Chapter 3

On the Waterfront

Very few Brooklynites escaped the influence of the East River and its waterfront. Commuters to Manhattan enjoyed the brief passage across the river in good weather or cursed the ice and chill of winter. They were as attentive as they wished to the sights and sounds of an urban waterway filled with large ships that sailed the world, along with barges, ferries, scows, and lighters that traveled from wharf to wharf, landing to landing, ship to shore, within the smaller world of the river itself. Shoppers and theater-goers—often the wives of those commuters—were only slightly less connected to this lively avenue of trade and human travel.

That the experience could be special—even magical—was captured by two mid-nineteenth-century literary lions. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Walt Whitman, whose editorial office once overlooked the “incessant stream of people” flowing to and from the Fulton Ferry landing, wrote of his mystical connection to all those who would experience, in generations to come, his own depth of feeling during the seemingly humdrum act of crossing the river:

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross

from shore to shore,

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and

west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south

and east,

Others will see the islands large and small,

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross,

the sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred

years hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-

tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

And to those future river crossers he could sense but not see:

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky,

so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one

of a crowd,

Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river,

and the bright flow, I was refreshed.¹

To Herman Melville, too, nothing about this waterfront experience was humdrum. In the first pages of Moby-Dick, his Ishmael marvels at the lure of the water to Manhattanites “of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.” Freed from their confinement “of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon,” they flock to the East River waterfront “from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?” asks Ishmael of the reader who might follow this crowd of landsmen to the water’s edge:

Posted like sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep…. Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.²

As everyone knows, Ishmael soon went to sea.

Occasionally, these evocations of the magnetism of the waterfront were matched in the real lives of Brooklynites and New Yorkers. On two frigid January days during the 1850s an incoming tide pushed masses of harbor ice into the already icy East River, creating a solid bridge from shore to shore, and drawing thousands, not to quiet reverie, but to the thrilling experience of walking back and forth between Brooklyn and Manhattan. On the second of those two days, some twenty-five thousand men and women, according to the Brooklyn Evening Star, scrambled down hastily provided ladders (at two cents per person) from dock to solid river, just to prove to the river it could be tamed in this way. Crowds assembled on the two riverbanks, too, “shouting and hurrahing and having a good time generally, and the utmost hilarity prevailed” for some five hours, until the tide turned and detached the receding ice from both shores, stranding hundreds of revelers on an ice floe heading back into the harbor and toward the open sea. Hilarity turned to panic, but the shrinking ice permitted boats to come to the rescue and not a life was lost. The cheering from the shores resumed after the last straggler was saved.³ One of those stragglers was the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher.⁴

Missing from these accounts of water and ice, tides and sunsets, yearnings for the sea and the magic of a river crossing is the drudgery of loading and unloading ships, filling and emptying warehouses, and manufacturing rope, white lead, glass, and dozens of other products. Missing too are the people who performed this work day after day; the shanties and tenements in which they and their families lived; and the ethnic, racial, and religious identities that differed from those of middle-class and wealthy commuters and shoppers, and of poets, novelists, and adventurous clergymen.

The public prints and private chronicles of this era do not ignore the working world of the Brooklyn waterfront, but there is a striking imbalance of attention between the suburban City of Churches and the less lovely—and decidedly less Protestant—workplaces and neighborhoods that lined the river from Red Hook to Williamsburgh and beyond. Newspaper and magazine editors were by no means indifferent to Brooklyn’s economic development, but their articles focused most often on the need for retail shoppers to spend in local stores such as the dry goods dealers Journeay & Burnham on Atlantic Street rather than to travel across the river to the grander and better-known emporia of New York.⁵ Most of those local stores were on the major streets—Fulton and Atlantic most notably—that led away from the ferry landings toward suburban Brooklyn.

After the construction of the Atlantic Basin in the 1840s, editors paid more attention to wharfage and warehousing, acknowledging that manual labor and a resident working class were vital components of the city’s economic life. In the process they raised the profile of ethnic minorities, conflicts between ethnic groups, and struggles between capital and labor, with coverage of an 1846 strike of Irish workers at the Atlantic Basin, and attacks by strikers on German immigrants who were hired to replace them.⁶

Brooklyn’s newspapers also examined manufacturing, although they did so significantly less frequently. As late as 1859 the Star admitted that it only “occasionally referred to the subject of manufacturing in this city, more with the hope of directing attention to it for a future effect, than in the expectation that any one would be led to adopt our suggestions now and turn their capital immediately into any prominent manufacture.”⁷ With respect to commerce, too, the Star wrote more often of the future than the present, hoping the New York City side of the river, “bristling with piers” and lined with a “forest of masts,” would yield at least some its treasure to the as yet underdeveloped landing and storage places of the Brooklyn shore. New York, after all, was once, like Brooklyn, a city of dwellings, “before commerce drove away the dwellings for the more profitable occupancy of space, and thus it will be with our splendid city.”⁸

What is curious about these assessments of Brooklyn’s bright commercial and industrial future is that a good deal of it had already arrived. The immediate and continuing success of the Atlantic Basin stimulated the expansion of Brooklyn’s commercial waterfront, along the gently rising shores of the old downtown and Williamsburgh, and in the narrow strip of land under the high bluff of Brooklyn Heights. By the 1850s Brooklyn was providing a significant and growing portion of the warehousing of the Port of New York, a fact only occasionally recognized in the press. In assessing Brooklyn’s industrial sector, the public prints were also behind the times. The lists of manufacturing firms that occasionally appeared in newspapers, city directories, and gazetteers are far less complete than the official tabulation of such firms in the New York State census of 1855, which lists no fewer than 386 factories and workshops employing 8,604 workers.⁹ Most of these firms were small shops with a handful of employees, but a sufficient number of larger units, located on or near the East River, gave the Brooklyn waterfront a distinctly industrial cast.

Just as in the early days of the City of Olympia and Vinegar Hill, many of them provided the ships, rope, and iron needed for maritime commerce—only there were more of them, and they were larger: ten ropewalks employing 677 hands, six shipyards with 540 workers, five iron furnaces with 602, a steamboat finishing plant employing 64, a lifeboat factory with 60. Five brass and copper foundries and smithies employed 236 people. Also located on or near the river were two hat and cap factories (666 workers), two glassworks (282), a white lead factory (195), seven distilleries (215), three gasworks (278), two porcelain factories (128), and numerous others significantly larger than the traditional artisan shops that operated on a much smaller scale.¹⁰ And the 1855 list of Brooklyn’s industrial firms was compiled a bit too early to capture what became the biggest of them all. In 1857 Frederick C. Havermeyer, Jr. moved his family’s Manhattan sugar refinery to a much larger property on the Williamsburg waterfront. Competitors soon followed, and by the time the Star suggested that industrial capitalists might want to invest in Brooklyn, the City of Churches was on its way to becoming the world’s largest producer of refined sugar.¹¹ The 1860 United States census reported an industrial workforce in Brooklyn that was half-again as large as the one detailed on the state census of 1855, establishing Brooklyn as the fifth most productive industrial city in the nation.¹²

Foreign immigrants were an essential part of the story of Brooklyn’s commercial and industrial development and an increasing presence in the waterfront and downtown wards. Immigrants, mainly from Ireland, helped build the docks and warehouses, loaded and carted goods to and from the river, worked in local manufactories and workshops, and dug and hauled away some of Brooklyn’s hilltops to fill in and straighten the waterfront itself. Their numbers were already sufficient by 1822 to justify the purchase of eight lots in Vinegar Hill for the building of Brooklyn’s first Roman Catholic Church. That same year the First Presbyterian Church appeared in Brooklyn Heights. St. James, however, was not the center of influence and affluence that was established on Cranberry Street. As Brooklyn’s chronicler of these years has written, Catholicism “came as an exotic, a part of the unfamiliar and unwanted cultural equipment of newly arrived and uncouth foreigners.”¹³ “Exotic,” though, did not necessarily mean “repulsive.” The Star’s report on the founding of St. James was no less respectful than those describing the founding of Protestant churches, and Alden Spooner soon advertised Catholic books for sale in the shop adjoining his newspaper’s offices.¹⁴ During the next few years Spooner wrote approvingly of a procession of the Hibernian Provident Society of Brooklyn, St. Patrick’s Day celebrations of the Erin Fraternal Association, and a meeting of the Friends of Ireland that forwarded $200 to Daniel O’Connell to further his struggle against English rule.¹⁵ Spooner also objected to “a friend who was talking violently against the influx of Irish emigrants, whom he styled the ‘low Irish.’ ”¹⁶

As this exchange suggests, there were local Protestants who worried about the foothold in Brooklyn of the Irish Catholic community. But the people who brought their strong backs and distinctive brogue to Brooklyn, and who founded St. James (which took three years to acquire a resident priest) were, after all, small in number and among the least influential in the local population. Nativism and anti-Catholicism did not flourish in Brooklyn for a few more years.

