Credit: Image from Morse, Sidney E. & Breese, Samuel. Morse’s North American Atlas. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1845.
Mary Cecilia Rogers did not return home the evening of Sunday, July 25, 1841. That morning, she had gone out for a walk. She left the home where she lived with her widowed mother, Phoebe, at 126 Nassau St.1 It was in the lower east side of New York City, just a block south of City Hall Park (see Figure 1.1). She said that she would return that evening.2 But she did not.
According to some initial reports, she was seen meeting a young man at Theater Alley, just a block west of her home. The two of them then headed toward Barclay St., the western end of which was known as the dock for the ferry to Hoboken, NJ. According to the report of her fiancé, Daniel C. Payne, however, she had arrived at the room he rented four blocks south of her home, at 47 Johns St., at about 10 a.m. She told him that she was to meet her cousin, a Mrs. Downing, who lived on Greenwich St.3
By Monday, some of Mary Rogers’ friends arranged to have a notice of her disappearance placed in the Tuesday newspapers. It was on Wednesday that her body was discovered floating in the Hudson River just off of Castle Point in Hoboken, NJ (today the home of Stevens Institute of Technology). “It was evident,” the nascent New York Tribune reported, “that she had been horribly outraged and murdered.” The article went on to note that Miss Rogers “was a young woman of good character, and was soon to have been married to a worthy young man of this City.”4
It was the New York Herald (then in its sixth year of publication), however, that took the lead in publicizing the story. On 4 August it declared:
How utterly ridiculous is all this! It is not nearly a week since the dead body of this beautiful and unfortunate girl has been discovered, and yet no other steps have been taken by the judicial authorities, than a brief and inefficient inquest by [Hoboken coroner] Gilbert Merritt. One of the most heartless and atrocious murders that was ever perpetrated in New York, is allowed to sleep the sleep of death—to be buried in the deep bosom of the Hudson.5
Credit: Image from Morse, Sidney E. & Breese, Samuel. Morse’s North American Atlas. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1845.
The newspapers made the story of Mary Rogers’ murder a sensation for the people of New York. Until the 1830s, newspapers had been rather elite affairs with titles like the Courier and Enquirer, and the Journal of Commerce.6 These publications had small circulations, typically less than 2,000, and they were aimed primarily at the business community: they covered mostly shipping, markets, and national political affairs. They also cost six cents a copy, which put them out of the reach of most working New Yorkers. A few politically radical workers’ papers had come and gone, but they had not earned the loyalty of ordinary New Yorkers. Then, in September of 1833, a printer named Benjamin Day, who had worked on one of the radical papers, the Daily Sentinel, conceived and launched an entirely new kind of newspaper that focused on local news—especially scandal, crime, the police, and the courts. Following the example of the wildly successful Penny Magazine in the UK, he set the price of his new paper at one cent. He called it the New York Sun, which proclaimed on its front page: “It shines for all.” Unlike the radical papers and the business sheets, the Sun did not take an official partisan stand. It did not reflexively denounce prominent members of the “opposing” party. Although the Sun tended Democratic, its stance was as defender of the city and its people. To circulate the new paper, Day had “newsboys,” often drawn from the local orphanages, sell most of the papers on the streets of New York, offering them in bundles of 100 copies for 67¢. Any newsboy who sold all his papers would earn himself 33¢ a day.
The Sun was wildly successful. Within just a few months, it had the highest circulation in the city, at over 4,000. By 1835 its circulation was 15,000. Soon, others began to copy Day’s formula. One of these was the New York Herald, launched in 1835 by a Scottish immigrant named James Gordon Bennett. Looking for a niche outside of the Sun’s sphere, the Herald was pitched at a slightly elevated tone. Unlike the Sun, the Herald included business news, though of a different cast than in the old commerce papers. It became known for its exposés of crookedness and incompetence among New York’s mostly unregulated companies and markets. The paper also displayed Bennett’s own anti-Catholic and anti-abolitionist streaks, tending toward support for the “Know-Nothings” politically, though it was not as extreme as they in its view of immigration (Bennett being an immigrant himself). When the market crash of 1837 threw many of the city’s residents out of work, sometimes out of their homes, the Herald played to the crowd by running scolding accounts of the lavish parties that New York’s rich were still throwing for themselves while the rest of the city suffered. The result was an organized boycott of the paper by the city’s “high society” which damaged Bennett’s Herald, but did not break it.7
The boycott did, however, open a niche in the city’s journalistic ecology for a “respectable” Whig paper that focused on news of the city, but was rather more respectful of municipal powerbrokers. That niche was filled, from April of 1841, by Horace Greely’s New York Tribune. The Tribune did not kowtow to the city’s elites, but neither did it go out of its way to tweak them. It covered crime, but not in the salacious tones of the Sun.
