Jefferson Davis's New York City: The Romance Between New York and the South

By Donald J. Green

Most of us would agree that New York and the South are very different places today, both culturally and politically. Yet, surprisingly, during the 19th century they shared a common outlook. As a native New Yorker, Donald J. Green was astonished to learn that Varina Davis, the First Lady of the Confederacy, and her daughter Winnie

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Jun 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685156282

Donald J. Green

A New York native, Donald J. Green is a graduate of Bucknell University. After a career in advertising in New York City, he relocated to Tampa, his wife Nell's hometown. He acquired an advanced degree in American history from the University of South Florida, Tampa and taught at Hillsborough Community College for over ten years. Jefferson Davis's New York City is his second book.

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Chapter One

Cotton, Commerce, Convergence

The Rise of King Cotton

E

arly in the 18th century cotton manufacturing in England was a home- based industry. Called the putting out system, businessmen supplied raw cotton to individuals who cleaned spun and weaved cotton into cloth by hand with the help of family members. But a series of mechanical inventions ushered in the Industrial Revolution with factories and cotton at its core. In 1733, John Kay’s flying shuttle doubled the productivity of weavers. The supply of thread caught up with weavers demand when John Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in 1767. Further improvements in the process during the next thirty years increased productivity 370 times.

The new factory system demanded ever larger quantities of raw cotton. But there were constraints on supply. In India, cotton was grown on family plots along with food crops, a safety net in the event that cotton demand diminished. Anatolia, present say Turkey, was eyed as a place where large scale agriculture might take hold, but elites and local custom resisted interference in the ancient rhythms of life. So attention turned to the New World. Brazil had the land and labor but cotton competed with powerful sugar and coffee interests for infrastructure improvements. In the Caribbean, Jamaica, Grenada, Dominica and the Bahamas were good sources but land was limited and sugar remained dominant, A devastating hurricane hit Barbados in 1780, wiping out the sugar growing infrastructure, so Barbados converted to cotton cultivation and, though small, became the most productive of the British owned islands.

French Saint Domingue (Haiti), the largest single source of cotton in the Caribbean, experienced a successful slave uprising beginning in 1791, ending that island’s lead role. The outbreak of war between England and France in 1793 lead to further shortages. With demand growing due to industrialization and constraints on supply, raw cotton prices skyrocketed.

One of the beneficiaries was American cotton from the Georgia Sea Islands and a narrow strip of coastal Georgia and South Carolina. This long staple variety was in great demand because it produced very fine finished cloth. Further inland, a strain of short staple thrived. But its sticky green seeds were tightly ingrained in the cotton ball and could not be removed with rollers used for the long staple variety. Removing the seeds from short staple cotton required the day long labor of a single slave to process one pound of cotton. Even the meager expense of feeding, clothing and housing slaves made the whole exercise unprofitable. With demand great and short staple upland cotton potentially plentiful, the inability to efficiently clean out the seeds became a continuing source of frustration for farmers.

Enter Eli Whitney, a Yale graduate with a mechanical bent, born in Westborough, Massachusetts on December 7, 1765. In college he earned extra money tutoring undergraduates and repairing apparatus for science professors. Upon graduation in 1792 he accepted a position as a tutor in South Carolina. On the boat trip south he met Catherine Greene the widow of Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene. Mrs. Greene resided at Mulberry Plantation, twelve miles from Savannah, on land donated to General Greene by grateful Georgians, in appreciation for his successful southern campaign against the British.

When Whitney’s South Carolina position did not work out he agreed to tutor the Greene children. During his stay at Mulberry he heard the lament of local farmers about the difficulty of removing seeds from cotton, so he decided to take on the project of building a mechanical device. The thinking at the time was that a gin should remove seeds from the cotton but Whitney took a different approach. One day he watched a cat go after chickens, clawing off their feathers but not harming the chicken. So he designed a gin, or engine, that mimicked the action of the cat’s claws. By turning a wheel the raw cotton was pulled through slits too narrow for the seeds that would be left behind. Depending how the gin was powered it could clean up to fifty times what a slave could do.

Predictably, word about the invention spread rapidly. The curious came to see a device that growers always dreamed about. Before long thieves broke into Whitney’s workshop and stole the model before it was patented. When the patent was finally issued this cat was out of the bag. Whitney initiated sixty lawsuits but only one stuck, in 1808, one year before the patent expired. However, in appreciation for his invention the states of South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee awarded him $90,000.

