the spinoffs in Brooklyn), in part because Catholics began showing up as well,

to cheer on their spokesmen. Brownlee, somewhat incautiously, had dared Catholic priests to come

debate the issues, only to find that Felix Várela and other apologists proved formidable opponents.

These battles spilled over into the sectarian press, with the Truth Teller leading the Catholic

camp, and the Protestant side upheld in Brownlee’s new biweekly, the American Protestant

Vindicator and Defender of Civil and Religious Liberty Against the Inroads of Popery (1834). The

Vindicator’s prospectus (endorsed by twelve clergymen) announced that as “Popery ought always to

be loathed and execrated,” Brownlee would lay bare its “detestable impieties, corruptions and

mischiefs.” Agents fanned out across the country, offering lectures, selling Vindicator subscriptions,

and inspiring local imitations of the New York Protestant Association.

Also in 1834, Samuel F. B. Morse, just back from Europe, published a series of let​ters in the New

York Observer, an evangelical paper, concerning a “Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the

United States.” The artist announced that in Vienna he had discovered the existence of a plot by

European monarchs leagued in the Holy Alliance to flood the United States with Catholics. In another

Morse series, issued as a pamphlet in 1835, the newly appointed NYU professor warned of “foreign

turbulence imported by ship-loads” at the behest of “priest-controlled machines” and rhetorically

demanded: “Can one throw mud into pure water and not disturb its clearness?” The answer was

clear: Morse called on all New York patriots to stand tall against the growing power of the Catholic

hierarchy and the onrushing influx of Irish.

“DAMNED IRISH!”



By March 1835 the Irish were in a fury. When the New York Protestant Association sponsored a

meeting at Broadway Hall to discuss the question “Is Popery Compatible with Civil Liberty?” a

crowd of Catholics forced their way in, broke up furniture, and destroyed the fixtures while the

speakers escaped through the back passageway.

Catholic clergymen disavowed the Broadway Hall riot, but nativists seized on it as justification of

their concerns. In June, with James Watson Webb, pugnacious editor of the Courier and Enquirer,

serving as a prime mover, the Native American Democratic Association was organized—the first

explicitly nativist political party in the United States. It established ward committees, set up its own

newspaper (the Spirit of ‘76), and warned Anglo-American voters, chiefly small masters and

journeymen, of the “swarms of foreign artisans who are more destructive to native American industry

than the locusts and lice were to the Egyptian fields.”

Violence erupted again in 1835 when a Bowery saloon keeper announced plans to form an Irish

militia company, to be called the O’Connell Guards in honor of the Irish patriot. The nativist press

shrieked about a “foreign armed force stationed among us,” and on June 21, 1835, the American



Guards, a Bowery gang proclaiming native ancestry, clashed with Irishmen in Chatham Square. The

battle, fought with clubs and brickbats, took the life of a passerby—a physician, struck by a brick, fell

to the sidewalk and was trampled by struggling combatants. Rioting spread throughout the Five Points

and elsewhere in the city, until subdued by Mayor Lawrence and two hundred policemen.

That fall, the Native American Democratic Association ran its first ticket, on a platform

demanding that only native-born Americans be permitted to hold office, but the new party, snarled in

internal divisions, had little impact. Philip Hone wrote gloomily in his diary that December that “low

Irishmen”—“the most ignorant, and consequently the most obstinate white men in the world”—were

now able to “decide the elections in the city of New York.” In time, he feared, “the same brogue

which they have instructed to shout ‘Hurrah for Jackson!’ shall be used to impart additional horror to

the cry of ‘Down with the natives!’”