The murder of Mary Rogers rapidly became a cause célèbre for New York’s papers, especially for the Herald. For a woman just 21 years of age, Rogers was already well known in the city as the “beautiful cigar girl” (or ‘segar’ as some had it). She held a job at a fashionable tobacco shop, owned by one John Anderson, located on Broadway. It was a popular hangout of many Tammany Hall politicians and other Democratic Party figures (which may well have played a role in the Know-Nothing Herald’s decision to take the lead in demanding that more be done to find the killer). The proximity of Anderson’s cigar shop to City Hall and to “Publisher’s Row” made Rogers a familiar figure to many New York politicians and journalists.8
Nearly three years before Rogers’ death, in October of 1838, she had become the object of city-wide attention when the Sun reported that she had disappeared from home, leaving a suicide note behind. Two weeks after her disappearance, however, another newspaper found that she had only visited a friend in Brooklyn, and it accused the Sun of authoring a hoax for the sake of publicity, a stunt that would not have been entirely out of character. In 1835, just two years after its launch, the Sun ran a piece claiming that the great English astronomer, John Herschel, had discovered of a range of fantastic beings living on the moon. The article was, of course, a transparent bid for attention that came to be known as the Great Moon Hoax (see Figure 1.2).
Despite the explanation that Rogers had simply gone to Brooklyn for few days, rumors persisted that Rogers had eloped with a sailor,9 so the insistence by the Tribune (cited above) that she was a “young woman of good character” was aimed at making a specific point with readers who recalled the earlier incident. By the time Rogers disappeared again in July of 1841, her acquaintance with many newspapermen and politicians may have garnered her story much more attention than it might have received otherwise. The mayors of the day—Isaac Varian and his successor Robert Morris, both Democrats—personally took part in the interrogations of various suspects and witnesses. Murder was a relatively rare event in the New York City of 1841.10 In the first six months of 1841, for instance, there had been four convictions for “manslaughter,” and two more for “assault and battery with intent to kill” but none for murder.11 Murder of a “respectable” young woman was rarer still.
Soon after the discovery of Rogers’ body, a string of suspects and witnesses were hauled in for interrogation. Two men were arrested on August 4, along with a sailor. All were soon discharged, however.12 Another sailor was questioned on August 5, also discharged.13 One suspect was pursued as far away as Worcester, Massachusetts and brought back to New York to face investigation. Although it was true that he knew Rogers from the cigar shop, and that he had recently been seen with a young woman on Staten Island, he turned out to have no connection to the Rogers murder.14 The story received an additional salacious boost when it was revealed that Rogers had a former fiancé, a lawyer named Alfred Cromeline, whom she had recently left for Daniel Payne. Two days before her disappearance, Rogers had written to Cromeline asking him to visit her at home. He had declined to do so, saying he had been “coldly received”15 at the Rogers’ home on an earlier visit since their breakup. The next day her name “was written on Cromeline’s slate”16 (presumably at the door of his residence) and a rose was placed in his keyhole. The possibility that the murder was a result of a love triangle began to circulate.