The effects of Whitney’s invention were far reaching. Before the gin, many Americans assumed that slavery would die out. In the nation’s first official national census in 1790, 697,897 slaves were counted in all states North and South. They cultivated tobacco primarily, with smaller numbers in rice, indigo and Sea Island cotton. Many were household servants. Over time, tobacco robs the soil of nutrients, reducing yields and making the crop unprofitable, so many of the Virginia and Maryland slaves would no longer be useful. Some Virginia growers even started to free their slaves shortly after the Constitution was ratified in 1788.

But the lower South’s climate and soil were highly suitable for the short staple variety once Whitney’s gin solved the the sticky seeds problem. With growing demand from British mills, and visions of great wealth before their eyes, Americans turned their attention to the vast Indian lands of the southeast. At first, cotton cultivation spread to inland Georgia and South Carolina; then to the present day Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and eventually, Texas. The Indian tribes that inhabited these lands, the Creeks, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Seminoles were forcibly removed by the military and coerced treaties in the name of the United States Government. President Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) first contemplated replacing them with white farmers. But It wasn’t until 1830, when the capstone Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson, that the tribes east of the Mississippi River were moved west. With Indians out of the way cotton cultivation mushroomed throughout the South.

After proper soil and climate the third pillar of cotton farming is slavery. So, within forty years of the 1790 census, in 1830, the slave population nearly tripled to 2,009,050. At the same time northern abolitionists began a movement to end the South’s peculiar institution. Despite their vocal agitation, cotton cultivation and slavery continued to grow. By the eve of the Civil War the slave population doubled again to 3,953,760.

By 1860, the United States was producing two- thirds of the worlds cotton, accounting for over half of American exports. From the first few pounds that arrived in Liverpool in 1765, the United States shipped over one billion pounds to England in 1860, representing 88 percent of Britain’s raw cotton supply. Its 2,650 cotton mills were well supplied. Lesser quantities went to France, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia and other European countries.

In 1858, at the height of the South’s economic and political power, all due to cotton, Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina made a speech on the floor of the Senate, in reply to comments by anti-slavery New York Senator William H. Seward:

Without the firing of a gun, without drawing a sword, should they (notherners) make war upon us we could bring the whole world to our feet. What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dare make war on it. COTTON IS KING

The Rise of King Commerce

The emergence of New York as the commercial capital of the United States, and the South’s financial collaborator, can be traced to its natural advantages, and a handful of decisions made between 1815 and 1825. New York’s natural advantages consisted of its central location between the cotton ports of the South, industrializing New England, the farms of the upper Midwest, and Europe. Its port is ice free, on the Atlantic, with sufficient depth for the deep draft ships that carried the biggest cargoes more efficiently and profitably than smaller vessels.

By comparison, the Port of Philadelphia, south of New York, one hundred miles up the Delaware, was not nearly as deep as New York’s port and froze during the winter. Baltimore, further south, did not freeze but was a lengthy two hundred miles up the relatively shallow Chesapeake. While Boston offered fast access across the Atlantic, its harbor froze over during the winter months. But New York’s natural advantages were not enough in themselves to secure its position as the nation’s dominant commercial center. Luck and daring also played a role.

On the evening of February 11,1815, three employees at the office of the New York Gazette, on Hanover Square in Manhattan, were about to leave for the day when a man staggered in with important news. The British war ship Favourite had just arrived in New York harbor with the American legation secretary and an official messenger of King George III. They brought official notification that American and British diplomats had signed the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812. Congress ratified the treaty only days later on February 16, and the conflict was officially over. When word got out, New Yorkers filled the streets to celebrate. But good news of another kind, a stroke of luck, was about to occur that put the city on the path to becoming the nation’s leading port and commercial center.