Nativists emerged in Brooklyn too; its populace, friendly to the Irish in the 1820s, had grown

alarmed by the 1830s, their fears played on by politicians and editors (like Alden Spooner, who

raised a hue and cry against “foreigners”). Here, too, Native American candidates did poorly and

moderates remained in command: the Rev. Evan Johnson, rector of St. John’s Episcopal, used his

1835 Thanksgiving Day sermon to preach against nativism.

Seeking a more combustible issue, nativists spiced their theology with sex. In January 1836

Harper Brothers published Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, by one Maria

Monk. (The Harpers, though nativists themselves, were concerned enough about their firm’s

reputation to set up a dummy company to bring Awful out.) In the book, which Benjamin Day

excerpted in the Sun, Monk told of her Protestant upbringing, her embrace of Catholicism, and her

arrival at the Canadian convent, where she discovered that nuns were forced to have intercourse with

lustful priests (those who refused were executed). Children born of these criminal unions were

baptized, then strangled and thrown into a large hole in the basement. Monk, impregnated by one

Father Phelan, escaped to New York City, tried to commit suicide, was taken to a charity hospital,

and confessed all to a kindly Protestant clergyman.

The anti-Catholic press gave Awful Disclosures complete credence. Indeed the Rev. George

Bourne of the Protestant Association capitalized on the furor to launch a new organization, the

Protestant Reformation Society, and more ministers joined the antipopery crusade. Catholic clerics,

led by Father Várela, charged that the “revelations” were a manufactured smear, and so they proved

to be. Maria’s mother came forward to say her daughter’s tale was the product of a brain injured in

infancy when the child had run a slate pencil into her head. Growing up wild, Maria had been

confined in a Catholic Magdalen asylum. She had escaped, with the aid of a former lover, and come

to New York, where leading nativist ministers—including the Rev. Bourne—had written up her

“disclosures.”

Many nativists doggedly refused to doubt Monk’s story until Colonel William Leete Stone, the

mildly antipapist editor of the Commercial Advertiser, examined the convent in the fall of 1836 and

pronounced the priests and nuns completely innocent. Monk’s star now faded quickly, but not before

it had helped spark another outburst in the streets.

In 1836, with excitement still running high, a nativist crowd resolved to attack St. Patrick’s

Cathedral. Forewarned, the faithful rallied. The church’s cemetery had just been enclosed by a high

brick wall, in which loopholes were now cut for muskets. More armed men lined Prince Street, the

expected avenue of attack. Others tore up cobblestones and hoisted baskets full of them to the upper



stories along the route. As the anti Catholic army roiled up the Bowery, its advance scouts reported

back on the fearsomeness of the Gaels’ military preparations and the fortress-like impregnability of

their walled cathedral. Disheartened, the nativists retreated, and their movement, for the moment,

subsided.

LIFE ALONG THE COLOR LINE



On July 4, 1827—Emancipation Day—all the city’s black churches held services of prayer and

thanksgiving. The largest celebration was in African Zion Church (at Church and Leonard). In his

oration, church trustee William Hamilton placed the day in historical context, recalling the bloody

events of 1741, the complex relation of blacks to the Revolution of ‘76, and the years of postwar

degradation. Then he joyously proclaimed that “this day we stand redeemed from a bitter thralldom.”

“No more,” he rolled on, “shall the accursed name of slave be attached to us—no more shall negro

and slave be synonimous [sic].”

Then the celebrants quietly dispersed, refraining from a more public jubilation lest they be

assaulted by whites hard at their Independence Day revels. Instead they gathered the next day, four

thousand strong, near St. John’s Park. Then they paraded through the principal streets to Zion Church

and on to City Hall, where the grand marshal, with drawn sword, saluted the mayor as the crowd

roared cheers.

The city’s blacks called for making July fifth their annual day of commemoration and reserving the

fourth for bitter reflection on the continuing disparity between America’s rhetoric and its reality. For

as the Rev. Peter Williams Jr. said: “Alas! the freedom to which we have attained is defective.” It

remained the case, he sadly observed, that in New York City “the rights of men are decided by the

colour of their skin.” Even the briefest of strolls around segregated Manhattan would have quickly

confirmed the accuracy of Williams’s assessment.

