Part 8

NOW OCCUPIED BY THE NEW WASHINGTON IRVING HIGH SCHOOL. FROM A DRAWING BY EDGAR MAHEW BACON.]

Irving’s familiarity with the Hudson River and its historical associations had already borne fruit in the _Sketch-Book_ in two original and characteristic legends. Like his illustrious contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, Irving was a born lover of traditions of all sorts; a man with a genius for getting the poetry and romance out of the past. In _The History of New York_, impersonated in Diedrich Knickerbocker, he created a legend; in _Rip Van Winkle_ and _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ he gave lasting fame to two stories full of the Dutch spirit. Sleepy Hollow lies to the north and east of Tarrytown, within easy walking distance. It is still secluded and quiet and the stir of modern times has not broken in upon its ancient seclusion.

[Illustration: OLD SLEEPY HOLLOW MILL.]

“A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail, or tapping of a woodpecker, is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquillity.... A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a high German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his pow-wows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual dream.”

Since the days when these words were written the air of Sleepy Hollow has not escaped the general stirring of a more hurried age; but on summer afternoons the meditative visitor still finds the valley a place of silence and peace. The master of the spell which has brought so many pilgrims to Tarrytown sleeps in the ancient graveyard; the home which he loved with a love deepened by years of exile, still stands, somewhat enlarged, but not despoiled of its secluded and ivy-clad loveliness.

Great estates have been formed about Tarrytown and stately homes line the shores of the river, but the place has kept something of its old simplicity and repose. It has never lacked the presence of those to whom its traditions of refined social habit and generous intellectual life have been sacred; and its distinction is still to be found in an atmosphere which is in no sense dependent on its later and larger prosperity.

[Illustration]

NEW YORK CITY

THE COSMOPOLITAN CITY

BY JOSEPH B. GILDER

By comparison with London, New York is a city of the second size, lacking some millions of the population of the modern Babylon. Even Paris, though less populous, outranks the American metropolis in many of the elements that go to the making of a great city. But in drawing these comparisons it must be remembered that only three centuries ago, when the French and English capitals had been places of importance for over a thousand years, New York was a wooded island, criss-crossed by innumerable streams, indented by morasses and infested by Indians and wild beasts. European civilization was wrinkled with age long before a permanent roof was erected on the island of Manhattan; and three lives such as that of ex-Mayor Tiemann, who died here in his ninety-fifth year, in the summer of 1899, would have spanned the entire history of the town from the Dutch discovery to the reign of Richard Croker.

The first white man’s habitation in what is now New York was a grave; for the crew of Hudson’s _Half-Moon_, after their fight with the aborigines on the mainland above Spuyten Duyvil Creek, in September, 1609, buried their dead before sailing homeward from their voyage of discovery up the great river named for their commander.

[Illustration: FIRST SEAL OF CITY. 1623-1654.]

Four temporary dwellings, presumably little better than wigwams, housed Skipper Block and the crew of the _Tiger_ near the lower end of the island, while they rebuilt their burned vessel, during the winter of 1613-14. The site of the present city was bought from the Indians on May 6, 1626, for trinkets worth sixty guilders, or four-and-twenty dollars—less than one tenth of the rate paid a few years since for a single square foot of land. Building was begun at once and pushed with vigor. Fort Amsterdam—a blockhouse partly shielded by palisades—marked the extreme southern limit of the island; and the first bark-roofed cottages were clustered close together under its harmless, necessary guns. A warehouse with stone walls and a thatched roof sprang up as soon as a stronghold had been built; and a horse-mill, with a loft fitted up for the simplest form of religious services.

[Illustration: MAP OF ORIGINAL GRANTS.]

Fort Amsterdam was a fortress in name only. Scarcely had it been completed when it began to fall into disrepair; and the pigs were forever rooting in its sodded earthworks, and threatening its very foundations. Thus early was it that these four-footed scavengers made their appearance in the history of New York, playing as picturesque, though not as patriotic, a part therein as that of the legendary Roman geese. Not till well forward in the present century did they disappear from the streets and the annals of the city.

Peter Minuit, the first Director of New Netherlands to hold his place for more than a year, and the first to organize a permanent provincial government, sent home hopeful reports, and backed them with shipments of fur and timber; but the expenses of administering the colony ultimately exceeded its earnings, and the West India Company was disappointed of the revenue it had counted upon receiving from the new settlement.