As early as August 9, just over two weeks after the murder, the supposition that a gang of men might have been responsible started to take hold. The Herald reported an unrelated story of a Baltimore woman being snatched from the company of a “gentleman” by “eight or ten young men & ruffians.” It then asked rhetorically,
Can this outrage throw any light on the murder of Mary Rogers? … We hear of no clue arrived at, and but very little exertion made for the discovery and punishment of the brutal ravishers and murderers. Let a public meeting be set a foot, a subscription raised in order to offer a reward for the murderers [note the presumed plural] of Mary Rogers. We will give FIFTY DOLLARS; and we doubt not that in less than 24 hours a thousand dollars may be raised, to be paid into the hands of the Mayor of New York, for the purpose of stimulating the energetic and indefatigable police.17
The solicitation of money for a police investigation was hardly incidental. In 1841, New York did not yet have a modern professional police force. On the streets, there were just two elected, unpaid constables per ward to watch over the city during the day. At night there were dozens of poorly paid watchmen (“leatherheads,” as they were often called) who were political appointees. The inducement for corruption could hardly have been greater. Neither the constables nor watchmen were trained full-time policemen. They mostly did their law enforcement “on the side,” and both groups tended to pay attention to investigations that came with the promise of a reward. Sometimes not willing to wait for an offer, they were known to exact “fees” from crime victims. As an amateur force, they were easily overwhelmed, and the city had, of late, been increasingly forced to call upon the militia to help preserve the peace. There was also a hierarchy of police officers who kept the system running and who relayed orders downwards from the mayor or the city council.
There had been gangs in New York back to the 18th century, but things became increasingly unruly in the mid-1830s as White Protestant New Yorkers began to feel they were losing control of the city to waves of foreigners.18 In July 1834, a mob ransacked the house of a prominent abolitionist named Lewis Tappan.19 That same year also saw Samuel Morse (best known today for having invented the telegraph and the code that bears his name) publish a series of articles in the staunchly Presbyterian New York Observer in which he claimed that the Austrian government and Pope Gregory XVI were using Jesuit agents to undermine freedom and democracy in the US.20 Many went so far as to argue that Irish Catholics were not “White” and, on that basis, should be denied the possibility of American citizenship.21 In 1835, a group of virulently anti-immigration, anti-Catholic New Yorkers led by Morse formed the Native American Democratic Association (NADA) to challenge the political power of Tammany Hall, which catered to New York’s large immigrant populations. NADA won 40% of the vote in the New York state elections of 1835. Emboldened by the surprisingly positive result, Morse ran for mayor in 1836, but was badly defeated by the Democratic incumbent, Cornelius Van Wyck Lawrence. Still, the group’s initial success in New York rapidly spread to other jurisdictions where White Protestants felt themselves to be under threat. In 1842, the movement went national under the name The American Republican Party. Horace Greely of the Tribune immediately dubbed them the “Know-Nothings,” the moniker by which they are best known today.
Although the ethnic tensions of the mid-1830s had made gang violence a rising issue in the city, matters were greatly exacerbated by the market crash of 1837. As one pair of New York historians put the matter,
if being a waged employee diminished one’s sense of autonomy and control, being fired devastated it. Security and self-esteem were best pursued elsewhere. [A young man could] don colorful gang regalia, rendezvous with his comrades, and regain at least the illusion of being in control of his life, of being a man among men.22
In short, the gangs went from being a means-to-an-end to being a source of personal identity.
Irish Gangs dominated the notorious Five Points slum, and they operated in the neighboring Bowery district, both less than a half-mile north of where Mary Rogers lived. Charles Dickens visited the Five Points in 1842, though only under the protection of two police officers. He walked the narrow alleys, surveyed the busy taverns, and even strolled into the unlocked rooms of sleeping residents. He described it as “reeking everywhere with dirt and filth,” and noted that its residents had their “counterparts at home [in London] and all the wide world over.” “Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old,” the novelist continued. “See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays.”23
The area’s gangs went by names like the Forty Thieves, the Dead Rabbits, and the O’Connell Guards. Protestant gangs, of course, immediately sprung up to oppose them, with names like the American Guard and the Bowery Boys. Most despised of all were the African American gangs. As one New Yorker wrote about them, “those black devils have always been a nuisance, but now ‘a respectable white man’ can hardly walk down Broadway of a Sunday afternoon without being jostled off the sidewalk by their desperate gangs.”24
Some gangs attached themselves to political parties or to other political institutions, such as Tammany Hall. Others took control of the volunteer fire companies that were ostensibly responsible for protecting the city. The weapons of choice when gangs did battle had traditionally been sticks and bricks. Increasingly, however, there were deadly incidents involving knives and guns, and the public was increasingly fearful of being caught in the crossfire.25 Something had to be done, but there was strong opposition to the establishment of a professional police force, modeled on Robert Peel’s “Bobbies” in London. Publicly, the objection was that a “civic army” did not become a democratic republic like the US. Not far beneath the surface, however, were the vested interests of political and ethnic control of particular neighborhoods, and the nefarious financial rewards that flowed from such influence. Despite those misgivings, the Rogers murder re-ignited the debate over a professional police force, and Bennett’s suggestions, first, that gangs were behind the killing and, second, that the police would be unlikely to do much about it unless offered a reward, fanned the flames of distrust.
