The Epic of New York City (34 page)

“Gentiemen, preee-ee-
sent!
”

At Pendleton's command Burr raised his right arm, slowly and deliberately, took aim, and fired. A slug slammed into the right side of Hamilton's belly a little above the hip. His muscles contracted, pulling him up onto his toes. He spun to the left—oddly enough—and fell on his face. As he fell, his fingers tightened in a spasm,
squeezing off a shot from his pistol, the bullet ripping through the limb of a cedar tree above and to the left of Burr. After a moment of brittle silence Burr advanced toward Hamilton with regret showing on his face, but after one look he turned away silently.

Pendleton shouted for Dr. Hosack. The physician scrambled up the rocks. Van Ness quickly opened an umbrella and held it in front of Burr's face so that Hosack would not be able to testify that he had seen the Vice-President. Then Burr and his second descended the cliff and boarded their boat. The doctor found Hamilton half sitting on the earth and half supported in Pendleton's arms. Hamilton looked up, recognized Hosack, murmured, “This is a mortal wound, doctor,” and fainted. The doctor ripped open his coat and tore away his shirt. Placing his fingers on Hamilton's wrist, he could feel no pulse. He laid his hand over Hamilton's heart but could detect no movement. Hosack and Pendleton picked up the bleeding man and carried him laboriously down the rocks to the boat, where the boatman helped ease him into the craft.

They shoved off from the Jersey shore, heading for the Manhattan waterfront estate of Hamilton's friend Samuel Bayard. The doctor rubbed Hamilton's lips, temples, neck, and wrists with spirits of hartshorn, or ammonia. When they had rowed about fifty yards, Hamilton began to breathe perceptibly. He sighed. His deep-set eyes fluttered open, and he stared about vacantly. Between long breaths he murmured, “Pendleton knows that I did not intend to fire at him.”

Brought back to Manhattan, Hamilton lingered in great agony. As he lay on his deathbed that night, Tammany members celebrated at Martling's Long Room, toasting the victorious Aaron Burr, who had shut himself up in the library of his country place. But after Hamilton had died at half past two the following afternoon, the men of Tammany found it expedient to take part in the public mourning. The funeral was one of the most impressive in the city's history. Alexander Hamilton's death drove his twenty-year-old daughter insane, converted Aaron Burr into a social leper, and resulted in widespread revulsion against dueling. Hamilton was buried in Trinity Churchyard.

When Washington Irving was a boy, he had gone to a school at 37 Partition (now Fulton) Street run by an old soldier, named Benjamin Romaine. This was a private institution, as were all other New York schools. They were maintained by churches. No education was given
to the children of unaffiliated parents. Obviously, something had to be done, or many of the new generation would grow up in ignorance. On April 9, 1805, the state legislature passed an act incorporating a free school society.

Public School No. 1 opened on Chatham Street on April 28, 1807. Before the end of the year 150 pupils were enrolled. The educational system first used here was devised by an Englishman, named Joseph Lancaster. The schoolmaster taught pupils, who in turn taught children in lower grades. This meant that fewer schoolmasters were needed, an economy appreciated by the rich. After all, a part of the excise duties was now being used to support the schools.

Besides education, the city fathers were concerned about the growth of population. In 1807 the state legislature named a three-man commission to plot Manhattan's undeveloped land. Because the chief engineer was John Randall, Jr., this first real city plan was called the Randall Plan. From today's East Houston Street northward to 155th Street Randall laid out a gridiron or rectangular system of north-south avenues crossed at right angles by east-west streets.

The Randall Plan made no allowance for the shape of the land, preferring to iron out Manhattan's hills by force instead of by blending man's needs with nature's gifts. It was too late to do anything about Greenwich Village's streets, which cut diagonally southwest to northeast. However, there was serious talk about abolishing Broadway altogether, for people believed that the city's business life would center on the Boston Post Road. Almost no space was allotted for public parks, an oversight that later cost the city millions of dollars.

Undeveloped land was divided into lots 100 feet in depth. As often happens during a land boom, householders put exorbitant values on houses in the path of a proposed street. When the city wouldn't pay their prices, they set dogs on public surveyors. One new avenue was laid out on a line that cut in half the kitchen of a vegetable woman; she and her neighbors bombarded surveyors with cabbages and artichokes.

Citizens laughed at the commissioners for laying out the city as far north as the wilderness of 155th Street. The officials replied:

As a matter of fact, just before World War II a total of 3,871 persons lived in a single Harlem block. If all Americans had lived together that closely, the nation's whole population would have fitted into one-half the area of New York City.