The little village grew but slowly. When it had spread so far northward as the line of what is now Wall Street—which is so far down-town to-day that many a New York woman, native-born, has yet to see it for the first time—a stockade was set up across the island, narrower then than now, to fence off the village from the farms (bouweries) of the more adventurous pioneers, and the forest that bordered them. This defense, completed in 1653, consisted of palisades and posts, twelve feet high, with a sloping breastwork of earth and a ditch on its southern side. In less than two years its height was doubled to keep the Indians from leaping over it.

[Illustration: THE FORT IN KIEFT’S DAY.]

But neither the Fort with its stone guns, nor this high wooden wall, was ever called upon to withstand a vigorous attack or resist a siege; for whenever the place was seriously threatened, its flag came fluttering down, and its keys were turned over to the enemy. This happened first in August, 1664, when Col. Richard Nicolls appeared in the bay, as deputy of the Duke of York, to whom Charles II. had granted all the territory between the Connecticut River and Delaware Bay, and demanded the Fort’s surrender. The claim of the English was nebulous to the last degree. As Freneau neatly put it,

“The soil they demanded, or threatened their worst, Insisting that _Cabot had looked at it first_.”

But the flimsiest pretension, if vigorously backed, outvalues the strongest if less sturdily maintained; and Director Stuyvesant found his people unwilling to support him in defying the intruder. So down dropped the Dutch colors and up ran the British.

Precisely nine years later, however, what had formerly been called New Amsterdam, but was now New York, yielded itself to a little Dutch fleet without striking a defensive blow. Captain Colve’s victory was so lightly won, indeed, that the English commander, Captain Manning, was courtmartialled for his apparent inefficiency, cowardice or treason, and the estates of the Governor, Colonel Lovelace, who, when the blow fell, was absent on affairs of state, were confiscated by the Duke. The triumph of the Hollanders was short-lived; for the year 1674 had not run its course when Major Edmund Andros assumed the governorship, and by the terms of a treaty of peace between England and the States-General, New Orange, as the place had been christened by the Dutch, again and finally became New York.

[Illustration: PETER STUYVESANT.]

New York has been in turn a Dutch village, an English town, and an American city. In its infancy it was wholly Dutch; but in its early youth the population was so leavened by English immigration that the transition to English control was less violent than one might expect it to have been. English influence was powerful even in Stuyvesant’s day; and when Stuyvesant was supplanted by Nicolls, the Dutch element was still powerful in the councils of the little town. The new ruler moved slowly and cautiously in anglicizing the government, and almost all the changes he made were for the better. The brief resumption of Dutch authority in 1673 was reactionary and wholly detrimental to the interests of the community; and, all things considered, the peaceful cession of the town to England, a year later, was the happiest chance that could possibly have befallen.

[Illustration: SEAL OF THE CITY IN 1686.]

A more violent and radical change was effected in 1689, when Jacob Leisler seized the occasion of the fall of the Stuart dynasty to grasp the reins of government which Andros had been forced to drop. By the aid of the militia and with the support of nearly all the less prosperous townsfolk, he administered public affairs till that good Dutchman William III. of England commissioned Governor Sloughter to hang the usurper and reign in his stead. Leisler’s rule had been in many respects an enlightened one, and years afterward his adherents succeeded in having his dishonored bones dug up and honorably reinterred. It was in this town, and at the instance of this earnest but ill-balanced and despotic champion of the poor, that the American Colonies took their first step toward concerted action, their objective being the overthrow of the French at Montreal.

The most striking characteristic of New York has always been its cosmopolitanism. As Governor Roosevelt points out in his capital review of the city’s history, no less than eighteen different languages and dialects were spoken in the streets so long ago as the middle of the seventeenth century. The Dutch, the English and the Huguenot refugees from France predominated, but there were many Walloons and Germans, and a large body of black slaves. The riffraff of the Old World was to be found here, as well as the nobly adventurous; and, in fact, at all times since, the proportion of foreign-born residents has been very large.

[Illustration: JOHN JAY.]

