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Authors: Mark Kurlansky

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Nicolino Calyo's 1840 watercolor of a New York City oyster stand.
COLLECTION OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

While most of the city was quietly sleeping, business at the Washington Market would actually pick up after midnight and reached its height just before the first purple-and-orange light broke over the East River and the rest of New York started to wake up.

While products were unloaded at the waterfront, wagons arrived all night on ferries from Jersey City, Paterson, Elizabeth, Newark, as well as the towns of the Hudson Valley, loading up and leaving before daybreak, because the New York City markets supplied not only the city but the outlying areas. Next would come the wagons from the city stores, and the last, just before dawn, were the buyers from hotels and restaurants and still a few early-morning retailers, women with large wicker baskets.

The market favored by the city's poor was along the East River at Catherine Street, which, though shabby, was in better condition than the Washington Market. It was a much quieter market, with only eighty vendors who called out to passersby, hoping to get some needed business. They serviced mostly the residents of nearby tenements, who ate very little most of the week. But the poor had a tradition of feasting one day a week and on Saturdays the Catherine Market was overflowing with retail shoppers. The emphasis in the Catherine Market was on low prices and the shoppers would barter with the vendors. The Catherine Market vendors reflected the ethnic diversity that was characteristic of New York, with Jewish, Irish, and Chinese salespeople. This market died down after midnight, when the city's poorest would quietly arrive, hoping for affordable final prices for whatever had not sold. Other markets included the sizable Center Market, with 161 stands, and Clinton, with 158, and the smaller 78-stand Tompkins, 70-stand Jefferson, 66-stand Essex, and even a little 37-stand Union Market.

Scribner's
noted with irony that the only really good market building was at the Manhattan Market, which was about to close. The market building's nine spires made of colorful slate and ground glass stood over the Hudson—the only ornament on the Hudson waterfront. The market had been built by a joint stock company that by the 1870s was collapsing and most of the 767 stands were empty.

It would all vanish in time. Bridges would put an end to the all-night street traffic of the ferries, and larger steamships would dock in the deeper water of the Hudson, abandoning the East River as a working waterfront. In time more food would enter the city by truck than ship, and the logic of harbor-front markets would be gone. But in the nineteenth century, there was no better New York experience than to go down to one of the markets late at night and eat oysters.

Charles Mackay told this story about oysters in lower Manhattan:

It is related of an amiable English earl, who a few years ago paid a visit to the United States, that his great delight was to wander up and down Broadway at night, and visit the principal oyster saloons in succession, regaling himself upon fried oysters at one place, stewed oysters at another, upon roasted oysters at a third, and winding up the evening by a dish of oysters, à l'Anglaise. On leaving New York to return to England, he miscalculated the time of sailing of the steamer, and found that he had an hour and a half upon his hands.

“What shall we do?” said the American friend, who had come to see him off.

“Return to Broadway,” said his lordship, “and have some more oysters.”

CHAPTER NINE

Ostreamaniacal Behavior

The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
in a letter from New York to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843

M
anhattan was the field for the bloodiest engagement
of the Civil War that did not involve Confederate troops.

Five Points, the most infamous slum in America, was ruled by street gangs such as the Swamp Angels, who earned their name by attacking from out of sewers, the Daybreak Boys, who were ten and eleven years old, the Dead Rabbits, who went into battle with their namesake impaled on a pike. They fought sweeping, pitched battles on the streets of Five Points. These gangs could muster one thousand fighters or more for a street battle. In 1857, the Dead Rabbits seized City Hall and held it for an hour while slaughtering their gang opponents in front of the building.

By the time of the outbreak of the Civil War, Manhattan had built five hundred miles of city streets, but three-quarters of them had no sewage. The city's population, 813,669, was a little more than half foreign-born. One-fourth of the New York population had been born in Ireland. Seemingly following the example of the Collect, the city created slums for immigrants to move to. In the 1840s, as gas lighting was being introduced all over the city, huge gas tanks were built near the East River just above Fourteenth Street, which was considered an unused area. After they were built, no one wanted to live near them because the gas tanks leaked, and so impoverished Irish immigrants settled into the area. Eighty percent of police arrests were of immigrants, which gave a sense of an ongoing war between the immigrant poor and the police. In the year 1862, the police arrested eighty-two thousand people—a tenth of the population of New York.