By the mid-1830s, Spooner’s tolerance toward the Irish was joined to the largely futile task of attracting them to the nascent Whig Party. The Star published pieces complimentary to the Irish as part of a larger strategy of convincing them that Democrats were false friends. “The Irish are a noble, generous, confiding, warm-hearted people, of hasty temperament, and an extremely quick sense of injury,” the editor wrote in 1836. And if that latter trait made them susceptible to Democratic demagoguery, it was still true that “every importation of Irishmen is a real treasure to the country.” Accompanying this praise, to be sure, was the recognition that an increasing number of Spooner’s fellow Protestants had come to feel differently: “Why, then, are they hated and despised by our countrymen?” he asked, “and why is every fresh importation viewed as a calamity to the country?”¹⁷

This chasm between “treasure” and “calamity” is visible as well in the responses to a Thanksgiving Day sermon delivered in 1835 by Rev. Evan M. Johnson, rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church.¹⁸ Emphasizing the common Christian faith of Protestants and Catholics, Johnson called for toleration of Brooklyn’s immigrants. Although Johnson was widely respected among Brooklyn’s clergy and laity, the sermon ignited a controversy that lasted for months, not only in Brooklyn but in Protestant journals published as far away as Boston and Philadelphia.¹⁹ A long letter in the Star eleven days after the sermon was delivered called it “an apology for the errors of the Roman Catholics,” an attack on “the pilgrim fathers,” and an inexcusable avoidance of the threat Irish Catholic immigrants pose to liberty and morality. The author of this unsigned letter described himself in the text as a Protestant minister.²⁰ By this time a Brooklyn branch of the nativist New York Protestant Association had been created, giving rise to meetings debating such questions as “Are the Roman Catholic Priests justified in prohibiting the people to read the Holy Scriptures?” “Are the Papal indulgences consistent with the Christian religion?” and “Is Popery compatible with civil liberty?”²¹ Catholic priests were invited to attend these debates, given the chance to explain and defend the practices of their church, and generally treated with respect. But if in a formal sense the Protestant Association meetings fostered toleration, their content—a variety of Catholic practices that most Protestants found troubling if not abhorrent—widened the chasm between those who could and could not accept with equanimity an Irish Catholic community in the City of Churches.

A degree of ambivalence existed on both sides of this chasm. In 1835, James Watson Webb, editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer, helped form America’s first anti-immigrant political party, the Native American Democratic Association, which soon spread to Brooklyn. An outspoken critic of Catholicism and Irish immigration, Webb nonetheless deemed Evan Johnson’s sermon on toleration “eminently calculated to assuage the furious zeal, and cool the fiery bigotry of those who believe … that there is but one solitary path to Heaven, and they the only guide.”²² Spooner gave space in the Star to this surprisingly tolerant message, but a few months earlier he, like Webb, gestured to the other side, dangling the possibility of supporting the Native Americans if they focused on denying the vote to those immigrants whose poverty, ignorance, and illiteracy made them “the dupes of political knaves.”²³ These departures, along with the failure of the Native American Democratic Association to gain much traction in Brooklyn’s politics, suggest that some fluidity of opinion remained during the 1830s, despite an undeniable increase in nativism and anti-Catholicism among American-born Protestants.²⁴

Attitudes hardened during and after the 1840s, when the potato famine in Ireland and political and economic upheaval in German states in the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire unleashed a huge migration of refugees to the United States. During the 1820s, an average of 12,850 immigrants entered the United States each year. In the 1830s that average increased more than fourfold to 53,843; it increased again to 85,733 during the first half of the 1840s. After the Irish famine began, and events displaced Palatines, Saxons, Hessians, and others in the still disparate German states, American immigration increased even more dramatically. The fifteen years between 1845 and the start of the Civil War averaged 258,742 immigrants, three times the average of the pre-famine 1840s, and twenty times the average of the 1820s.²⁵

Brooklyn took in its share of the immigrant stream. By 1855 nearly fifty-seven thousand Irish-born people resided in Brooklyn, along with some nineteen thousand who had been born in Germany. Nearly half (46.6 percent) of the newly consolidated city was listed on the census as foreign-born—just under 28 percent from Ireland, 9 percent from Germany, and another 9 percent from Great Britain and other countries.²⁶ These populations stabilized in absolute numbers in the latter 1850s, and their proportions to the overall population declined somewhat as Brooklyn grew from the continuing influx of native-born Manhattanites and other domestic migrants to the city, as well as from the American-born children of the immigrants themselves. The young New Worlders were no doubt counted among the ethnics of the city by those who claimed an older native vintage, but it’s worth noting that by 1860 the foreign-born in Brooklyn had been reduced to 39 percent of the city’s population and the Irish-born to 21 percent.²⁷

Many of the Irish immigrants were famine refugees and the hardships they fled stimulated some sympathy as well as fundraising for food shipments to Ireland. An announcement of a meeting for December 1, 1846, stressed the obligation of those with “superabounding blessings” to care for the needy and, perhaps inadvertently, drew a boundary between the Irish refugees and “us”: “If any people may be said to have stronger claims upon our sympathies than another, surely those of Ireland are that people—their kindred are among us, and of us.” Two men with Irish surnames joined six prominent Protestants in signing this appeal, the latter including the once-and-future mayor George Hall, a founding member of Brooklyn’s Native American Democrats, who was best known for his crusades against mostly Irish-owned grog shops and his enforcement of Brooklyn’s Sunday closing laws.²⁸ Whatever the mixture of feeling and intent toward the Irish, the appeal was a failure. Twelve days later the Star reported with unaccustomed brevity: “IRELAND. It is stated that the whole amount raised in Brooklyn to send food to Ireland, is only $220.” At a meeting ten days later, funds were submitted from only three wards: ward 1, where Irish shanties clustered around Furman Street, contributed $50 (less until reporter Robert A. Lyon drew on his own funds to bring it to that amount); from downtown ward 2 Michael McNamara and J. Mahoney reported $23.50; and from ward 6, John Shields submitted $4. Ward 6 was the home of many of Brooklyn’s new suburban neighborhoods, but this minuscule collection almost surely came from the Irish tenements and shanties along the waterfront near the Atlantic Basin.²⁹

On February 6, 1847, the Star attributed these early failures to skepticism about the extent of the crisis. But proofs of the Great Hunger “come to us now with overwhelming weight. Vessels should be loaded and despatched with liberal contributions, and such a city as ours, with its fifty churches, should show, that its christian symbols will be followed by the exercise of the greatest of all the Christian virtues,—Charity.” Another meeting was held ten days later and yet another, better organized and larger, ten days after that. At this meeting, sponsored by 347 signatories in addition to a highly influential Committee of Thirteen, a collection proposed by the ubiquitous John Greenwood yielded $700. An even more significant achievement was a formal plan to extend the appeal to all churches in Brooklyn and Long Island. The final result in dollars raised and food shipped is unknown, but we can certainly point to a serious effort on the part of some Brooklynites, including a number of its Protestant leaders, to relieve the suffering in Catholic Ireland.³⁰

Although the organizers and attendees of these meetings may have been perfectly sincere, their sympathies toward the Irish in Brooklyn were not the same as those they extended across the sea to Ireland. The local Irish, after all, had escaped starvation, and in the process brought troublesome attributes to Brooklyn, including the Catholicism some Protestants could not abide. Only two days after the Star called for “the exercise of the greatest of all the Christian virtues,” Alden Spooner admitted to the not-so-charitable motive of using relief to reduce the flow of migrants to Brooklyn: “If we would detain them at home, we must contribute to feed them there.”³¹

