New York at War (23 page)

When Fulton’s
Demologos
was launched on October 29, it slid into the East River, according to the
Evening Post
, “amidst the roar of cannon and the shouts and acclamations of upwards of twenty thousand people, who had assembled to witness the event” along the Manhattan and Long Island shores. But the ship never gained the glory Fulton wished for it. By the time it was fitted out with the engine and tested in the harbor’s waters, the war was over. Naval officers judged it too cumbersome to be of use in the open sea, and
Demologos
ultimately languished in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a floating infirmary, without ever firing a shot at an enemy.
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The launching of
Fulton I,
also known as
Demologos,
October 29, 1814. THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK.

While the
Demologos
was unsuccessful as an instrument of war, it arguably played a part in taking one life. Ill and exhausted, Fulton toiled obsessively on the ship during the winter of 1814–1815 at his workshop on the Jersey City shore. After returning to his Manhattan lodgings one night, he took to bed with severe pneumonia. He died on February 23, at age fifty, to be remembered for his steamboat—and the ferry landings (and, eventually, streets) that bore his name on either side of the East River—rather than for his weapons of mass destruction. But recognized or not, Fulton had inaugurated New York’s career as an incubator and cradle of mechanized warships that would help transform the nature of marine warfare.
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The full measure of that industrial revolution, however, would not be gauged for several decades. In the moment, the war’s economic impact made daily life hard for many. The British blockade was effective enough to create shortages; this, combined with the government’s requisition of foodstuffs and fuel for its fighting forces, brought a sharp inflation that outstripped the earnings of many working families. “The times are very hard . . . ,” a New York lady wrote to her sister in October 1813. “It is high time this cruel war was at an end.”

The economic stress of war intensified the sense of New York as a city under siege not only from the British warships hovering offshore, but also from foes much closer to home. Once more, New York appeared to be harboring enemies within its gates. The Royal Navy pounced so swiftly on vessels trying to sneak out of New York that it seemed obvious that local agents were providing the British with information about embarkations. Friendly fishermen and merchants covertly sailed out to the blockading fleets and sold them food. Republicans were primed to blast Manhattan’s Federalists as pro-British traitors, but it was hard to single out individuals when that party dominated much of the city’s public life. Instead, a more convenient scapegoat was found.
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At the start of the war, Charles Holt’s Republican paper, the
Columbian
, had called on the authorities “to put the laws immediately in force against alien enemies, and to rid the city of spies.” Such sentiment, aimed at the city’s community of British émigrés, harmonized with the policy of the Madison administration. On July 7, 1812, the State Department issued an order requiring all British subjects living in the United States to go to the nearest US marshal’s office to register their names and those of their family members, as well as their ages and places of residence. By April 1813, the names of 2,300 English citizens were on the books of Manhattan’s federal marshal. Any resident British alien traveling into or out of the city needed to carry a passport and check himself into the local marshal’s office on arrival.
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While British New Yorkers were neither prosecuted en masse nor deported, the registry system would linger as a humiliating memory of the war years. Such measures gratified the anger of native-born New Yorkers and offered a fleeting reassurance of security. But passports could not protect the city against the Royal Navy, should London adopt a more aggressive strategy. The key question remained unanswered: if New Yorkers peered seaward one day to see “all London afloat,” as many still living had done once before, could they rest assured that their defenses would hold?

This was the question of the hour during the spring and summer of 1814. Napoleon’s defeat in Europe freed up thousands of redcoats for redeployment to Britain’s American theater. In June, reports arrived confirming an ominous buildup of British reinforcements at Halifax and Bermuda. Governor Tompkins and Mayor De Witt Clinton used city money to hire spies who posed as friendly vendors, boarded Sir John Warren’s and Sir Thomas Hardy’s ships off Sandy Hook, and reported back that the British intended to attack the East Coast somewhere between Rhode Island and the Chesapeake. By mid-July, a special defense committee of the Common Council concluded that “the immense prize which this city affords to his cupidity” made New York a logical goal for the enemy’s invasion. An English lady living on Broadway even claimed she had received word from her relative, Admiral Sir George Cockburn, who hoped very soon to “have the honor to dine with her at her house, as he expected to be in command of the city of New York.”
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In response to the renewed threat of invasion, workmen were busy during the late spring and summer of 1814 on a new set of fortifications designed to fill gaps in the existing network. To the relief of New Yorkers, the port’s new military engineer, Colonel Joseph Swift—the first man to graduate from West Point—proved as capable as his mentor, Jonathan Williams. Ranging across the city’s shores and hinterland, Swift plotted out a ring of new outposts. Gun batteries were placed on the Long Island shore and an offshore reef facing the Staten Island forts, thereby strengthening the Narrows. A two-story wooden blockhouse, with cannon above and loopholes for muskets below, was built and garrisoned at Rockaway to deter the foe from landing on the barrier beaches of Jamaica Bay. Remembering well the lessons of 1776, Swift pressed for a series of defenses across Brooklyn and rural northern Manhattan to prevent a flanking British assault. Large blockhouses were built on Mill Rock in the East River and at Hallets Point on the Queens shore to guard the Hell Gate passage. Swift counted on the 44 guns of the frigate
President
, which had run the blockade into the harbor in February, to be a “floating battery” augmenting the 570 cannon and mortars of the harbor and shoreline forts.
⁴⁴