All the new forms of transport drew the color line. Blacks were banned from cabins on Hudson

River steamers and restricted to the exposed deck, on spring day and stormy night alike. The Rev.

Williams himself had been refused passage on an American packet bound for Europe and been forced

to sail on an English vessel. Blacks were not allowed on street stages, and when a black man hailed

one of the new omnibuses going up Broadway, the driver warded him off with a whip, convulsing

white bystanders with laughter.

Many commercial facilities were also off limits to African-American New Yorkers. Vauxhall

Gardens flatly denied them admission; the Park Theater sequestered them in a roped-off section. An

English visitor in 1819, questioning a black barber as to why he had rejected a prospective black

customer, was told that if he hadn’t the shop would have lost all its white patrons. A black minister

was refused a cup of tea by a “foreigner in a cellar cookroom” as the “customers would not put up

with it”—customers who included agents of the American Bible Society.

Blacks were barred from the Free School Society’s institutions, as well as the charity schools of

most denominations. A light-skinned African-American Presbyterian minister found his children

rejected from Presbyterian schools “on account of their complexion, they being mixed blood, a few

shades below the pure white.” The Quakerrun African Free School was exclusively for blacks and

provided a good education, but as one graduate noted, the diploma wasn’t much help. “What are my

prospects?” he asked. “To what shall I turn my head? Shall I be a mechanic? No one will employ me;

white boys won’t work with me. Shall I be a merchant? No one will have me in his office; white



clerks won’t associate with me. Drudgery and servitude, then, are my prospective portion.”

Even servitude couldn’t be taken for granted. Irish women were rapidly displacing black women

in domestic service jobs, driving some to the streets to hawk fruits or vegetables, or themselves. Most

black men found work as waiters, coachmen, servants, or unskilled laborers, though their political

powerlessness barred them from most licensed trades (notably jobs as cartmen) and public offices

(such as weighers and measurers). Hackney drivers and chimney sweeps were an exception, as their

ranks had been opened to blacks by grateful Federalists.

Many black men still took to the sea, as sailors, stewards, or cooks, so many that in the late 1820s

the African Free School added navigation to its curriculum. Though wages and working conditions

were miserable as ever, foredeck gangs were substantially integrated, forecastles (the cramped

bunkrooms below decks in a ship’s forward end) maintained a rough equality, freedmen could get

wages equal to those of whites, a ship’s job came complete with room and board, and often one’s

compatriots constituted the majority. In 1835 nearly 25 percent of the black men sailing out of New

York City were members of predominantly black crews.

Although blacks formed mutual aid societies—like the African Clarkson Association (1829)—to

provide sick benefits, burial allowances, and widows’ allotments, with economic options so pinched,

many nevertheless wound up in public institutions. Here too they received “special” treatment. The

almshouse was segregated. Until 1833 the House of Refuge refused to accept black juvenile

delinquents. And blacks landed in jail more readily than whites, in part because authorities arrested

them for minor infractions ignored when committed by Caucasians.

Things were no better in most churches. Trinity had actively encouraged formation of St. Philip’s

as a separate (though closely watched) institution, but the General Theological Seminary continued to

reject black applicants, and when the New York Diocese did vote to admit a black man to candidacy

in holy orders, it stipulated that neither he nor any congregation he might head would be entitled to a

seat in the diocesan convention. White churches that received blacks at all sent them aloft to “Nigger

Heaven” or shunted them to a “Nigger Pew” (with seats marked B.M. for Black Members). Whites

who deeded pews to their children generally covenanted that blacks never be permitted to purchase

them, lest this depreciate the value of adjacent pews.

Finally, of course, there was the all but total exclusion from the polls.

Some whites, unsatisfied with this segregated status quo, wanted blacks out of the city altogether.

The American Colonization Society (ACS, 1817), whose New York branch was run by the cream of

Manhattan society, advocated shipping blacks to Liberia in Africa, or elsewhere out of the country.