Spooner’s attitude toward the local Irish appears to have hardened. Even while lauding their hard work and high spirits, he had always had critical words for the rowdy and the drunken (to say nothing of the many Democrats) among them, but in 1848, a few months before he left the editorial chair of the Star, Spooner added a screed against the Catholic Church worthy of the harshest critics of Evan Johnson. “How finely does the Catholic religion, in its purest and fervent attributes, harmonize with human weakness,” he wrote, in an uncharacteristically sarcastic mode:

How seductively it speaks to the senses—how forcibly it operates on the passions—how strongly it seizes on the imagination—how interesting its forms—how graceful its ceremonies—how awful its rites. What a captivating and picturesque faith! Who would not become its proselytes, were it not, as some say, for the stern opposition of reason, and cool suggestions of philosophy.³²

Anti-Catholicism, an important driver of nativist sentiment, was growing more strident in America, and the City of (Protestant) Churches was no exception. As the local immigrant population grew, new Catholic churches were founded in Brooklyn, mostly in Irish neighborhoods. In 1853, Archbishop John Hughes of New York established the Diocese of Brooklyn, with John Loughlin its first bishop and St. James its cathedral. By 1855 there were fifteen Roman Catholic churches in Brooklyn, at least three of which served German neighborhoods.³³ The local press continued to report the founding of Catholic churches with the same respect they afforded new Protestant churches, but in the hands of Alden Spooner’s son Edwin the Star became increasingly vitriolic in its editorial treatment of Catholicism.³⁴ After the national and local collapse of the Whig Party, the paper served briefly as the organ of the nativist American (“Know Nothing”) Party before swerving again to support the new Republican Party. In May, 1855, while a Whig-Know Nothing coalition was enjoying a brief majority on the Brooklyn Common Council, Edwin Spooner wrote of the “sheer delusions” of the “followers of Popery” and the “blindness and ignorance, that takes idolatry for religion, and upholds a hierarchy which is now, and has ever been corrupt and blasphemous from the sixth century.”³⁵ “Irish Papists” became part of the vocabulary of the Star during these years, although not of the Eagle, which needed to frame its complaints in terms that would not threaten immigrant ties to the Democratic Party.³⁶

Conflicts between Brooklyn’s Protestants and Catholics occurred beyond the editorial pages of local newspapers. The late spring of 1854, a peak time for both Irish immigration and political nativism, was particularly productive of ethnoreligious conflict on the streets of both New York and Brooklyn. The return of warm weather encouraged Sunday outdoor “street preaching,” located in spaces large enough to accommodate crowds of worshipers. In Brooklyn a preferred venue was the corner of Atlantic and Smith streets, where a burned-out building had been razed to leave a large open lot, and where Methodist minister John Beach was able to reach a far bigger audience than could fit into his little frame church on Bridge Street. In New York City a preacher of more dubious credentials, a sailor who named himself the Angel Gabriel, held forth on the steps of City Hall, his congregation gathered in the park below. This angel’s preaching was fervently anti-Catholic, and on May 14 a sermon by his second in command (and accordion accompanist), one Samuel C. Moses, attracted the attention of Irishmen, who turned the meeting into a brawl. Smaller conflicts occurred on the following Sunday in New York, and in Brooklyn as well, where quick action by the police averted a riot.

On the Sunday after that the two weekly events merged. Rev. Beach delivered a sermon the Eagle described as “anti-sectarian and void of any of those sentiments which are calculated to give offence to a large portion of our foreign population.” His large audience listened with quiet attention, but before Beach’s sermon ended “a delegation of New Yorkers arrived, headed by a man with an accordeon [sic].” Three hundred strong, they declared they had come over the river “to help their Brooklyn friends: whether to pray or to fight” they did not explain. After much strutting about (and no praying) they marched back to the ferry at Main Street, in the midst of a mostly Irish neighborhood, where they were set upon by a large crowd. With no ferry in the slip there was time for a proper brawl, and “thus ended a Sabbath day in Brooklyn.”³⁷

The following Sunday, June 4, a large gathering at the lot on Atlantic and Smith streets heard a sermon (its text: “And this man receiveth sinners”) worthy of Evan Johnson in its inclusiveness. But another delegation from New York appeared, bent on confrontation with Brooklyn’s Irish. The Eagle labeled them Know Nothings and estimated their number at 150 and the Star, improbably, at two thousand. This time as they marched toward the ferry, they were confronted by Mayor Lambert, who had beefed up the police presence and secured the readiness of several militia units. Lambert ordered the New Yorkers to cease marching, but even if they approached the ferry in a less defiant posture it made little difference. Passing Fulton Street into the downtown, they were pelted by projectiles thrown from houses, while a large crowd on the street attacked them with stones, clubs, slingshots, and whatever else was handy. This time the New Yorkers answered with pistols, firing shots into the crowd while they retreated. The police were overmatched and the militia arrived too late to have any effect. Many people were injured, but no one was killed. More than forty men, all Brooklyn Irish, were arrested on what might well have been the most violent day Brooklyn had seen since the American Revolution.³⁸

Within a few days Mayor Lambert issued a proclamation outlawing street preaching in Brooklyn, provoking complaints that he had no authority to forbid religious services on the Sabbath and was blaming the peaceful assemblies of Protestant worshipers while letting Irish rioters off the hook.³⁹ Street preaching continued for a time despite the mayor’s order, but the Sunday following the June 4 conflict was peaceful, and so was the next, despite the return of a Bridge Street Methodist preacher to Atlantic Street, where he addressed about two thousand people. “In the crowd,” the Star admitted, “we noticed a large number of Irishmen, who behaved themselves with propriety, and were not molested.”⁴⁰ “The street preaching excitement has entirely subsided in this locality,” noted the Eagle on July 10, while reporting on outdoor preaching in Brooklyn, Williamsburgh, and New York.⁴¹

Street preaching was by no means the only stimulant for sectarian and interethnic conflict in Brooklyn. Later in 1854, in an election day riot in Williamsburgh, one native American man was killed. In another confrontation two days later a Catholic and a Methodist church were threatened with destruction.⁴² Aside from the battle in 1846 between Irish strikers and German strikebreakers at the Atlantic Basin and several smaller and perhaps more spontaneous skirmishes between the two major immigrant groups, the hostility between Irish Catholic immigrants and organized Protestant nativists was the primary source of ethnic public violence in Brooklyn.

To many native Protestants interethnic riots confirmed the violent character of the Irish, which manifested itself as well in the day-to-day misbehaviors associated with excessive drinking. The Irish were infamous for their love of drink, and tabulations of licensed taverns in Brooklyn assigned far greater numbers to Irish owners than to other groups—175 of 300 in the fourth police district in 1853, for example, with Germans far behind with 79, and “Americans” with 26.⁴³ And these were just the licensed places. American-born Brooklynites were as aware of the numerous unlicensed grog shops and liquor-dealing groceries in Irish neighborhoods as they were unaware of the Irish custom of the shabeen, which temporarily transformed the tenement or shanty of any new widow into a barroom where the men of the neighborhood were obliged to buy drinks, thereby providing the widow with a timely bit of financial assistance. Crimes were tabulated too, and in at least one case—Williamsburgh in September 1854—were listed in the newspapers by nativity as well as by the nature of the offense. More than half (226) of 415 offenses that month were for drunken and disorderly behavior and almost the same number of crimes (232) were attributed to natives of Ireland (in part, no doubt, because municipal authorities singled them out for arrest and prosecution).⁴⁴ Even though not all those hauled into court as disorderly drunkards were Irish, native-born Brooklynites who read the two lists found confirmation of a widespread anti-Irish prejudice.