In this context, the Herald’s suggestion that a gang had been responsible for the mysterious murder of Mary Rogers cast the incident in a new and more menacing light. If it marked a new level of threat posed by urban violence, then it shifted the significance of the event from being merely an engaging, if sorrowful, tale of the downfall of an unlucky girl, to one that might have real significance for New York residents.
As if not wanting to be scooped by the Herald, the day immediately after the “gangs” editorial was published, the Tribune published a report that Rogers had been seen the night she died in Hoboken with as many as eight “young men.”26 The city was now so hungry for news of the incident, the Herald felt the need to announce that, “nothing has transpired at the Police office worth detailing to our readers on this melancholy subject.”27 On August 12, the Herald published a searing editorial on the state of justice in the city, accusing the judges of indifference and police of complicity. The condemnation closed with the words:
New York is disgraced and dishonored in the eyes of the Christian and civilized world unless one great, one big, one strong, moral movement be made to reform and reinvigorate the administration of criminal justice, and to protect the lives and property of its inhabitants from public violence and public robbery.28
The same issue contained letters from possible witnesses (including one who wrote anonymously for fear of retaliation by unnamed gangs), and a report of a public meeting at which contributions for the reward fund were collected.
In the absence of further information, but needing to keep up the drumbeat against the gangs, a few days later the Herald speculated that the killing:
was done in this city by some of the soaplocks [Bowery Boys] or fire rowdies, and who either by force or fraud got her into some of the Engine Houses adjacent to the north river, kept her there all day, and at night, during the pelting of that pitiless storm, they consigned her body to the North River—either alive or dead.29
Both the Herald and the Tribune ran nearly daily reports, many of them focusing on the presumed involvement of the city’s gangs, until the end of August. In September, coverage began to fall off until, late in the month, the Herald ran a short series of illustrated articles on where Rogers was last seen alive and where, in the editor’s opinion, she had probably been murdered. On October 9 it was reported that Rogers’ fiancé, Daniel Payne, had been found dead of an apparent suicide, near the presumed murder site in Hoboken.30
The case was never definitively concluded. In the end, the best the Herald and the Tribune could do was to quarrel with each other: A year later, in early November of 1842, the woman proprietor of the Hoboken tavern at which Mary Rogers was reported to have been last seen alive, one Frederica Loss, was accidentally shot by one of her sons and died a few days later.31 In the wake of this event, on November 18, the Tribune published an article declaring that the mystery of Mary Rogers’ murder was solved. Mrs. Loss, it was said, had confessed on her deathbed to Judge Merritt (the Hoboken coroner) that Mary Rogers had come to her house with a physician who had attempted to perform an abortion. The procedure had killed Rogers and Mrs. Loss had instructed her sons to dump the body in the river.32 The next day the Herald, which, it appeared, had been embarrassingly scooped by its rival, declared the Tribune’s story to be “all falsehood, and absolute fabrication,” and published a letter from Merritt saying he had not received such testimony from Mrs. Loss.33 The Tribune replied that it had received the story from two unnamed “Magistrates” and that it had erred in attributing the story to Merritt.34 The Herald twice demanded to know the Magistrates’ names.35 The Tribune sneered back “Our envious neighbors may as well forbear their snarling. They only set the public laughing at their ludicrous misery.”36 The Tribune demanded a reward from the Mayor for cracking the case.37
The Herald mysteriously dropped its call for the names of the magistrates, and the Tribune never volunteered them. The papers moved on to other news stories and the Rogers case was transformed into a kind of civic legend: a fictionalized version of it written by Edgar Allan Poe, titled The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, started a serialized run in a magazine called Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion.