With the war against the Americans and Napoleon over, British merchants found themselves with a glut of manufactured goods. Because the British had occupied New York for the entire Revolutionary War, and had established strong commercial ties to the city, they decided to dump their excess goods in New York at bargain prices. One of the earliest British arrivals, the brig Sara,announced on May 18, 1815 in the Evening Post that 162 crates of earthenware direct from Liverpool were up for sale. Bargain hunters converged on the city in search of deals from lower Manhattan auction houses. By 1817, the glut was over and the British considered moving to another Atlantic port as an outlet for their wares. But the New York Legislature struck back with the Auction Law of 1817, requiring that auctioned goods had to be sold no matter the final bid, even if it meant a loss for the merchant. Thus, New York cemented its reputation as the place for bargains. From then on, merchants from the South and midwest descended on the city to bid on textiles, ironware, Sheffield cutlery, tools, pens, brushes, etc.

At the same time that the auction legislation passed, the State approved the Erie Canal Bill, authorizing a state expenditure of seven million dollars for a 353 mile canal linking New York City with the Great Lakes. When completed, goods of all kind could be shipped from Liverpool through New York City up the Hudson, across the Erie Canal to Buffalo and through the Great Lakes, all without the expense of land travel. Just shipping wares from New York City to Buffalo through the Canal cut transportation costs by an astounding ninety percent.

The idea of a man made waterway across the State was in the minds of New York officials as early as 1724, 101 years before the Canal was completed. Cadwallader Colden, an Irish born surveyor, doctor, scientist and mathematician was appointed by Governor Burnett to report on the state’s topography. Colden liked how the numerous rivers and lakes could serve as links in a water based transportation system. The one big advantage was that New York contained one of the only two natural breaks in the Appalachian chain that ran from Maine to Alabama., Nothing came of Colden’s ideas. Over the next ninety years others argued for a waterway across New York State. Even George Washington added his voice to the chorus, expressing concern that if the Appalachians remained an impenetrable barrier, a separate country could arise west of the mountains if there was no easy way of communicating with the settled East.

With much of the War of 1812 fought in and around upstate, the difficulty of delivering supplies because of poor transportation was noted. When the war ended and the British evacuated their forts in the upper Midwest, a wave of settlers moved to cheaply bought government owned land. By 1820, twenty five percent of Americans lived west of the Appalachians. New York officials and merchants saw the need to establish a commercial link between midwestern farmers and New York City. So once again there was talk of a canal.

The leading advocate was DeWitt Clinton, father of ten, United States Senator, New York Mayor, Governor and one time presidential candidate. As a member of the Canal Commission from 1810-1824, Clinton personally surveyed the route and became the driving force behind its construction. Two months after the legislature approved the bill, on July 4, 1817, Clinton had the honor of shoveling a batch of earth for the symbolic start of construction.

The forty foot wide four feet deep Canal was a technological marvel for its day. Eighty three locks lifted boats up and down mountains, one as high as 675 feet. The work was completed in eight years. Most of the workers were local farmers recruited along the route with freed slaves and Irish immigrants.

On October 26, 1825 the official opening ceremonies began in Buffalo. Governor Clinton lead a parade from the courthouse to the Seneca Chief, a canal boat docked at the waterfront that would be his home for the next ten days. The Seneca Chief lead a flotilla across the 353 mile length of the Canal to Albany, then down the Hudson to New York City. As the boat left the dock, a band played Fortissimo and a 32 pound cannon blasted away. New Yorkers waited impatiently for word of the boat’s departure. The signal came from cannons and riflemen stationed along the entire route that fired immediately upon hearing the previous weapon. When the last shot reached New York harbor the reverse was set in motion all the way back to Buffalo. The 1000 mile round trip took two hours. Cadwallader D. Colden, the grandson of Dr. Colden, who first advocated for a canal, recalled the very moment he heard the cannon fire and asked himself:

Who that has American blood in his veins can hear the sound without emotion? Who that has the privilege to do it can refrain from exclaiming I, too, am an American citizen and feel as much pride in being able to make the declaration as ever an inhabitant of the eternal city felt in proclaiming he was a Roman.

When the string of boats arrived in New York City ten days after leaving Buffalo, Governor Clinton, in a great symbolic gesture, emptied kegs of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic Ocean. The Canal was so successful that it inspired the construction of more than eight hundred miles of other canals along the Atlantic. Over seven thousand boats operated on the Erie. The Commission reported that $500,000 in annual tolls was five times the amount needed to pay interest on the loans.The entire debt was paid off by 1837. Just as the Canal strengthened New York City’s position as the nation’s leading commercial center, it robbed New Orleans—the South’s biggest port—of its distinction of being the only city with an all water route from the Midwest. To maintain New York’s competitive advantage, Cornelius Vanderbilt would eventually construct the New York Central and Erie Railroads. From canal to rail New York would be linked to all of the United States and the to rest of the world. In a sense the Erie Canal was only the beginning.