Against this association of the Irish with mayhem and drink were many complaints in the Brooklyn press of rowdiness that strongly suggested native transgressors. Two articles from the early 1840s mention “Soap Lock” ruffians or rowdies, invoking even before Frank Chanfrau’s famous stage depiction the character of the native-born working-class tough looking for a “muss” (“Soap Lock” refers to the Bowery b’hoy’s signature hair style, straightened by soap or grease to protrude stiffly downward from his tall hat). Another warns young, well-born men who loiter on streets in Brooklyn Heights every evening in order to insult young women, particularly “the girls at service,” that “a public exposure shall strip them of their pretensions of gentility.”⁴⁵ The volunteer fire companies, and particularly the gangs of young men and teens who ran to fires with them, were another source of public disorder, and here too discussions were not cast in ethnic or sectarian terms. The fire companies were generally well regarded, and though the firemen sometimes looked for a fight with rival companies on their way to, from, or even at a fire, the gangs caused most of the trouble, achieving considerable notoriety. One of them, the “Forty Acres,” which ran with Engine 5, a downtown company, was lionized in the Eagle in 1903, half a century after the gang’s battles with the “Bucks” and the “Cat Killers.” The Bucks were from “Irishtown” in the second and fifth wards, but ethnicity and religion may not have been the organizing principle of these battles.⁴⁶ Like Mose the Bowery b’hoy—who ran with a fire company in New York—these “fire laddies” were looking for a “muss,” not to preserve the purity of a native- and Protestant-ruled republic, but for the simpler joy of breaking other people’s heads.

These forms of public disorder did not distract significant numbers of native-born Protestants from what they understood as the Irish Problem. The Irish, in their view, threatened the image of Brooklyn as a beautiful and peaceful domestic haven. Their drinking and disorderly public behavior challenged the very core of that image, the quiet Sabbath devoted to the exercise of religious and familial duty. And they were, enduringly, adherents of a Roman Catholic Church that remained the bane of militant Protestantism. This issue was never far from Protestant Brooklyn’s response to the Irish. In the aftermath of the “street preaching” riots of 1854 the Star published two letters blaming Roman Catholic priests for secretly encouraging their parishioners to attack the Know Nothings who had come across the river to taunt them. To these correspondents, the riots were not spontaneous community uprisings but the result of a priestly cabal.⁴⁷ And the Church, more than the Irish as a people, was condemned from the pulpits of the loftiest of Brooklyn’s Protestant clergy. The Eagle described Presbyterian minister Samuel H. Cox, for example, as “one of the most popular and accomplished divines in Brooklyn,” noted for “his inexhaustible fund of anecdote and ready wit and humor.” Cox’s amiability did not extend to Catholicism: “The Roman Catholic Church he denounces as ‘the woman arrayed in purple and scarlet color—she that sitteth upon the seven hills, drunken with the blood of saints.’ ”⁴⁸

Sitting on the border between sympathy and condemnation, another aspect of Irish immigrant life challenged Brooklyn’s self-image as a beautiful and peaceful city and suburb. Arriving in America with few resources and surviving off the very low pay they received from menial labor, many Irish during these years lived in shanties and crowded tenements along or close to the East River waterfront, and away from the river in peripheral areas where rents were lower and opportunities for squatting were greater. Some lived downtown in the old second and fifth wards—the latter included the original Irish settlement of Vinegar Hill—or just beyond them in the seventh ward, particularly along Myrtle Avenue, an emerging thoroughfare that ran toward Williamsburgh. Where Myrtle ran along the north side of the new Washington Park (Fort Greene), a collection of shanties earned the names New Cork and Little Ireland, as well as the attention of writers whose descriptions combined amusement with contempt. “Descending Fort Greene,” wrote the Eagle in 1847, “one comes amid a colony of squatters, whose chubby children, and the good-natured brightness of the eyes of many an Irish woman, tell plainly enough that you are wending your way among the shanties of Emeralders.” A less jolly correspondent complained two years later of the “hundred or more miserable shanties, formerly occupied by the families of hogs and Irishmen.” The hogs had been removed to a pound by the Common Council, leaving the Irish to make themselves “a special subject of remark and objection on the part of the decent and orderly inhabitants of this section of the city.”⁴⁹

Equally visible, especially to the commuters of Brooklyn Heights and South Brooklyn, were the poor Irish in neighborhoods near South Ferry and the Atlantic Basin, living in four-story tenement houses and other structures built primarily for the occupancy of dockworkers and their families. In 1856, a committee appointed by the state legislature to examine tenement housing in Brooklyn found cramped, dingy, leaky (and in basement apartments, regularly flooded) living spaces. A five-story building at 800 Hicks Street housed eighty-six families “occupying each a room and a dark bedroom of the most meager dimensions.” Nearby were the so-called State Street barracks, twenty four-story houses offering equally deplorable accommodations. Kelsey’s Alley, a twelve-foot-wide passageway from Columbia Street to the river, was perhaps the most notorious slum street in Brooklyn, but it was typical of the area. On each side were eight four-story tenement houses providing two small rooms for each of 128 families.⁵⁰

Had the committee ventured a short distance inland from the South Brooklyn waterfront they might have found less wretched but still troubling housing amid seemingly middle-class neighborhoods. In one of a series of articles written in 1844 for The Columbia Spy, Edgar Allan Poe described Brooklyn’s suburban development in terms at odds with observers who had praised the homes and tree-lined streets that expanded the beauties of Brooklyn Heights well to the south of Atlantic Street. Recently arrived New Yorkers, Poe argued, had “contrived very thoroughly” to spoil the natural beauty of Brooklyn by erecting foolishly designed and poorly built suburban houses. “What can be more sillily and pitiably absurd than palaces of painted white pine, fifteen by twenty? … I really can see little difference between putting up such a house as this, and blowing up a House of Parliament, or cutting the throat of one’s grandfather.” And Poe lampooned unsophisticated city fathers for refusing to pave their streets with “Kyanized” [chemically treated] wood, claiming it had no equal “in point of cheapness, freedom from noise, ease of cleaning, pleasantness to the hoof, and durability.” In the “next instance,” he predicted, Brooklyn’s Common Council might well “experiment with soft-soap or sauer-kraut.”⁵¹

Although Poe had just moved to New York, had little money in his pocket, and was clearly hiring out his pen in service to a newly fashionable mode of urban satire, his criticism should not be entirely dismissed. Eleven years later, the Star offered a disturbingly similar critique of South Brooklyn houses that had been built for tenants and were poorly maintained. Worse, “certain neighborhoods” of these houses “become exceedingly disagreeable from the influx of foreigners who are generally speaking, filthy to the last degree about their premises and who are almost strangers to soap and water.” Landlords who do not look to the comfort of their respectable tenants “may be sure their property will depreciate, until it comes into the possession of ‘Nix com rouse’ and ‘Be jabers.’”⁵² Even a small immigrant presence in neighborhoods of this sort brought home—literally—the problems presented to Protestant Brooklyn by a growing and more visible diversity of peoples.

The fear of new peoples was focused mainly on the Irish. But the reality of Irish life in Brooklyn was more complex than some realized. The Irish community in Brooklyn traces back to at least the late eighteenth century, and by the 1820s possessed sufficient resources to found not only a Roman Catholic Church and several benevolent institutions, but other organizations intended to enhance the standing of the Irish in the larger community and embrace Irish identity. The Erin Fraternal Association, for example, was created in 1823 mainly to organize local celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day. The association’s founders, George S. Wise, Jr. and George L. Birch, illustrate the dangers of generalizing about Brooklyn’s Irish, especially before the large migrations of the famine era. Born in Virginia to Irish parents, Wise came to Brooklyn in 1812 as a purser in the Navy Yard. Birch was born in Ireland but was a Methodist. Soon after arriving in New York in 1798, he became active in politics, moved to Brooklyn to edit a short-lived Democratic-Republican challenger to Alden Spooner’s Star, and was appointed Brooklyn’s postmaster in 1821.⁵³