Whether Mary Rogers was actually murdered or died of a botched abortion, the political wheels that her traumatic death set in motion carried on far into the future. New York State Governor William Seward (later Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State) made specific reference to the Rogers case in calling for police reform in 1842.38 He designed a New York Municipal Police Act, providing for a professional and full-time, though still neighborhood-controlled, force, in 1844. By that time, however, the “Know-Nothings” had defeated both the Democrats and Whigs to take New York mayoralty. The city’s new chief executive was John Harper, the man who had published a sensational book titled The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk in 1836 during the great anti-Catholic outburst that had been led by Samuel Morse that year. The book purported to tell the story of a former nun from Montréal who “revealed” that religious sisters were forced to submit sexually to priests, with the children of such unions being murdered. Monk got wrong basic details about the order to which she had supposedly belonged, and even her mother discounted the tales as products of insanity,39 but the book was wildly popular among those caught up in the rising anti-Catholic tide.
Mayor Harper would have nothing to do with Governor Seward’s vision of a professional police force. Instead, he bulked up to the old system with 200 additional policemen, all appointed at his own discretion (which meant, in practice, that they had to be White, American-born Protestants who professed to being non-drinkers). He ordered them to wear dark blue uniforms and star-shaped copper badges (thus “cops”), the descendants of which remain with us today. Harper also attempted to ban most alcohol sales, to fire “foreign” municipal workers, and to banish unlicensed vendors (many of them immigrants) from city streets.
Policing was far from the only municipal issue that provoked tension between the established Protestants and the Catholic newcomers. Public education was also a frequent political flash point. New York City’s public schools, such as they were, had traditionally been openly and strictly Protestant in their outlook. Bible readings—King James Bible readings—were a mainstay of the curriculum. The Public School Society refused even to operate schools in the predominantly Catholic Five Points slum. The Catholic Bishop of New York, John Hughes, himself an 1817 immigrant from Ireland, demanded public funding from the government for Catholic schools. Governor Seward knew this to be a political impossibility, but he tried to work out a compromise that would enable Catholics to participate in the public system. In 1842, the basic structure of a non-denominational public school system was passed by the New York assembly, but neither side would accept the outcome. Protestant mobs attacked Bishop Hughes’ home. The just-created New York Board of Education tendentiously declared the King James Bible not to be a sectarian document; classroom readings from it continued. Hughes finally gave up his attempts to reform the public schooling system, turning his attention instead to establishing a network of private Catholic schools in New York.
New Yorkers’ flirtation with John Harper and his obstinate Know-Nothing movement began to cool, however, as citizens came to understand the level of conflict what the nativists’ heated rhetoric would mean in practice: In May 1844 came the report that 3000 nativists in Philadelphia had marched into the Irish ward of that city, ransacking houses and beating residents. The cause had been the local Bishop’s request that Catholic students in the city’s school be permitted to use the Catholic Douay translation of the Bible during daily religious readings instead of the Protestant King James version. Anti-Catholic agitators maliciously declared that the Irish were trying to “take the Bible out of school,” and then used the allegation as a pretext for mass intimidation and violence. After a relatively quiet June, the mobs returned during the July 4 weekend, burning down two Catholic churches, destroying hundreds of Catholic homes, and killing over 30 people. The disorder came to be known as the Philadelphia Bible Riots. However, when particularly zealous nativists in New York called for a rally of their own in solidarity with the riots in the City of Brotherly Love, electoral support for Harper and his party collapsed in New York.