David Hale, editor of the Journal of Commerce, declared that New York City would be much better

off without its black population, and Tammany spokesman Mordecai Noah agreed. After all, he asked

in 1826, “what do our colored citizens do but fill our almshouses and prisons and congest our streets

as beggars?”

As late as the latter 1820s, leading evangelicals like Arthur Tappan and Anson Phelps backed the

American Colonization Society’s efforts, with Phelps actually serving as president of the

organization’s New York branch. In Brooklyn, Adrian Van Sinderen, president of the Long Island

Bible Society and the Brooklyn Temperance Society, also headed the Brooklyn branch of the ACS

(founded in 1830). It was only when Arthur Tappan realized how deeply the New York AfricanAmerican community detested the back-to- Africa project that he swung the evangelical battalions in

a radically different direction, and that realization, in turn, came through his affiliation with the city’s



black Presbyterian community.

During the 1820s prosperous evangelicals, dismayed by what they saw as the ignorance and

viciousness of poor African Americans, helped found and finance a black congregation. In the

process, they cultivated some outstanding African leaders, most notably Samuel Cornish. Born free in

Delaware in 1795, Cornish had moved to Pennsylvania in 1815, where he was tutored for the

ministry by members of the Philadelphia Presbytery. Licensed to preach, he was recruited by New

York evangelicals to missionize poor blacks in the Bancker Street area. In 1821 Cornish set up a

rough-hewn church, held two or three services there on Sunday, conducted a Sunday school, gave

Bible lectures, held prayer meetings, and visited families in their homes. The next year he drew

together the twenty-four initial members of the First Colored Presbyterian Church. In 1824, with loans

from the presbytery and financial aid from Jacob Lorillard, tobacco merchant and real estate investor,

the group built and settled into a brick home on Elm Street near Canal, with Cornish formally

installed as pastor. (It would later relocate to Duane and Hudson, then to Frankfort and William,

where it would remain for the next twenty years.)

Samuel Cornish soon tested the limits of denominational support by refusing to draw sharp lines

between the black community’s theological and political concerns. He began by speaking out against

the American Colonization Society and then, in 1827, took an even more decisive step. For almost ten

years, the city’s white press had cooperated with the ACS by refusing to print the anticolonization

resolutions passed by black gatherings in New York and across the country. Cornish now met with a

small group that included the Jamaican-born John Russwurm, recently graduated from Bowdoin

College (only the second black college graduate in the United States), and church leaders William

Hamilton of AME Zion and Peter Williams Jr. of St. Philip’s. In March 1827 they launched

Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper in the United States. By the summer it had well over

twelve hundred subscribers, with perhaps several thousand reading at least parts of each weekly

issue.

Freedom’s Journal, as edited by Cornish and Russwurm, covered activities in the AfricanAmerican community, both the extraordinary (like Emancipation Day) and the everyday (marriages;

funerals; the doings of mutual relief, literary, temperance, and fraternal societies), together with

advertisements from local black businessmen. Its pages presented a portrait of the community

strikingly at variance with the negative picture promulgated by the ACS. Not that the paper denied the

existence of a rougher element. But Cornish noted that whites constituted, proportionately, a

substantially larger percentage of almshouse residents than blacks. And while he conceded that the

per capita number of blacks in prison was higher than whites, he argued that “the coloured man’s

offence, three times out of four, grows out of the circumstances of his condition, while the white

man’s, most generally, is premeditated and vicious.” Cornish did deplore coarse conduct by

unrefined and uneducated blacks—which he attributed to slavery, not emancipation—but believed

they should be uplifted, not exiled. Freedom’s Journal exhorted its readers to eschew “loose and

depraved habits” and cultivate sobriety, industry, honesty, and self-discipline; like Fanny Wright, the

editors hailed education as the way to overcome economic deprivation. They also ran inspirational

biographies, published articles on the black revolution in Haiti, of which they were intensely proud,

and proclaimed that “every thing that relates to Africa, shall find a ready admission into our

columns.”