The Erin Fraternal Association’s celebrations established a legitimate Irish presence on the streets of Brooklyn even before local Protestants did the same with their Anniversary Day parades of Sunday school children. These celebrations, along with outdoor meetings organized in support of Irish independence, lent purpose as well as presence to an Irish community that was still small in comparison to the Protestant majority. Significantly, the association and several successor organizations marched not just on March 17, but also on July 4, as prominent participants in Brooklyn’s annual affirmation of American patriotism. The St. Patrick’s Day marches helped build a more cohesive Irish community; participation in the Fourth of July celebration served notice to nativists and anti-Catholic militants that these Irish Catholic Brooklynites would not allow themselves to be treated as an alien and subversive element within this overwhelmingly Protestant city. They would continue to fight against English oppression in Ireland, but they would do so as liberty-loving Americans, at once strengthening their Irish identity and the legitimacy of their claim to American citizenship. This assertion was powerful in the early 1820s, with the mortar hardly dry in the walls of St. James; it became more powerful as Irish participation on the Fourth continued into and beyond the period of famine migration and rising political nativism. The local press approved: “The Erin Association, as usual, indicated the constancy of their attachment to the principles of the Revolution by coming out as a man to take part in the ceremonies,” reported the Star in 1841. Descriptions of subsequent July 4 marches almost always validated the Irish presence in this most American of events.⁵⁴

Organizations formed in the 1840s and beyond responded to the challenge of maintaining Irish respectability in the face of increasingly harsh native attitudes toward poor immigrants. One proclaimed an Irish elite. Of the eighteen men who formed the St. Patrick’s Society (out of the earlier Emerald Association) in 1850, ten can be traced to the Brooklyn city directory. Among them were a doctor and a lawyer, two Fulton Street merchants and a Fulton Street hotel owner, an Atlantic Street grocer, the owner of a marble yard, a schoolteacher, a livery stable owner, and a mason.⁵⁵ Some of these men, surely, were the native-born children or grandchildren of Irish immigrants and were Brooklynites of long standing. They maintained an Irish identity, however, and were respectable enough within the dominant Protestant society of Brooklyn to dine and rub elbows with the New Englanders and Dutchmen whose New York counterparts laughed heartily at an Irishman’s toast to Plymouth Rock as the “Blarney Stone of New England.”⁵⁶

Organizations such as the St. Patrick’s Society pointed to a degree of diversity in the Irish population. The city directory helps confirm it. Of the sixty-seven men in the 1850 directory who were named Kelly, for example, thirty-three were listed as laborers or as stevedores, carmen, and other workers at or near the lowest rung of the economic ladder. But twenty-five men worked at artisanal trades—blacksmiths, carpenters, and masons accounted for fifteen of them—and nine were nonartisanal businessmen, including two, a broker and a wine merchant, who commuted to New York. The directory undoubtedly underrepresents unskilled workers (there may not have been much motivation to find and record shanty-dwelling squatters), and its simple occupational nomenclature obscures important distinctions—between masters and wage earners within the trades, between masters who earned tidy profits and those who worked close to the bone, between genuine grocers and those who did little more than sell cheap whiskey by the glass.⁵⁷ But it is clear enough that not all of the Kellys (nor the O’Reillys, Fitzpatricks, and Sullivans) of Brooklyn lived at or close to the bottom of the economic order. None of the Kellys listed in the 1850 directory were policemen or political appointees of other sorts, but we know from other sources that these public sector occupations were important avenues of upward mobility among the immigrant Irish. (Irish policemen were a significant enough issue in Brooklyn that Know Nothing aldermen of the mid-1850s made a determined and temporarily successful effort to replace them with native Protestants.)⁵⁸ There was, in sum, enough diversity within Brooklyn’s Irish population to belie the stereotype of a monolithic underclass—poor, ignorant, hard drinking, and “almost strangers to soap and water.” Yet the stereotype endured among many native-born Brooklynites, including those owners and managers of waterfront factories, warehouses, and construction sites who found in it justification for paying Irish laborers a pittance for their work.

These prejudices hardly pertained to Brooklyn’s German-speaking immigrant population. Many of the Germans who were victims of political or economic upheaval quickly established themselves as artisans, shopkeepers, and in some cases professionals, in Brooklyn and Williamsburgh. The potato famine that devastated Ireland hit continental Europe as well, but famine refugees from Prussia, Bavaria, and other German-speaking regions were not numerous enough to define the larger stream of German immigrants. Noting the large number of Germans arriving in the spring of 1848, the Eagle commented on their “habits of industry, temperance, and economy, which are certain to make them thrifty and good citizens. Most of them bring money to purchase land and some of them a large supply.”⁵⁹ This was a common perception; indeed, it is difficult to find demeaning characterizations of German immigrants by native-born commentators.

Germans themselves boldly reinforced that positive perception. In a speech to a local Turnverein festival in 1857, a Dr. Bauer boasted: “The Germans do not come as paupers or beggars among you, but bring along with them means of considerable amount.” Referring to German immigrants generally, and not just the better-off ’48ers, Bauer claimed: “In all branches of industry, manufacture, commerce, art and science of this country, the German hand and mind make themselves felt, and they occupy an honorable position.”⁶⁰ Appropriate to the occasion and the audience, these rhetorical exaggerations were not far off the mark. The Eagle printed his speech with approval, and there was no objection on the occasion by the mayor of Brooklyn, who, touching upon the sensitive issue of temperance, noted that the Germans, even in their beer gardens, had taught “our people to understand that they could be convivial without becoming drunkards, and enjoy themselves without enfringing upon the rights of others.”⁶¹ The implicit contrast with the Irish could not have been missed.

The relatively solid economic status of Brooklyn’s German immigrants can be gleaned from the city directories of the early 1850s. Among 104 Hoffmans, Kleins, Mullers, Schmidts, and other identifiable Germans of Brooklyn and Williamsburgh we find 18 workers in menial occupations, 68 masters or workers in 28 different manual trades, and 18 white-collar businessmen and professionals, including 3 who commuted to New York.⁶² A majority of “Brooklyn’s” German immigrants lived in Williamsburgh, fully four of ten (7,800 of 19,000) in a single Williamsburg(h) ward in 1855. Ward 16 of the newly consolidated city lay a dozen blocks and more from the East River, and the Germans reinforced its character as a neighborhood of small workshops and stores rather than of waterfront warehouses and factories. The neighborhood would soon change somewhat when the German-descended Havermeyers built their new sugar mill at exactly that latitude of the river; indeed, it appears they did so in part because “Dutchtown,” as ward 16 was called, offered them many potential German workers. But this was not a working-class—and especially not an underclass—neighborhood. The German immigrants who lived there, and in Brooklyn more generally, displayed an occupational profile that clustered more to the center than the bottom of the economic order. The directories surely missed many German laborers and do not indicate the number of German artisans who lived close to poverty. But Brooklyn’s Germans were mostly better situated than its Irish and gave the native-born population much less cause for alarm.

One reason they did not is that so many of them, almost surely a majority, were Protestants. The three German parishes of the Roman Catholic Church in 1855 were more than balanced by eight Protestant churches specifically identified as German. Some of these churches were smaller than their Catholic counterparts, but it is telling that nearly all the anti-Catholic sentiment expressed in the Brooklyn press during this era focused on Irish, not German, immigrants. And because the Catholic Church hierarchy in America was almost entirely Irish, German Catholics largely escaped the odium that resulted from the battle over public aid to parochial schools and the use in them of the Catholic Douay rather than the Protestant King James version of the Bible. In Brooklyn the only publicized instance of a German educational initiative was an uncontroversial project of the Turner’s Association of the Eastern District to establish a private school for German children. “Religion will not be inculcated,” reported the Eagle, “and will only be referred to incidentally, as facts relating to it appear in history.”⁶³

On rare occasions, the Brooklyn newspapers did aim invective or ridicule at German immigrants. In 1847, the early days of famine emigration, the Star criticized Germany, not Ireland, for sending “their pauper hordes” to America. Eight years later an extraordinary bit of condescension toward Williamsburg’s German working class appeared in the Eagle under the title “Ball of the Strawberry Girls.” These girls gained “a livelihood by crying berries and vegetables in the streets, a very large number of whom reside in the Eastern District of the City known as ‘Dutch town.’ … The male portion of the company consisted of butcher-boys, wagon boys, Germans, shoulder hitters, a few loafers and a sprinkling of shanghais.” The fare was abundant but limited to boiled ham and mustard salad, coffee and bread. The next such occasion, eagerly awaited “among certain circles,” will be “the ball of the ‘bone-hunters,’ alias rag-pickers.”⁶⁴ These articles, especially the latter, were stark departures from the usual treatment of Germans, which was respectful even when discussing their one significant challenge to the dominant (Anglo) Protestant culture of Brooklyn, drinking alcohol on the Sabbath.