In the period immediately preceding the Revolution, the desire for independence was far less general in New York than in Massachusetts or Virginia. The large land owners and leading merchants were mainly members of the Church of England; and while there was no state church, so called and admitted to be such, the Anglicans were first in wealth and fashion, and their organization enjoyed exclusive privileges. Even King’s College (now Columbia University) was placed officially under Church control. The court party included not only the Anglican clergy and almost all the laity, but even an influential section of the membership of the Dutch Reformed Church. It included such families as the De Peysters, the De Lanceys and the Philippses in the city and its suburbs; and the Johnsons, who dominated central New York. There were Tories even on the Committee of Fifty-one that first authoritatively proposed the assembling of a Continental Congress. In no other colony was the Tory element so numerous and powerful; in none other were the patriots opposed by so active a spirit of loyalty to the Crown, and so vast a bulk of indifference on the part of property-owners, solicitous for nothing but the security of their possessions. At first the Schuylers, the Livingstons, and Hamilton, Jay and Morris found their support almost wholly among the masses, who rose not only against England, but also against the domination of the classes, which was more oppressive in the aristocratic city of New York than in the democratic town of Boston, or in Philadelphia. Thus, it was the so-called Sons of Liberty that had led in the agitation which made the Stamp Act a dead letter, so far as this colony was concerned, and a decade later prevented the landing of taxed tea on New York wharves. And their demonstrative radicalism found little response in the minds of some of the ablest civil and military leaders contributed by this colony to the work of liberation and reconstruction. But the violence of the mob could not blind such men to the essential justice of the American cause, and the actual beginning of the war found a large majority of the best people of the colony definitely committed to a patriotic course. So when Washington and his army were driven hither from Brooklyn and hence to New Jersey, in 1776, New York was no longer the populous place it had been before their sympathizers fled from the terrors of hostile military rule.

[Illustration: ALEXANDER HAMILTON.]

For the next seven years this remained the chief British stronghold in America. If the eastern and southern colonies could be split apart by English control of the Hudson, the backbone of the colonial federation would be broken—as the backbone of the Confederacy was broken, nearly a century later, by Sherman’s march to the sea. So every energy was bent toward dislodging the Continentals from this dividing-line. This was the immediate object of Arnold’s treachery, as well as of many an overt movement from south and north. But Washington outgeneralled the enemy and kept the federation intact, till the capture of Yorktown made New York no longer tenable by the foe. The city was well-nigh ruined by its experiences during these seven terrible years; and the outlying country to the north—Westchester County—suffered no less severely, being exposed to raids from the opposing bodies of regulars, and to constant marauding at the hands of free-booters, who pretended affiliation with one side or the other, sometimes in good faith, but often merely as a pretext for lawless depredations.

[Illustration: FRAUNCES’S TAVERN.]

The most joyously celebrated event in the annals of Manhattan was the city’s evacuation by the British at the close of the war. On the day that this occurred, November 25, 1783, General Washington arrived in town and dined at Fraunces’s Tavern; and hither he repaired again, ten days later, on the eve of his departure for Annapolis, to bid farewell to his officers. In this same building, and in the same Long Room, the first meeting of the New York Chamber of Commerce had been held, in 1768, fifteen years before any similar association was organized in Great Britain. This hostelry had, indeed, been the fashionable rendezvous of New Yorkers since 1762, when the shop at the southeast corner of Broad and Pearl Streets was converted to still more public uses by Samuel Fraunces (“Black Tom”), who in later years was to become the first President’s steward. At the beginning it was known as the Queen’s Head Tavern, its sign bearing a portrait of Queen Charlotte. Enlarged, and otherwise altered, but not improved, Fraunces’s Tavern is still, as it has always been, a public-house, though fashion has long since deserted it. It would be most deplorable if the march of improvement (in whose name, as in Liberty’s, so many offences are committed) should ever be allowed to obliterate this most aged and interesting relic of old New York.

The war of 1812 was by no means popular with the representative merchants of New York, despite the fact that the enforcement of England’s pretended right of search had acted almost as a blockade of the port for some years before the outbreak of hostilities. It had been a common occurrence for merchantmen in the lower bay to be stopped by a shot across their bows, and searched for possible British subjects among their crews. But when war came the fighting spirit was aroused, and many a privateer was fitted out to prey upon the enemy’s merchant marine. Rich prizes were taken, and desperate engagements were fought between the crews of brigs and schooners from New York and British men-of-war’s men who interfered with their privateering practices. A few years earlier (1807), Fulton had demonstrated on the Hudson the practicability of steam navigation; and now he built in New York, under Congressional direction, a steam frigate, iron-clad and heavily armed. This formidable craft might have been depended upon to raise the British blockade, had it not been raised still more effectually by a declaration of peace. The city did not suffer in this second war with England as it had suffered in the first. Instead of waiting for years, as before, to recuperate, it entered at once upon a period of unprecedented growth. The return of peace stimulated immigration, and local prosperity was vastly augmented by the opening in 1825 of the Erie Canal.