Freedom’s Journal did not hesitate to lash whites and denounce racism. The paper called for the

abolition of property requirements for black voters, denounced the colonization project, and



condemned fellow Presbyterians for excluding blacks from church-connected academies. Most

critically, Freedom’s Journal demanded the immediate abolition of slavery. While Cornish and

Russwurm did not advocate a slave rebellion in the South—though their Boston agent, David Walker,

would do so in 1829—their call for the immediate confiscation of property in slaves was an

extremely advanced position, one that not even William Lloyd Garrison would adopt until 1830.

Influential white Presbyterian clergymen were upset by Cornish’s denunciations of the American

Colonization Society and by what they deemed his insufficient appreciation for their altruism. This

created an awkward situation at a time when Cornish was visiting white churches to solicit funds for

First Colored Presbyterian. In September 1827, therefore, having completed his agreed-upon six

months, Cornish resigned as editor and accepted instead a position as agent of the African Free

Schools. (Working with black women who formed the African Dorcas Association in 1828, he

managed to double pupil enrollment in a few years by opening four new schools nearer the black

community and by mending and providing clothes for children to go to class in.)



John Russwurm, left, and the Rev. Samuel Cornish with the masthead of Freedom’s

Journal— the first African-American newspaper in the United States, famous for its

pioneering, no-holds-barred attacks on both slavery and racism. (Schomberg Center for

Research in Black Culture. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden

Foundations)

In 1828 Cornish also withdrew as pastor of First Colored Presbyterian and was succeeded by

Theodore Wright. Born in 1797 in New Jersey—his father was from Madagascar—Wright had



attended the African Free School and in 1825 been admitted to Princeton Theological Seminary,

where he served as one of Freedom’s Journal’s fifteen agents, getting many students and faculty to

subscribe. On graduating in 1828—the first Afro-American alumnus of a theological seminary—

Wright was engaged by the Presbytery of New York. He rapidly expanded First Colored

Presbyterian’s membership, was installed in 1830 as its pastor, and would go on to transform a small

struggling institution into the second largest black church in the city, one heavily involved in

educational, reform, and protest efforts.

Freedom’s Journal, meanwhile, had fared poorly under Russwurm’s sole control. The young man

had been won over to the support of the American Colonization Society, and he began printing

articles (usually by whites) in favor of colonization, though still including articles (usually by blacks)

opposing it. Finally, on March 28, 1829, repu​diated by his community, Russwurm resigned; the ACS

sent him to Liberia as superintendent of public schools, and the paper ceased publication. Cornish

started a new one to replace it, but the Rights of All lasted only a few months, and for much of the

next decade, the black community’s newfound voice fell silent.

“CRUSH THIS HYDRA IN THE RUD”



Before doing so, however, it had won some powerful converts. Editor Samuel Cornish’s

anticolonization broadsides had unsettled Arthur Tappan. So had the staunch opposition of Peter

Williams Jr., rector of St. Philip’s, who in an Independence Day speech in 1830 pointedly evoked

anti-immigrant sympathies by noting: “We are natives of this country, we ask only to be treated as

well as foreigners.”

White evangelicals could hear the black antislavery ministers in part because they felt quite

comfortable with them. They shared religious values, after all, as well as a belief in temperance and

self-improvement. In 1833, for example, the Revs. Cornish and Wright founded the Phoenix Society

of New York, declaring that the condition of “people of colour” could “only be meliorated by their

being improved in morals, litera-ture, and the mechanic arts.” Such acceptance of the need to refine,

educate, and employ New York’s African Americans appealed to Tappan, who signed on as treasurer

and donated the funds to hire Cornish as general agent.