A central and much-loved institution in German society, the beer garden, was a pleasant place to take one’s family and meet friends for a convivial Sunday afternoon. There would be music, typically from German brass bands, conversation for the adults, play for the children, and, of course, lager beer. The strengthening of the Sunday closing laws in Brooklyn during the 1850s was aimed primarily at taverns, groceries, and other places of alcoholic consumption, including the beer gardens, even though it was not yet widely believed that lager beer led to intoxication. But just as workers objected to the closing of horse car service on the one day they could take their families into the country (or to Henry Ward Beecher’s church), Brooklyn’s Germans objected to the peculiarly American idea that nothing but churches should be open on the Sabbath. Soon after the passage of the 1852 law they met in large numbers “to defeat the attempt to render the Sabbath a day of universal gloom.” In speeches delivered in German they emphasized that “in Germany the Sabbath was not merely observed as a day of rest, but of social and intellectual intercourse.” Men who worked six days in seven “met on Sunday to discuss social problems and political questions, and for intellectual intercourse and enlightenment,” a claim no doubt intended to deflect attention from the fact that the places they repaired to for these discussions served beer along with ideas.⁶⁵

Unlike the Sunday horse car controversy, the debate over German beer gardens appeared only occasionally in the local press and was rather muted when it did. More than a year after the 1852 German protest meeting, the Star rose to the bait offered by a New York City German paper: “In Brooklyn alone,” wrote the Turn-Zeitung, “the sleeping chamber of New York, are 400 churches, the sleeping berths for the dulness of the Anglican Sabbath.” The Star admitted that Brooklyn was New York’s “sleeping chamber,” noted that the claim of four hundred churches was “rather premature,” and then defended the “Anglican Sabbath,” however dull, as a truer route to happiness. It was, indeed, “our best American Institution.”⁶⁶

Scarcely convinced, Germans continued to denounce the Sunday closing laws as “despotic in the extreme, and an outrage upon individual rights,” and continued to patronize such popular places as “Schneider’s Mammoth brewery and beer garden in the 16th ward.”⁶⁷ They could do so, even during the years of vigorous Sabbath law enforcement, for various reasons. Beer gardens were popular institutions, even among non-Germans. “The sixteenth Ward was in full blaze of glory,” wrote the Eagle after the end of an August heat wave in 1857 brought crowds of Sunday customers from “a throng of nations” to Dutchtown beer gardens. Music was a big attraction, along with the beer, which the Eagle deemed relatively harmless. Closing the gardens down in the face of this popularity would have been difficult. As an institution, moreover, the beer garden was “far less objectionable to rigid moralists than the taverns and corner groceries” so clearly associated with the Irish population. Native Protestants were free to imagine it as a family institution, patronized by good citizens after a Sunday morning spent in church. That beer gardens did not breed either hard drinking or violent disorder allowed native Protestants to tolerate the German Sabbath, not only on its own terms, but also as a way of justifying their intolerance of the Irish. The Eagle observed that the “closing of all other places on Sunday has given the gardens a lift.” It might well have reversed the causal sequence; the smooth and unobjectionable functioning of the German beer gardens lent strength to the policy of closing down those less reputable, mostly Irish, places.⁶⁸

There is, finally, a more purely political explanation. Unlike the Irish, Brooklyn’s German immigrants did not always gravitate to the Democratic Party. Their views (freely discussed each week at the beer gardens), were diverse, their circumstances less dire, and many among them found that remaining open to recruitment by both parties better protected their interests. In noting that there had been no attempt to close the beer gardens, the Democratic Eagle might have pointed to partisan as well as social and cultural reasons why “it will be as well to let them alone.”⁶⁹

There were, in sum, significant differences in the circumstances and experiences of Irish and German immigrants to Brooklyn in the years before the American Civil War, and a tangible divide in the reactions of native Protestants to each group. Much of this divide was based on the economic roles and well-being of each group, and on the behaviors that seemed to characterize each as a people. But it was shaped as well by numbers and by differences in visibility to the native-born, which was partly a function of urban and suburban geography. Far fewer Germans than Irish lived in Brooklyn, and most of them were concentrated in Williamsburg, away from the river and the suburban neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights and South Brooklyn. Many of the Germans lived above the store in artisanal and retail neighborhoods, which made their housing less visible even to passersby, quite unlike the Irish shantytowns and tenement houses in and near Columbia Street and Furman Street, so close to the path of large numbers of commuting suburbanites. If they chose to, Brooklyn’s commuters, including those who used the downtown ferries, could see the largely Irish waterfront world of work and domestic life as they crossed the East River each day. So much a part of the geography of Brooklyn from its earliest days, the river continued to influence the life of the city, even in the ways some Brooklynites reacted to the new and different people who complicated their increasingly less homogeneous City of Churches.

Not all the Brooklynites who differed from the dominant population were newcomers. African Americans had lived in Brooklyn for generations, almost entirely in bondage. At the turn of the nineteenth century they constituted 27 percent of the population of mostly rural Brooklyn. But as the number of slaves diminished in anticipation of the emancipation set by the state legislature for 1827, and as the free Black population modestly increased, the growth of the overall African American population was vastly outpaced by white in-migration, both domestic and foreign. By 1820 the now mostly free African American community was reduced to less than 12 percent of the total population. By 1840, now entirely free, it was down to 5 percent, and by 1860 the 4,313 African Americans of Brooklyn constituted only 1.6 percent of the city’s residents.⁷⁰

The small-farm slavery of rural Brooklyn had been less brutal than the slavery of Southern plantations and the long process of emancipation in New York State, though contested and grumbled over, was acquiesced in by even the most conservative slaveholders. But neither of these conditions paved the way to racial equality. White racism, in Brooklyn and elsewhere in the antebellum North, was firmly embedded in the culture of European Americans, few of whom were willing to assist propertyless former slaves in their transition to freedom. The New York State constitutional convention of 1821, for example, eliminated property qualifications for white male voters but maintained an onerous requirement for free Black males. Nearly all the freedmen lacked capital for investing in land or artisanal or commercial proprietorships, and most faced discrimination in the search for employment commensurate with the skills they possessed. Isolated successes—in barbering, undertaking, teaching, preaching, and other trades and professions where white practitioners refused to provide their services to Black people—did not reflect tolerance in the larger community but a potent form of racial animus.

These limiting circumstances applied to free Black communities all over the North. But New York City and Brooklyn offered additional obstacles stemming from the vital role New York merchants, brokers, shippers, and bankers played in the shipping and financing of Southern cotton, sugar, and tobacco. The importance of the South to New York commerce led many of the city’s most influential businessmen, and not a few political leaders, to oppose an aggressive national policy toward Southern slaveholders, and made New York a reluctant supporter of the war to preserve the Union. Some of these Southern-connected merchants were residents of Brooklyn, and the storage and processing of sugar, tobacco, and cotton were important components of the development of waterfront warehousing and manufacturing on the Brooklyn side of the river during the 1840s and 1850s. The effect of these connections on white Brooklynites’ attitudes toward the local Black population is difficult to separate from the more general racism of the antebellum era. But they could not have helped build racial tolerance, especially when so many livelihoods depended on a system, however distant, of racial subjugation.⁷¹

In the decades preceding the war, Brooklyn’s free African Americans established independent institutions, and even an independent community, in response to the limited opportunities afforded them within the dominant white society, and the insistence by whites of separation as the normal relation between the races. Black churches were the most prominent example. The first of these, as we have seen, was founded by African Americans who separated from the Sands Street Methodist Episcopal Church in 1817.⁷² For some years this Wesleyan African Methodist Episcopal Church was the only Black church in Brooklyn, but by 1855 there were at least ten, most of them founded in the late 1840s and early 1850s.⁷³ Separate institutions in benevolence and education trace back to Brooklyn’s village period. An African Woolman Society “of colored people, for benevolent purposes” was formed in 1824. Among its projects was the founding in 1827 of a school for Black children. In 1830 a meeting presided over by white clergy at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church called for extending Brooklyn’s venture into public education by opening a second public school for African American children, apparently by moving the Woolman Society school into the public sector. The Star approved of this effort on behalf of “a poor and laboring population.” It may also have been an attempt to reinforce the segregation of the children of the two races. A letter to the Star in 1833 signed by “A Colored man who pays school taxes” complains of the diminution of public financial support for the “Colored School of this village,” and closes with a warning: “I sincerely hope that our school will be taken more into notice, as we are aware of the disagreeable feeling that is likely to take place, if we were to send our children to the regular district school of this village.”⁷⁴ Apparently, adult book reading, too, required segregation. In 1841 a public meeting of African American citizens resolved to form a library “for the benefit of the people of color in the city of Brooklyn.”⁷⁵