Besides the dumping of British bargains and the Erie Canal, another element in New York City’s rise was the start of packet service across the Atlantic. The term packet was the original designation for ships operated by the British post office that maintained regular service to New York and other ports. The service began in 1755 in cooperation with Benjamin Franklin, one of several Deputy Postmasters in the American colonies.

Before 1818 ship captains would announce a departure date. Passengers and cargo would arrive in time for the expected embarkation but the promise was rarely kept. The hold might not be full with cargo or passengers, so the ship would remain until the captain was satisfied. In the meantime passengers would wait and merchants would fret. An example of the irregularity was the ship Minerva with a promised departure date of September 15, New York to Liverpool cargo or no cargo. The day after the first announcement a second was made announcing a delay until September 25 and room for more cargo. Due to fog, Minerva finally departed on October 3, eighteen days after the original promised date.

This would all change when an advertisement appeared in the Evening Journal on October 17, 1817, announcing regularly scheduled packet service between New York and Liverpool for passengers, cargo and mail. The New York to Liverpool service would leave on the fifth of every month starting in January 1818, while the Liverpool to New York run would depart on the first of every month. Four ships would operate on the route: the Amity, the Courier, the Pacific and the James Monroe (named after the recently elected president). The ships were all New York built with copper bottoms for speed, commodious accommodations and commanders of great experience. The announcement was repeated again six times between January 2, and January 9, by the American and British Quaker partners lead by Yorkshire born Jeremiah Thompson, the originator of the idea. For the first time the term Line would be used to describe the venture, eventually designated the Black Ball Line.

The owners were aware of the public’s skepticism about promised departures so they upped the ante by promising that the ships would depart at a certain hour, in this instance at 10a.m. on January 5, 1818. A crowd gathered to see whether the promise would be kept. At the East River pier lay the 424 ton James Monroe with 1500 barrels of apples, flour, cotton and naval stores. Eight men paid for passage which included bedding, food and wine. Passengers hailed from New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Kentucky and Montreal, the first of many Canadians to use the service.

The morning of January 5 a snow storm blanketed the city giving Captain James Wilkinson a good excuse to delay the departure, especially since there was room in the hold for more cargo. But as St Paul’s clock struck ten he gave the signal and the James Monroe departed on time and began the 3300 mile run to Liverpool, arriving 23 days later. There was no promise of arrival days until steamship service in 1838 because in the age of sail, conditions at sea could vary by voyage. Unfortunately, the Courier did not depart on its first Liverpool to New York run on January 1, as promised, but four days later filled with manufactured woolens and passengers, including seven in steerage. In subsequent months the Amity and the Pacific made their sailings on schedule.

Because of its regularity and reliability, the service proved highly popular with merchants and passengers. Incessant competition for more space on the packets drove naval architecture to design faster and bigger ships all of which could easily navigate New York’s deep harbor. The packets lured higher value cargo, specie (gold and silver) and coin. Each arrival became of vital interest to businessmen because they knew the most important information would arrive on the packets. The Line was well capitalized so it was able to maintain its service even during the Panic (depression) of 1819 when economic activity stalled. In a sense, the panic was a godsend for Thompson and his partners because it gave them four years of breathing space before rivals could establish competing service. Soon coastal packets were established between New York and Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Boston.

With the dumping of British goods in 1815, passage of the Auction Law two years later, the Atlantic and coastal packets in 1818, and completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York cemented its place as America’s leading financial and commercial center, a position it would never relinquish. With the exception of the far off Mexican War in 1846, it would have decades of uninterrupted peace to build on its early good fortune.

One development led to another. The frequent comings and goings of the international and coastal packets supplied New York with a constant flow of information about foreign and domestic markets. In 1815, New York’s leading newspapers, the Commercial Advertiser and the Evening Post, sold no more than 2000 copies daily. But a new generation of publishers took advantage of the information flow into New York by starting forty seven newspapers, eleven of them dailies with subscribers all over the country. By 1828, 160,000 copies were shipped out of the city; by 1833 the number mushroomed to one million.

In 1815, there were only five