In March 1863, the Conscription Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. All men between the ages of twenty and forty-five were required to register, and if drafted were required to serve for three years. Adding to the outrage of the poor, the act provided an exemption for the very wealthy; anyone could buy their way out of the draft with $300. Few New Yorkers, few Americans, could raise this sum. It was about a third of a year's wages for an oyster shucker. A wealthy man could also hire someone to serve in his place, which was considered—by the rich—a civic-minded thing to do. The fathers of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, banker J. P. Morgan, and future presidents Chester A. Arthur and Grover Cleveland all hired substitutes. Even Abraham Lincoln, himself over the draft age of forty-five, set an example by hiring a substitute. George Templeton Strong paid his proxy soldier $1,100 and wrote, “My
alter ego
could make a good soldier if he tried. Gave him my address and told him to write to me if he found himself in the hospital or in trouble, and that I would try to do what I properly could to help him.”

A few New Yorkers such as meat producers, industrialists, and the oyster producers benefited from the war. The main competitors of New York oysters, Chesapeake oysters, were no longer available. The military did not allow oyster sloops on the Chesapeake Bay for fear they would somehow be used to help the Confederacy. Closing down the bay meant New Yorkers not only took over the Chesapeake share of the market but went into the business of supplying seed oysters. Staten Island planters, ironically the same oystermen who had saved their beds by planting Chesapeake seeds, especially profited. Their prices almost doubled during the war, and the demand never slackened. The Union Army had always been a good customer. In 1859, the quartermaster general wrote that more money had been paid out that year for oysters than for meat. Much of that had been canned or pickled, but even during the war, troops on occasion were treated to fresh New York oysters.

But with the general New York population there had been little enthusiasm for the war at the outset and it had grown even more unpopular. Most New Yorkers did not regard slavery as a serious transgression and thought abolitionists were fanatics. In 1850, George Templeton Strong, a Lincoln supporter, had written in his diary:

My creed on that question is this: That slave holding is no sin.

That the slaves of the Southern States are happier and better off than the niggers of the North, and are more kindly dealt with by their owners than servants are by Northern masters.

That the reasoning, the tone of feeling, the first principles, the practices, and the designs of Northern Abolitionists are very particularly false, foolish, wicked, and unchristian.

There was a huge and enthusiastic rally in Union Square in 1861 to see off the troops, but few had predicted what a slaughter this war would be. From the very start the news in New York was bad. New York troops fought in the first engagement and New Yorkers were shocked to learn they had been routed by the Confederates at a place called Manassas, Virginia, with an unimaginable 460 federal troops killed and 1,582 wounded. A New York soldier wrote in his diary, “Tonight not 100 men are in camp . . . . A hundred men are drunk, a hundred more are in houses of ill fame, and the balance are everywhere . . . . Colonel Alfred is very drunk all the time now.” Horace Greeley of the
New York Tribune,
who had urged Lincoln to let the South secede, and had then urged him to march on Richmond, now urged him to give up the fight and negotiate terms.

Other slaughters followed. In one battle in 1862 at a place called Shiloh, 3,477 men died, almost as many as had died in the eight years of the American Revolution. Later that year, more than twelve thousand Union troops were killed or wounded in one day at Antietam. Every day New Yorkers read the lists of dead and wounded in the newspapers. In September 1862, photographer Mathew Brady opened an exhibit in New York of work by his assistants Alexander Gardner and James E. Gibson entitled
The Dead of Antietam.
Photography was new, and few had ever seen such images of war. Because the camera exposed slowly and was a large cumbersome box with glass plates for negatives, it could not function in the heat of battle. Instead it recorded battlefields covered with the staring, twisted, mutilated dead.
The New York Times
reported, “Mr. Brady has done something to bring to us the terrible reality, the earnestness of war.”

By the summer of 1863, as New York prepared for conscription, General Robert E. Lee's army was in Pennsylvania, not far away, and many New Yorkers were calling for Lincoln to negotiate a peace settlement. A masterpiece of warped logic became widespread in New York: All of the carnage and suffering of the Civil War was the fault of black people for being slaves. As blacks fled north and challenged New York immigrants for the worst jobs, the poorest immigrants, especially the Irish, turned bitterly against those they regarded as the newcomers. The idea of fighting to free blacks so they could migrate north and steal their jobs was infuriating to these impoverished New Yorkers. Were they all to be slaughtered because of
them
? Blacks were beaten on the streets of New York, even lynched. Avenue A was particularly infamous for lynchings.