Until 1822, the mayor was appointed by a State council, presided over by the Governor; thereafter, until 1834, he was chosen by the municipal council; since then he has been elected by the people. But democratic rule was not always found to work satisfactorily, and in 1857 the control of local affairs was largely delegated to the legislature. This precaution proved of comparatively little value, however, and the Tweed ring of local office-holders found little difficulty in running things as they wished and robbing the tax-payers of millions upon millions. The charter of the city recently created by the amalgamation of New York, Brooklyn, etc., professed to restore home rule, in large measure; but so much of the supposed boon as it confers may be withdrawn at any time by State legislation, and bills withdrawing it piecemeal are, in fact, introduced at every session of the legislature.

When secession threatened, in 1861, the Democratic city of New York was the least friendly of Northern communities in its attitude toward the federal government. The common council, indeed, rapturously applauded the mayor’s formal suggestion that the city itself secede. But the first overt act of hostility at the South showed that, beneath this surface sympathy with the secessionists, the great mass of earnest citizens were ardent in adherence to the Union. Life and treasure were poured out more than abundantly. The Seventh Regiment—the “crack” militia organization of the city, if not of the nation—hurried off to Washington to guard the capital from surprise; and tens of thousands of volunteers followed to the front. No one city contributed more to the national cause. In fact the city’s contributions were too liberal for her own good; for the consequent dearth of able-bodied honest men at home left the community a prey to the enemies of society, and regiment after regiment had to be called back to restore order. The worst outbreaks were the so-called draft riots, caused by the enforced enlistment of troops; in these uprisings, negroes were the special object of the mob’s hostility.

The first few huts in New Amsterdam were huddled together beneath the sheltering walls of the Fort. There was but one general direction in which the hamlet could extend; yet it was long before the northward movement filled with shops and houses the space between the Fort and the line of Wall Street, and for several years thereafter the great Wall marked the boundary of the village. The Revolution found the border pushed forward to the edge of the Common, where the post-office stands to-day. The chief outlet from this point lay eastward, through what is now Park Row to the Bowery, and thence through the outlying farms to Westchester County, Connecticut and Boston.

On the west side there was another outlet, skirting the Hudson River and extending to the little village of Greenwich; and the occasional outbreak of yellow fever in New York made this a popular resort. The influx of twenty thousand refugees during one of these scares, early in the present century, completely changed the character of this village, and although most of the newcomers returned to the lower end of the island, Greenwich had practically become, by 1830, an integral part of the city. The northward spread via Greenwich Street, the Bowery and Broadway continued, till Yorkville and Harlem on the east and Manhattanville and Bloomingdale on the west were absorbed by the growing city. In 1874 the Harlem was crossed, and New York ceased to be an island; in 1895 still further accessions were made in Westchester County. But the crowning event in the expansion of the city was the legislation by which, on January 1, 1898, Brooklyn and the outlying towns and villages on Long Island, and all of Staten Island, were brought within the limits of New York—an act that raised the population at a stroke from less than 1,900,000 to near 3,400,000, and incidentally brought almost half the people of the State under the immediate rule of Tammany Hall.

A word should be said as to the Society, named in honor of Tamanend, an Indian chief who signed one of the treaties by which William Penn acquired the site of the city of Philadelphia. One of many societies of the same name, organized for social and political purposes toward the close of the eighteenth century, it reflected, to a certain extent, a spirit which had prevailed among the younger officers of the Revolution who had felt the force of Rousseau’s idealization of primitive man. Its first meeting was held on “St. Tammany’s day” (May 12), 1789. In membership it was allied with the Sons of Liberty and the Sons of 1776, and it has always professed “intense Americanism,” so far as that phrase is synonymous with Anglophobia. At first its ranks were recruited from among the small merchants, retailers and mechanics of the city; and by coming into close touch with the mass of immigrants that form so large a proportion of the population, giving the newcomers employment in some cases, in others charitable aid, instructing the alien voter as to his political rights and privileges, and directing him in their exercise, it has built up an enormous voting machine, insufficient to defeat a united opposition, but almost invariably so fortunate in local contests as to find its opponents divided. While nominally Democratic in national affairs, Tammany has never scrupled to oppose the Democratic party in the pursuit of its own immediate end—the control of local offices and revenues. This powerful machine has now for several years been dominated by an illiterate immigrant.

[Illustration: THE STADT HUYS.]

Comparatively recent as were the beginnings of the city, hardly a trace of the original village remains. Not a single building has come down to us from the Dutch period. It was to have been expected that something would survive the flight of less than three centuries. A happy chance might easily have preserved the stone “temple” erected within the walls of the Fort in 1652, or the slightly older warehouse, or some one of the many curious little stone or brick houses in which the burly burghers of the seventeenth century smoked their long pipes by the chimney-side, while their wives plied the spinning-wheel, their daughters spread the board, and their children, in padded breeches, played about the sanded floor.