In 1807 New York was nicknamed Gotham. It seems that three young men—Washington Irving, his brother William, and James Kirke Paulding—wrote essays poking fun at the foibles of their fellow townsmen. This wasn't difficult because manners were ridiculously formal. For example, one gentleman always spoke of Mr. Julius Caesar and
Mr.
Homer. This jumble of essays was called
Salmagundi,
meaning a hash made of minced veal, pickled herrings, anchovies, and onions served with lemon juice and oil. After they had appeared in newspapers, the
Salmagundi
squibs were published in a yellow-backed pamphlet small enough to be carried in a lady's purse. Eight hundred copies were sold the first day of publication, and this started the Knickerbocker school of literature.

New Yorkers chuckled, even though the essays mocked them. The authors dubbed the city Gotham because of something that had happened in the English village of Gotham in the thirteenth century. King John planned to visit Gotham and buy a castle there. The villagers, realizing that they would have to maintain this estate, decided to act like idiots and scare away the king. John was amazed to see them trying to rake the moon's reflection out of a pond, joining hands around a thornbush to keep a cuckoo from flying away, and doing other foolish things. Wanting no part of such madmen, the king decided not to settle in Gotham. The villagers later chortled that “more fools pass through Gotham than remain in it.”

The year of
Salmagundi
also produced the first New York guidebook. Written by Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, its pomposity amused and irritated Washington Irving. He was surprised to learn how few New Yorkers realized that the city once had been called New Amsterdam. Irving, who was making no progress as a lawyer, consulted local libraries and in twenty-two months wrote
A History of New York From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty.
Because he pretended that it had been written by an antiquarian named Diedrich Knickerbocker, his work became known as
Knickerbocker's History of New York,
and it also gave the city its symbol—Father Knickerbocker. The word means baker of marbles.

As New York became a literary center, the age of steam navigation began. For twenty years inventors had experimented with a variety of steamboats, and Robert Fulton, son of an Irish immigrant, learned from all of them. Unlike the luckless Fitch, Fulton got financial backing from wealthy Robert R. Livingston, who had become minister to France after he had sworn in Washington as President. Fulton and Livingston met in Paris. The inventor ordered an engine built in England, and when he got back to New York, he found it lying on a wharf near the Battery. He had it hauled to Charles Brown's shipyard on the East River, and there he oversaw the construction of his steamboat.

The
Clermont
was 150 feet long and 13 feet wide. To play it safe, Fulton equipped her with a mast and sail, although she had a huge paddle wheel on each side. After she had been finished, the
Clermont
was towed to the foot of Amos (now West Tenth) Street on the west side of Manhattan.

One August morning in 1807 Fulton prepared to cast off for the most memorable steamship trip in history. The forty-two-year-old inventor was a reserved man with a solemn face; he was tall and slender, with large dark eyes, a high forehead, and curly brown hair. A crowd of skeptics gathered on the banks of the Hudson. Uneasy passengers aboard the ship shifted their weight from one foot to another. At last the paddle wheels stirred the water into white foam, and the ship began to move. Then she stopped. From the shore arose murmurs of “I told you so!” Fulton asked the spectators and passengers to be patient for half an hour.

After he had adjusted the balky engine, he again gave the signal to cast off. Now the paddle wheels not only turned but also kept moving and, since they were uncovered, threw up torrents of water, drenching the passenges. The
Clermont
was fueled by pine knots that cast sparks and ashes out of the skinny smokestack. Warding off this fiery deluge, the passengers looked as fearful as though they were crossing the river Styx. As the hissing thumping black monster crept up the Hudson, crews of passing river sloops fell to their knees to pray, cows along the shore stuck their tails into the air and bucketed into woods, and a farmer ran home to tell his wife that he had seen “the devil on his way to Albany in a sawmill.”

The first stop for fuel was at Clermont, Livingston's estate 110 miles above New York; later the ship was named for this place. She made the 150-mile trip to Albany at an average of 5 miles an hour, thus completing the first real voyage ever made by a steam vessel anywhere in the world. Fulton and Livingston won a monopoly of steamboat travel in New York waters, but soon other men built and operated steamships elsewhere.

When Fulton had been in Paris, he had presented his idea for a steamboat to Napoleon. The emperor had been so impressed that he had ordered his marine minister to discuss the matter with Fulton, but nothing had been done for three years. By then it was too late. After Fulton's success on the Hudson, Napoleon sighed: “I should have been master of the world, but those idiots of savants made fun of his invention!”

Napoleon's ambition kept Europe in bloody turmoil the first decade of the nineteenth century. England and its allies—but especially England—kept him from achieving his desires. Eager to make any sacrifice for “six hours' control of that wet ditch”—the English Channel—Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States for money to invade England. The invasion never came off, but the headlong clash between France and Great Britain was felt in America.

Neither European power paid much attention to the rights of neutrals, and the United States was by far the most important neutral. As France and England produced war matériel and fed huge armies, the demand for American produce soared, and the United States merchant marine multiplied. Each nation tried to keep American goods away from the other. Both were high-handed in halting American ships to search them. And the British impressed American seamen. As tensions mounted, it became apparent that something had to give.

Chapter 16