On Sunday, July 12, 1863, the first conscripts, the names drawn the day before, were listed in the New York papers along with the New Yorkers among the twenty-three thousand Union dead or wounded at Gettysburg. On Monday morning, more names were being drawn as a mob attacked the conscription office, destroyed the files, tore down the building, and went out on the streets looting and burning. According to
The New York Times,
“They talk, or rather they did talk at first, of the oppressiveness of the Conscription Law, but three fourths of those who have been actively engaged in violence have been boys and young men under twenty years of age, and not at all subject to the Conscription.” What had happened was that the slums and their street gangs were finally exploding.

The metropolitan police force fought back with 2,297 men and were often badly outnumbered. An estimated fifty thousand to seventy thousand people took part in the riot, with some gangs rallying ten thousand fighters. A thousand citizens armed with handguns and clubs were sworn in as auxiliary but still could not contain the mobs. The police chief was beaten to death. The mob attacked the wealthy in their homes and smashed stores and looted. Two disabled veterans were killed. They attacked black homes, boardinghouses, orphanages, and schools. Women gang members were said to be the most vicious against blacks and captured policemen, torturing them with knives, gouging out eyes and tongues, or spraying a victim lashed to a tree with oil and setting him on fire.

Rioters fought the police in the streets, in buildings, in parks, and on rooftops. More than one hundred buildings were burned down. After four days of fighting, regiments of infantry and cavalry pulled from the battlefield at Gettysburg, sunburned from their days fighting under the July sun, arrived in New York and the street gangs were no match for these battle-hardened veterans.

In the end, of 161 Five Pointers conscripted, 59 received exemptions, 11 hired substitutes, two paid the $300 fee, and 88 simply failed to report. Only one Five Pointer draftee served, Hugh Boyle, who went in at the end of 1864, served in the war until it ended five months later, and then, on his way to join occupation forces in Texas, deserted.

After the war,
the memory of the 1863 draft riot left the people of New York with a lingering fear of the slums, the immigrants, and the poor. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century claim that Manhattan was a healthy spot had long been forgotten. The city was notoriously unhealthy and much of that bad health was centered in the slums. In 1863, the year of the riots, one in every thirty-six New Yorkers died. The same year, one in every forty-four Philadelphians died and the same for Bostonians. Even in London and Liverpool, with their Dickensian slums and poverty, only one in every forty-five died that year.

In 1865, the bleeding nation, with its more than six hundred thousand dead and another almost half million wounded, was reeling from the Civil War. But in New York there was also fear of fetid slums and terrifying epidemics. In reality, smallpox, cholera, and typhoid epidemics did not cause the high fatality rate. More people died of nonepidemic diseases such as tuberculosis, diarrhea in children, bronchitis, and pneumonia. But it was the sudden sweep of a fatal disease, the epidemic, that incited the fear and imagination of New Yorkers.

Cholera would periodically attack cities all over the world, an unseen deadly force. Death came within a few days, and mortality rates were as high as 90 percent of all patients stricken with the disease. Terrified populations would search for causes. In New York, it was often traced to a ship that came from an infected port city. New Yorkers would brace themselves when they learned of cholera outbreaks in European cities.

What caused such pestilence? In New York, the principal suspects were foreigners, poverty, slums, immoral living, and alcoholism. It was often thought not that the poor were victimized by disease, but rather that they caused it. The modern-day assault of AIDS was not the first time an epidemic led to the stigmatization of its victims. In nineteenth-century New York, victims of cholera, yellow fever, and typhus were commonly looked down upon. Then, in the fall of 1854, several prominent citizens came down with cholera and died. A major epidemic had begun among the privileged. “There is a strange flare up of this epidemic just now, among people of the more ‘respectable' class,” George Templeton Strong noted in his diary on October 24. He was to personally witness a few fatal cases among his circle of friends.

The epidemic was a tremendous shock. Since it could not be blamed on the filth and moral degradation of the slums, perhaps it was being caused by oysters. And so what became known as “the oyster panic” began.

Numerous frightened New Yorkers began theorizing that the cholera resulted from eating bad oysters. Not surprisingly, there was a marked drop in oyster sales, especially among merchants who sold to the rich, such as Downing. Strong quoted, in his words, “the former venerable Ethiop” insisting, “If any gentleman can prove he died of the oyster I works in, I'll pay his expenses to Greenwood,” the Brooklyn cemetery. In Downing's defense, Strong assured in his October 31 diary entry, “There is no serious increase of cholera cases, and probably no foundation for distrust of oysters, raw, broiled or roast.” Strong was very wrong. It is now known that a chief cause of cholera is food that has been infected by sewage, and that raw shellfish is a particularly likely way to contract the disease.

BOOK: The Big Oyster
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