This extremely unusual degree of association—in some cases outright friendship—between

middle-class blacks and whites in New York City helped galvanize an antislavery movement. Tappan

reversed course on colonization, as did Garrison up in Boston, where he started the Liberator, an

antislavery paper, in 1831. Soon Garrison came out with a sharp attack on the American Colonization

Society, a polemic that received wide circulation with the help of financial assistance from Arthur

Tappan.

Before long the silk merchant essayed bolder interventions, urged on by Charles Finney, who

declared slavery one of the evils America had to shed if it were to attain the millennium. Tappan set

out to form an integrated antislavery organization. He secured the collaboration of black ministers

Williams, Wright, and Cornish, and he also recruited youthful white evangelicals from the Third

Presbytery, seat of Yankeedom in New York. William Goodell, editor of the Genius of Temperance,

signed on. Joshua Leavitt, editor of the New York Evangelist (and, like Garrison and Tappan, a

sometime resident at the Grahamite Boardinghouse), also saw the abolitionist light. So did the Rev.

George Bourne, editor of the anti-Catholic Protestant Vindicator, and Presbyterian minister Samuel

H. Cox, a close friend of Cornish and Wright and, like Bourne, a religious bigot, though he focused



his ire on Quakerism (“infidelity in drab”).

In the spring of 1833 Tappan launched the Emancipator, a newspaper devoted solely to abolition,

and underwrote its distribution to clergymen across the North. Next, he and his associates set about

organizing a New York Anti-Slavery Society. They decided they would formally inaugurate it

whenever English abolitionists succeeded in their campaign to end slavery in the British West Indies.

Such a transatlantic linkage would underscore the fact that the abolitionists’ views, rather than those

of slaveholders and their apologists, were becoming the norm of the “civilized” world. When news

reached New York in September 1833 that Parliament had voted for emancipation, Tappan

announced an organizational meeting for 7:30 Wednesday evening, October 2, at Clinton Hall.

On October 1 a worried group of colonizationists met in the office of James Watson Webb, editor

of the Courier and Enquirer. The American Colonization Society was in deep financial trouble. Its

Liberian colony was faring poorly. It was smarting from rebukes (by Arthur Tappan and other

temperancites) about its importation of liquor. And now abolitionist rivals were poised to take the

field.

For Webb, the abolitionists presented a clear and present danger not just to the ACS but to New

York City itself. Though he proudly traced his lineage to Puritan Massachusetts, Webb was an ardent

Episcopalian and a member (by marriage) of New York’s wealthy mercantile class. A staunch

traditionalist, he had appointed himself the journalistic defender of the city’s patriciate. Webb was

particularly concerned to guard against any dilution of old American bloodlines by inferior breeds—

above all, blacks—and to his way of thinking, Tappan’s newest venture threatened just such

miscegenation. If slaves were emancipated but not exiled, they would have to be assimilated. Given

that many freed slaves would move north, the abolitionist enterprise might mulattoize New York

society.

On the morning of Tappan’s planned meeting, Webb’s Courier and Enquirer fulminated: “Are we

tamely to look on, and see this most dangerous species of fanaticism extending itself through society?

. . . Or shall we, by promptly and fearlessly crushing this many-headed hydra in the bud, expose the

weakness as well as the folly, madness, and mischief of these bold and dangerous men?” He urged

“patriots” to assemble at Clinton Hall a half hour before meeting time to take remedial action. During

the day placards went up around town, addressed (ostensibly) TO ALL PERSONS FROM THE SOUTH(and

signed “Many Southerners”), summoning people to Clinton Hall to show their displeasure. Tempers

flared yet higher when it was learned that William Lloyd Garrison planned to attend.