The Democrats took back the city in the elections of 1845 and implemented Seward’s plan for a professional police force. The battles over immigration and religion had hardly even begun, though, either in New York City or elsewhere in the country. In just a few years time, the Irish Potato Famine and a failed revolution in the German states would send millions more Catholic immigrants streaming into America’s port cities, New York most of all.
This was the fractious city into which William James was born on the 11th of January 1842. His father, Henry, was 30 years of age, and his mother, Mary, was 31.40 The standard account is that William came into the world in the magnificent Astor House hotel, on the west side of Broadway between Vesey and Barclay Streets (see Figure 1.1). The hotel was only about 300 yards from City Hall and about 200 yards west of Mary Rogers’ home. It was virtually across the street from P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, which had opened just a year earlier (see Figure 1.3).
Barnum’s Museum may have been the most visited attraction in America at the time. Over the course of its life it housed an incredibly diverse array of objects from the zoological to the historical to the fantastical: paintings, dioramas, weapons said to have been used by John Brown in his (in)famous raid at Harper’s Ferry, a hat worn by Ulysses S. Grant, a wide variety of wax sculptures depicting various historical and present-day scenes, the trunk of a tree under which Jesus’ disciples allegedly sat, and, perhaps most notoriously of all, the mummified body of the “Fejee Mermaid,” to name but a few. There were live animals as well: a “flea circus,” exotic snakes, a dog that ran a loom, seals that performed tricks, dancing bears, beluga whales, even hippopotami and elephants. A “doctor” of phrenology sat prepared to assess the shapes of visitors’ skulls and comment on their characters. There were even human exhibits: displayed in the 3,000-seat theater that Barnum called “The Lyceum,” there were presented midgets such as “General” Tom Thumb, “giants” such as Anna Swan, “Esquimaux” and other “exotic” ethnic individuals, even the original “Siamese twins” Chang and Eng. Phineas Gage, whose famous 1848 injury is still recounted in textbooks of psychology and neurology today, appeared at Barnum’s Museum for a time, bearing the tamping rod that had been blown through his head.
Credit: August Köllner. Broad-Way, New York, 1850. Lithograph, lithographer after Isidore-Laurent Deroy, printed by Cattier, Paris, published by Goupil & Co., New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Susan Dwight Bliss, 1966 (67.630.36).
The story of William James’ birth in the Astor House hotel is made somewhat curious by the fact that his parents had already rented a house at 5 Washington Place, uptown near the University of the City of New York,41 then just 10 years old. What is more, just three days before William’s birth, his father had purchased a house at 21 Washington Place from one of his brothers.42
New York was a very different city in the early 1840s than the one we know today. First, it consisted only of Manhattan, and it was truly an island. There were no bridges to Brooklyn, then a separate city, or tunnels to New Jersey. The only ways off the island were to take a ferry boat or to ride the full, rugged 13 miles to the north end of the island and cross the Bronx River onto the American mainland. Few of the city’s buildings rose higher than four stories, save church spires. (The Astor House and Barnum Museum were exceptions, at five stories.) There was no Central Park. Indeed, hardly anyone lived that far up island. Contemporary maps of the city often stopped at around 30th street. Much of northern Manhattan was still farmland. Gas streetlights, introduced less than 20 years before,43 were dim and few. There was, of course, no electricity, no telegraph, and no form of transportation or even communication faster than a horse. Even reliable access to clean drinking water was a serious problem for New Yorkers of the early 19th century: In 1822, thousands of New Yorkers had died in a Yellow Fever epidemic. In 1832, cholera had killed 3,500—one in every 65 New Yorkers.44 A reliable source of fresh water for the city was only secured in October 1842, nine months after William James’ birth, with the completion of the Croton Aqueduct. Its opening was considered so significant that it prompted huge civic celebrations around the new commemorative water fountain that was built in City Hall Park, across the street from William’s birthplace. So powerful a symbol was the aqueduct that, even 14 years later, the teenage “Willy” James, then residing in Switzerland, would write to a friend, about Lake Geneva, that it was “as pure and clear as filtered Croton water.”45
Henry James Sr.’s intellectual development was, in 1842, still a work in progress. A serious burn had resulted in the amputation of one of his legs at the age of 13. After a long, painful recovery, he had rebelled against his father’s conventional Presbyterian strictures, becoming an erratic, often-drunken young man. He spent a tumultuous time at Union College in Schenectady NY, where his status was protected mainly by the fact that his father was the school’s most important patron. Henry’s father (also named William) had once even stepped in with his own money to bail the school out of a looming bankruptcy.46 After the senior William’s death in 1832, Henry had attended Princeton Seminary between 1835 and 1837, in the midst of a period of great strife for the Presbyterian Church. With the widespread religious revival that came to be known as the Second Great Awakening sweeping the northeastern US, Presbyterians were split between the staid and restrained Old School, and a rising New School that demanded spontaneous public displays of pious enthusiasm. Although Henry James briefly flirted with the new practices, rather than side with either faction, he became a follower of an 18th-century radically egalitarian, anti-clerical critic of the Scottish Presbyterian Church named Robert Sandeman. Henry James came to believe that the clergy served no good purpose, that good works and other religious practices—whether reserved or ardent—played no role in true Christianity, and that only through simple, direct belief could one achieve salvation.