New forts would be useless if they lacked garrisons, and Tompkins worked tirelessly to expand the city’s defensive army. The governor mustered upstate militia and volunteer regiments and ordered them to the city. Throughout August, New Yorkers watched as the Montgomery Rangers, the Albany Riflemen, West Point cadets, and New Jersey regiments took up positions in the harbor forts and in mass encampments staked out on Harlem Heights and Brooklyn Heights. By September 11, when the last troops arrived, Tompkins had assembled an active force of about six thousand men, with another ten thousand in reserve.
⁴⁵

The arrival of new troops was reassuring; slow progress in completing Swift’s defenses was not. By late summer, city authorities concluded that civilians would have to volunteer their time, sweat, and muscle, as they had in previous crises. As the sun rose over the East River waterfront each morning in August and September 1814, an unusual scene repeated itself: hundreds of men, often accompanied by fifers, drummers, and flag bearers, marched onto Fulton’s new steam ferryboat at Beekman Slip to perform a day’s unpaid labor on Brooklyn’s fortifications. The Tammany Society, the Washington Benevolent Society, law students, journeymen printers, “Patriotic Sons of Erin,” the Common Council itself—all took up the spade and the wheelbarrow to complete a line of trenches and wooden stockades that stretched across the farmland of Brooklyn from Gowanus Creek to Wallabout Bay, often incorporating the moldering remains of the last war’s redoubts. Other civilians finished a similar line of blockhouses and entrenchments across the fields of Harlem from river to river (remnants can still be seen today in Central Park). By mid-August, 1,000 or more were toiling daily and nightly; because many volunteered for only a day or two, the rotation of workers meant that a significant portion of Manhattan’s population of 95,000 created the breastworks and ramparts at Brooklyn and Harlem.
⁴⁶

The volunteers represented a cross-section of the city’s populace, but the effort also underscored the era’s rigid social boundaries. Rather than being pressured to labor with their hands, wealthy gentlemen were permitted to provide money for “substitutes,” just as they could when facing military mobilization. When over two hundred of the city’s women journeyed to Fort Greene to perform “an hour’s work,” the
Columbian
thanked them and applauded “a lady of 72 years of age” who “wheeled a barrow of earth with great activity.” But the paper quickly added that “more permanent and appropriate employment for the sex will be found in the associations for needle work for the soldiery forming throughout the city.”
⁴⁷

Fort Fish, one of several fortifications built in 1814 in what is now the northern end of Central Park. Lithograph by George Hayward,
View from Fort Fish at McGowan’s Pass Looking Towards Harlem,
1856. COURTESY OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY,
WWW.NYPL.ORG
.

Most poignant were the exertions of the city’s free black men. By 1814, New York City was home to about nine thousand free African Americans and about a thousand slaves. Under a state law passed in 1799, all boys born into slavery after July 4, 1800, would be freed at age twenty-eight, and all girls at age twenty-five; thus an entire generation of enslaved New Yorkers could look forward to obtaining their freedom in the mid-1820s. Older slaves enjoyed no guarantee that they would ever be free, although some dared hope that a revision of the law might liberate them as well. The free black community sustained itself through the resilience of its evangelical church congregations and the leadership of a small cadre of clergymen and tradesmen. But they inhabited their own city, one of limited job and educational opportunities, poverty, segregated institutions, and property qualifications that kept black men from voting.

Thus it was noteworthy when, on August 20, an anonymous “Citizen of Color” used the newspapers to urge his brethren to shoulder the pick and shovel and head for Brooklyn. “There is a fair prospect of a period not far distant,” he noted, “when this state will not contain a slave. Our country is now in danger. . . . We have now an opportunity of showing . . . that we are not traitors or enemies to our country.” Two days later, about one thousand free black men, accompanied by a band and flags, answered the call and did their share on Brooklyn Heights. The
Evening Post
lauded “the hardy and patriotic sons of Africa” who, “knowing the value of freedom, are anxious to defend it.” As sincerely patriotic as the gesture was, it was also politically astute. The war emergency let New York’s African Americans remind white leaders of black loyalty and of the promises of freedom whites had yet to fulfill.
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On August 27, as work on the fortifications around the city continued, the bleakest news of the war reached New York. The British had seized and burned Washington, DC; President Madison had fled. “Let every man capable of bearing arms provide himself with a musket and the necessary accoutrements,” the Common Council, fearing a similar fate for New York, implored the public. But the crisis passed. In mid-September, news arrived of the British failure to capture Baltimore, followed by reports of a decisive American victory on Lake Champlain. Gradually it dawned on New Yorkers that the momentum of the British summer offensive was ebbing away and that the immediate danger had passed. In November, Governor Tompkins started sending the upstate militia regiments home.
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