That evening at least fifteen hundred New Yorkers arrived at Clinton Hall, yelling for the blood of

Tappan and Garrison, only to find the building locked. The trustees of Clinton Hall, having learned of

the proposed onslaught, had withdrawn permission to use it, and Tappan’s troops had surreptitiously

shifted uptown to Finney’s Chatham Street Chapel. By the time the crowd of “highly respectable

citizens” (in the words of a later newspaper report) learned of the new venue and arrived to storm the

building, the New York Anti-Slavery Society had whipped through its organizational meeting, elected

Arthur Tappan president, and slipped out the back door. The abolitionists were in business.

Indeed New Yorkers now seized the mantle of national antislavery leadership from the

Garrisonians in Boston. On December 4, 1833, sixty black and white delegates founded the American

Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), establishing its national headquarters at 143 Nassau Street and

requiring all members of the Executive Committee to be residents of New York City. Arthur Tappan

was named president. His brother, Lewis, joined the Executive Committee, along with some white



merchants and the black ministerial trio of Cornish, Wright and Williams.

The worst fears of negrophobes had been realized. New York had become a center of antislavery

agitation—at who knew what cost to the city’s business links with the South. Worse, the integrated

organization had put blacks in positions of responsibility and signaled an assault on local segregation

by inviting blacks into white evangelical churches (though continuing to seat them separately). Tappan

and team—having told New York it had problems with drink and sex—now informed the city it had a

racial problem, which it would not be allowed to ignore.

WHITE SLAVES AND “SMOKED IRISH”



Abolitionists hoped to win support from New York’s white working class. Most radical leaders were

disciples of Tom Paine and Robert Owen, both of whom were ardent enemies of servitude. Fanny

Wright was antislavery. So was George Henry Evans, editor of the Workingman’s Advocate. Evans,

indeed, specifically opposed colonization, defended free speech for abolitionists, and urged workers

to support their project, insisting that “EQUAL RIGHTS can never be enjoyed, even by those who are

free, in a nation which contains slaveites enough to hold in bondage two millions of human beings.”

Many white workers agreed with Evans that slavery was unjust: republican artisans considered

chattel slavery the antipode of liberty. Many artisans and shopkeepers were among the three thousand

who signed an abolitionist petition submitted to Congress in 1830, calling for an end to slavery in the

District of Columbia. The plebeian-oriented Sun occasionally printed antislavery material, and the

Transcript defended abolitionists’ right to speak.

Nevertheless, most New York laborers hated the men in command of the abolitionist apparatus and

refused to separate the message from the messengers. Abolitionism was inextricably linked to other

evangelical initiatives that many workers found objectionable. Evans, a freethinker, rejected

Tappan’s revivalism and Sabbatarianism and wondered if the abolitionists weren’t “actuated by a

species of theological fanaticism” in hoping “to free the slaves more for the purpose of adding them

to their religious sect, than for love of liberty and justice.”

Worse, many of the wealthy merchants who championed black slaves were in the front ranks of

those condemning workers who rallied to defend their rights (the Tappan-initiated Journal of

Commerce had led the assault on Workie-ism). Tappan and his colleagues drew a sharp line between

slavery and capitalism. Under slavery, the misery and poverty of working people was clearly

attributable to the slaveocrats who owned them. Under capitalism—given the evangelical premise

that ascribed success or failure wholly to individual character—a working person’s poverty could

not be laid at his employer’s door.

The absolute clarity of this evangelical distinction between free and unfree labor seemed a good

deal muddier to those whose lives had been abraded by capitalist development. To such men, setting

the plight of distant slaves above that of local workers seemed hypocritical. Some labor radicals,

including George Henry Evans, were drawn for a time to the metaphor of “wage slavery” (or “white

slavery”) as a linguistic device for emphasizing the analogies between their own sinking condition

and that of already submerged bondsmen.

True, New York laborers had their political independence, no trifling matter. But the Revolution

had been fought for economic independence as well, and by that criterion, the growth of wage-work,

the declining respect for manual labor, the rise of renttenantry, the transformation of proud craftsmen

into “hirelings”—all these together constituted a disturbing trajectory, whose end point might yet be