This, of course, implied that most so-called Christians of the day were deluded about their status with Christ, and Henry was not particularly shy about voicing this conclusion, both in print and in person.47 One of his colleagues in this extreme religious program was a fellow former-Princetonian, Hugh Walsh, whose two sisters, Mary and Catherine, had become Sandemanian converts as well. This caused no small degree of strain between the Walsh children and their Old School Presbyterian mother. Nevertheless, Henry James would marry Mary Walsh in 1840. Because clergy were regarded by both Henry and Mary as the pointless agents of a corrupt church, the wedding ceremony was a civil one, led by no less a personage than the Mayor of New York, Isaac Varian.48 Mary Walsh’s sister, Catherine, would never marry but often lived with or near Henry and Mary throughout their lives, becoming the beloved “Aunt Kate” of William James’ childhood.
As Henry James’ religious fire began to gradually smolder, he turned his attention to the work of the one-time Unitarian minister, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a core member of the group of thinkers and writers in Concord, Massachusetts known as the “Transcendentalists.” Emerson’s small 1836 book Nature is often regarded as a founding document of the movement, and his 1837 lecture “The American Scholar” is sometimes said to have started a uniquely American form of public philosophy.49 In 1840, the Transcendentalists founded an influential (if short-lived) journal called The Dial. Remarkably for the era, it was edited by a woman, the redoubtable Margaret Fuller, who was one of America’s earliest public feminists, and who would later go on to write and edit for Horace Greely’s New York Tribune.50 In 1841, several of them experimented with communal living at the Brook Farm just outside of Boston. In March 1842, Henry James saw Emerson’s first lectures in New York City and was so impressed that he immediately wrote to him. The letter was quickly followed by a series of personal meetings. Although James, with his strong religious impulses, could not accept Emerson’s “naturalism,” the two men struck up a complicated lifelong friendship. Also in 1842, Henry James discovered the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist-turned-spiritual-philosopher who would come to dominate his thinking in later years.