The most striking initiative in racial segregation, though, was the forming of the African American settlement of Weeksville (and of Carrsville, which adjoined Weeksville, and was only occasionally described as separate from it). In 1832 an African American chimney sweep named William Thomas purchased thirty acres of land along the hilly glacial moraine about three and a half miles east of the settled portion of Brooklyn, a site at once remote from Brooklyn and accessible to it by means of the Atlantic Street tracks of the Long Island Railroad. Samuel Anderson, a preacher, bought seven acres in the area in 1833, and two years later Henry C. Thompson, a manufacturer of blacking and president of the Woolman Society, bought a parcel of thirty-two lots. In 1838 Thompson sold two of these lots to James Weeks, a Brooklyn stevedore, whose name became attached to what would grow over the next few years into an almost entirely Black community.⁷⁶

By 1840 Weeksville was home to twenty-seven families, twenty-four of which were African American. Most farmed the hilly land, but others commuted to work in Brooklyn, even as far as the waterfront. Weeksville soon attracted more families, many from other cities and states, and by 1855 had a Black population of 521. Not an especially large number—only about one in eight of Brooklyn’s African Americans lived there—it was enough to make Weeksville the second largest distinctly Black settlement in the New York area (the largest was in Seneca Village on the upper west side of Manhattan) and a center of African American Brooklyn’s political life. As part of a protest in 1852 against the exclusion of Black riders on Brooklyn’s omnibuses, “sundry individuals of color, residing in the Ninth Ward” (i.e., Weeksville) drafted a petition and presented it to the mayor. The derision with which the Common Council rejected this petition testifies to the courage required to make even so simple and just a claim upon white Brooklyn.⁷⁷ Rejection and amusement were the most common responses, but at least one by the Star in 1859 described Weeksville as a community deserving respect: With a church (there were actually two), a schoolhouse, dwellings that “compare more than favorably with those of a large class of the whites who have more privileges and much better opportunities,” and many residents who commute to good jobs, including even in “the large stores of New York.”⁷⁸ By this time, too, Weeksville had become “significant statewide and nationally as a center of activism against slavery and for the rights of free people of color.” Its residents were active in the Underground Railroad and would later provide refuge for African American victims of New York City’s 1863 draft riots.⁷⁹

Some white Brooklynites joined the residents of Weeksville in opposing slavery and promoting the rights of African Americans. Not all New York businessmen who lived in Brooklyn engaged in Southern commerce, and not all were supporters of the slave system. Lewis Tappan was not active in Brooklyn’s reform and philanthropic societies, but he maintained his credentials as a leader of the antislavery movement through his New York-based American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. A founding member of Plymouth Church, he was a friend and supporter of Henry Ward Beecher. On the famous occasion when Beecher presented a young slave woman to his congregation and challenged its members to purchase her freedom, Tappan rose to announce that he and several other men would contribute whatever was needed to meet the price.⁸⁰ The coterie of well-to-do slave sympathizers that gathered around Beecher was not small, and Beecher himself hammered away frequently at the evils of slavery. He was also active in local reforms and benevolent efforts relevant to the local Black community, promoting, for example, the New York Colored Orphan Asylum to his congregation, this time using a performance by the children to raise funds.⁸¹

Southern secession and the outbreak of war shifted the balance of sentiments away from the South and, by extension, the slave system. Some white Brooklynites who opposed or were indifferent to abolitionism rallied to the call to defend the nation against the rebels. Brooklyn’s existing regiments marched off to war, and new ones were formed, trained, and prepared for battle. American flags and expressions of patriotism were seen and heard everywhere. Even the Eagle, which had steadfastly opposed attacks on the South and its slave system (and ridiculed local efforts to address the rights of African Americans), accepted the necessity of the Union war effort. This was no trivial adjustment. Before the war, and in its early days, the Eagle fiercely attacked Beecher’s full-throated call to arms and warned of destruction that would make it impossible to preserve a single nation. Four days after the attack on Ft. Sumter an editorial deemed abolishing slavery as feasible as “turning back the Mississippi to its fountain head…. No; even if conquered, the South must be let go and set up for itself.” Less than a week later, however, it admitted that calls for peace were now fruitless: “Let it now be war determined and decisive.” Within a few months, under new editor Thomas Kinsella, the Eagle established a policy of supporting the war and the Union while criticizing President Lincoln’s management of both.⁸²

A few years later the Eagle, by then well established as Brooklyn’s newspaper of record, published long reports on the city’s most significant home front effort, the Sanitary Fair of February and March 1864. The US Sanitary Commission had been created by federal law early in the war to supply and sustain military hospitals, inspect army encampments, and in other ways provide support for sick and wounded Union soldiers. Its role in mobilizing support from the civilian population for these efforts culminated in a series of large fundraising fairs in major cities. Brooklyn’s fair was proposed by the Woman’s Relief Association of Brooklyn and Long Island, which had been formed under the leadership of Marianne Fitch Stranahan at a meeting held at Richard Storrs’ Church of the Pilgrims late in 1862. The Women’s Relief Association “desired the cooperation of the men of influence” for the Sanitary Fair project, but the women did not surrender leadership when many of Brooklyn’s male leaders endorsed the proposal. Mrs. Stranahan was appointed co-president of the fair’s governing body, along with A. A. Low, and a large executive committee contained a few more women than men. The former included Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher and Mrs. Henry E. Pierrepont; the latter included Pierrepont’s husband, as well as Stranahan’s—James S. T. Stranahan, owner of the Atlantic Basin and a leading proponent of public works in Brooklyn. Some two dozen committees were structured the same way, and a glance through the long lists of names of committee members reveals a catalog of Anglo-Dutch Brooklyn Protestantism: Mrs. John Greenwood (Refreshments), Richard Storrs (Art, Relics, and Curiosities), Fisher Howe (Manufactures and Mechanic Arts, Western District), Mrs. J. A. Harper (Publications and Printing), and John J. Van Nostrand (Grocers and Hardware Merchants). There is a slight sprinkling of Irish names, but like the Stranahans (James was a Presbyterian born in New York State into a family that had migrated there from Connecticut) some or all these people were Protestants. The only recognizably German name is Havermeyer.⁸³ In its report on the opening night of the fair the Eagle described the crowd as “clergymen, authors, editors, actors, singers, lawyers, physicians, men of leisure, old men and very young ones also; the ladies turned out in large force, and added greatly to the charms of the occasion by brilliant toilette and still brighter eyes.”⁸⁴

Emblematic of the roots of this crowd, and even more of the organizing committees, were the two eating establishments at the fair: Knickerbocker Hall and the New England Kitchen. The Eagle, less closely attached to Brooklyn’s Yankee Protestant elite than had been the Star (which ceased publication in 1863), poked gentle fun at the attempt to replicate an old-fashioned New England kitchen, with its offerings of beans, cheese, pies, and apple cider: “If the establishment was a fair specimen of New England living in the olden time, we should say of New England what Dr. Johnson said of Scotland, that it was a capital spot to go from, and we don’t wonder now that so many New Englanders immigrated to Brooklyn.” It also observed that on display at the Kitchen “were two very old Bibles, an article not peculiar, we believe, to New England, although they seemed [to] be exhibited as a special feature of that region.”⁸⁵

The fair was a great success, attracting large crowds each day and raising the immense sum of $400,000 for the Sanitary Commission. But this elite-led affair did not attract Brooklyn’s immigrant and African American workingmen and their families. Indeed, as the fair approached its scheduled closing date the executive committee considered “the propriety of opening the buildings again next week at a reduced rate, for the common people.” The price of admission was reduced by two-thirds for two days of what the Eagle called “The Poor Man’s Fair,” but it still did not draw much attention from the working class.⁸⁶ This much-publicized event of the Civil War home front expressed the class and ethnic fault lines within Brooklyn’s society as clearly as it did any general mobilization of support for the Union cause.

The war itself complicated these divisions at the same time it increased racial tensions within the laboring population. Many Irish workers were at best conflicted about working alongside African Americans, fearing that a general emancipation of Southern slaves would unleash a huge migration northward of competitors for their own precarious livelihoods. There were Irish brigades in the Union forces, to be sure, including at least one from Brooklyn, and their contribution to the war effort helped moderate native Protestant antipathy toward the Irish in the postwar era. But for Irish workers on the home front a Union victory was as much to be feared as fought for. The call for new conscripts in the days following Gettysburg made prominent an equally clear distinction between them and those Sanitary Fair attendees who could afford to buy their way out of the draft.

Tensions boiled over in Brooklyn nearly a year before the infamous draft of mid-1863. On Saturday afternoon, August 2, 1862, a fight broke out between an Irishman and an African American in front of a grog shop near the waterfront in South Brooklyn. The two men were reportedly workers at a nearby resin factory, but the antagonism that built up after the fight focused on two tobacco factories, Lorillard and T. Watson & Co., near neighbors on Sedgewick Street in the heart of this Irish working-class neighborhood. About one hundred African American men, women, and children worked in these two factories, along with nearly twice as many whites, with the two races divided by task. At Watson’s, each crew had a foreman of its own race. All the Black employees lived outside the neighborhood in either New York City or the peripheral wards of Brooklyn, commuting to work on the South Ferry or, if Weeksville was their home, on the Long Island Railroad. Interactions between the races in these factories were limited, and during that day and the next inflammatory rumors spread through the immigrant neighborhood.

On Monday morning the advance guard of a gathering mob approached Lorillard’s to demand entry, only to be turned away by the foreman, a Mr. Hignet, who had already sent the African American workers home to avoid violence. He advised Watson’s to do the same, but most of the Black male employees were already on the other side of the city at an emancipation rally, and the twenty or so who were at work, mostly women and children, decided to stay. By the time the mob attacked Watson’s factory, the white employees had gone home for their mid-day meal, which left the commuting Black workers at the mercy of the mob. The police showed up in time to turn away the attackers and stymie an attempt to burn the building down. In the end, the damage was confined to a few minor injuries, some broken windows, and Brooklyn’s self-image as a place where such things did not happen. The Star (still active in 1862) “could scarcely credit the report that a riot had actually taken place” in this “city of Churches and noble charities,” before admitting that it did. It concluded that the assault was the work of “half-drunken, ignorant white men and women.”⁸⁷ The Eagle, too, was appalled by “one of the most disgraceful riots, which has ever happened in this city.” After placing blame on the “considerable ill-feeling” that had long existed between the African American tobacco workers and the Irish of the surrounding neighborhood, the Eagle insisted that no serious conflict between them had occurred before the Monday assault.⁸⁸

The military draft law of the following year provided the occasion for even more violent conflict. The National Conscription Act of February 1863 required male citizens and male aliens who had applied to become citizens between the ages of twenty and forty-five (thirty-five for married men) to enroll for possible conscription into the armed forces of the United States. Draft quotas for each Congressional district were to be set by the president, with the process of enrollment and conscription supervised by a Board of Enrollment headed by a provost marshal. The act specified in detail who would be eligible, and how the process was to be carried out. It allowed for exemption from the draft upon payment of a $300 fee or the provision of an acceptable substitute.⁸⁹ Given the Supreme Court decision six years earlier in Dred Scott v. Sandford that ruled African Americans ineligible for citizenship, only white men would be enrolled.

The new law proved explosive when the conscription lottery began that July. The $300 exemption payment, which was about a year’s income for unskilled labor, and the exclusion from risk of African Americans, sharpened the class and racial grievances of large numbers of white workingmen, especially those whose commitment to the war was already weakened by President Lincoln’s recently implemented Emancipation Proclamation and the now undeniable fact that this was a war for the liberation of more than four million slaves. It was now easier for these workingmen, including a very large number of natives of Ireland, to perceive a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” as well as a conspiracy to drive down their wages by freeing masses of Black workers to compete for their jobs. Neither of these perceptions was particularly accurate: the rich, the modestly well off, and the poor all fed the bleeding grounds of the Civil War, and the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North would not begin for at least another generation. Arguing these points to the men and women who marched from Central Park to the provost marshal’s draft lottery headquarters in New York City on Monday, July 13, 1863, however, would have been a dangerous thing to do.

The events following that march during the next three days are well known: the burning of the draft headquarters and the Colored Orphan Asylum; the stalking, beating, and in some instances lynching and mutilation of Black men; the attacks on the homes and businesses of wealthy supporters of the war; the storming of police stations and armories; the battles with police and the few soldiers who remained in the city (most had been called earlier to the bigger battle at Gettysburg); the destruction of African American churches and properties of all kinds; the barricading of streets. The arrival of five regiments of troops from Gettysburg eventually ended the carnage, with more than a hundred dead (some say a good deal more), the flight of thousands of African Americans from the city, massive property damage, and a shredded political community only partially repaired by the dominant Democrats who, with Lincoln’s acquiescence, pursued limited reprisals against the rioters, prosecuting many but convicting few. The draft resumed without incident in August. Draft riots occurred in other cities, but New York’s was the largest civil disturbance the nation had ever seen.⁹⁰

It was Brooklyn’s good fortune that the draft that provoked the riots in New York City was scheduled to begin in Brooklyn on Wednesday, July 15, two days after the authorities became fully aware of what might lie in store for them. On Tuesday they postponed the draft indefinitely. Brooklyn’s Democratic leaders quickly followed up by reminding restive citizens that Governor Seymour had already announced a plan to challenge the constitutionality of the Conscription Act in court. The Eagle reported precautionary measures by the mayor and sheriff to prevent New York rioters from invading their city, including moving weapons stored in the armories to safe hiding places and fortifying the Navy Yard.⁹¹ On Wednesday a meeting in Williamsburg organized a citizens’ “Law and Order Brigade,” which attracted more than two hundred volunteers. At another meeting Col. Edmund Powers persuaded Williamsburg “artisans, laborers, and others” who might have been inclined to start a riot that they would be safe from any draft. When one of the six hundred people at that meeting called for “three cheers for Jeff Davis” he was met with “shouts of derision and groans,” and cheers for Governor Seymour, General McClellan, and the Union.⁹²

This combination of effort and good timing spared Brooklyn the terrible violence experienced by New York City. To be sure, isolated attacks on African Americans warranted the temporary abandonment of several well-known Black streets and neighborhoods, and tensions were unquestionably high elsewhere in the city. A fistfight in Williamsburg on a Wednesday evening drew a thousand onlookers, and though the fight “was hardly a mentionable one, as not even a whortleberry-colored eye was bestowed,” the fact that the draft was discussed for another hour before the crowd dispersed “is most significant of the heated condition of the public in this district.”⁹³ But few if any lives were lost anywhere in Brooklyn. The most significant episode of property destruction appears to have been unrelated to the draft, or to racial and class tensions associated with the war. On Wednesday, around eleven o’clock at night, two grain elevators at the Atlantic Basin were destroyed by fire. It was generally understood that the fires were set by grain shovelers angered by the introduction of machinery that would cost many of them their jobs.⁹⁴

This episode of American Luddism, no less perhaps than the tensions generated by the nation’s most serious domestic conflict, speaks to the threat posed by the workers and the ethnic and religious minorities of the East River waterfront to the dominance of Brooklyn’s Protestant upper and middle class. That dominance was still plain to see in the City of Churches, and disruptions at Watson’s tobacco factory and the Atlantic Basin were announced in the public prints as shocking aberrations, events that should not disturb a quiet and beautiful city that delighted in tracing its religious and cultural genealogy to the Pilgrim Fathers. Was that a pretense wearing thin? Few would have said so in the generation leading up to the Civil War. But further challenges would arise in the generation that followed, and grow beyond denying in the generation following that.