Despite all the vicissitudes of Henry James’ early religious life, one thing that remained constant, as it did for many Protestant Americans of the time, was his distrust of Catholicism. One of James’ ministers in Albany in the early 1830s, Rev. John N. Campbell, had identified the sizeable immigration of Catholics to America with the Great Apostasy foretold in the Biblical Book of Daniel (and this was well before the truly massive immigration of Irish and German Catholics that began in the late 1840s). Although James was not among those extremists who believed that Catholics should be prohibited from becoming citizens, he did not believe they could remain loyal either to the nation or to the principles on which the republic was founded. “Catholicism would always horrify him,” is how Henry James’ major biographer described his blunt feelings on the matter.51
Henry James was able to devote such energy to the intellectual and spiritual aspects of his life because he had inherited great wealth from his father’s vast estate, after the latter’s death in 1832.52 The family had then been based up the Hudson River in the state capital of Albany. Henry’s father, William, had emigrated from County Cavan in Northern Ireland around 1789.53 William of Albany, as he is often called,54 made his initial fortune in real estate. He became friends with the prominent politician, DeWitt Clinton.55 Clinton was the driving political force behind the building of the Erie Canal. So closely identified did he become with the project that its opponents derogatorily referred to the canal as “Clinton’s Ditch.” William of Albany was an eager investor in the canal, and he made millions from this investment, at one point becoming New York State’s second wealthiest man.56
As is well known, the Erie Canal revolutionized the economic structure of the US as soon as it opened in 1825. The great American geographical challenge, nearly from the time of the first colonies, was how to transport goods and people into and out of the massive continent’s interior. The Appalachian Mountains, running all the way from Maine to Alabama, posed a formidable obstacle in the age of the ox cart. Only two major waterways led to the interior of the country. The first, from the north, was the St. Lawrence River, then controlled by the British with whom the US had been at war as recently as 1815. The second, far to the south, was the Mississippi River, the gateway of which was the city of New Orleans, which was the site of the bloodiest battle in the War of 1812. Another path to the interior was sorely needed. New York City was set on an attractive harbor, but the major river leading from it, the Hudson, went north to Albany, not west into the interior.
The Erie Canal changed all of this by paralleling the (non-navigable) Mohawk River, which flows into the Hudson from the west through a gap between the Adirondacks Mountains and the Alleghany Plateau.57 The canal then cut clear through western New York all the way to Lake Erie (see Figure 1.4). From there, ships could travel west to (what would later become) Chicago, and beyond. The Canal cut the cost for shipping a ton of goods from New York City to Buffalo from $100 to just $9.58 In the process, it changed New York itself from a large but fairly ordinary American city, into the commercial dynamo of North America. Further, the opportunities that this transformation created drew migrants—both foreign and domestic—in numbers that had never before been seen. From 1820 to 1830, the city’s population increased by nearly two-thirds, from 124,000 to 203,000. Over the next decade it would add nearly its entire 1820 population again, rising to 313,000 by 1840.
Credit: Original map published in Betts’s Family Atlas, 1838, pp. 54–55.
William of Albany’s shrewd investment in the greatest venture of the age insured that generations of his descendants would live in comfort and leisure. For his son Henry, who, recall, had lost a leg to fire as a young teen, the inheritance freed him from his probable occupational course—becoming a minister—and enabled him to spend his life thinking independently, even radically, about the spiritual issues that gripped his interest. Money was never to be taken entirely for granted, however, in the erratic political and economic atmosphere of early 19th-century America. President Andrew Jackson’s risky and self-serving fiscal policies59 had led to the Panic of 1837, which caused a severe economic depression that lasted through 1843, just after the younger William James’ birth.
Within weeks of the William’s birth in January 1842, the family moved up from the hurly burly of downtown to the genteel confines of Washington Place. In January of 1843 Henry gave a series of public lectures on Christianity. They seem to have been something less than an unalloyed success. Initial turnout was respectable, but dropped off markedly as the series proceeded.60 Henry renewed his acquaintance with Emerson, however, and met others of the Transcendentalist circle later that year. In April 1843, William’s first brother, Henry Jr., was born. Before the year was out, however, Henry Sr. had decided that he must leave New York in order to find the cosmic answers he sought. The stresses of the bustling, growing, sometimes chaotic New York often drove James to seek more tranquil environs. He considered moving to rural Massachusetts to be closer to Emerson, who shared Henry’s suspicion of and distaste for urban life. The Concord philosopher once wrote, “I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities. They are great conspiracies; the parties are all maskers who have taken mutual oaths of silence not to betray each other’s secret.”61 New York, in particular, he told Henry, made him “shudder as he approached.”62 Henry, however, received little encouragement from Emerson to join him in the New England countryside, so he set his sights on Europe instead. In October 1843, he sold the family home on Washington Place and sailed, with his young family, for England.
Almost immediately upon his arrival, Henry set about meeting the popular Scottish essayist, Thomas Carlyle, whose works he admired, and the influential English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, whose empiricism did not impress him so greatly. Although Henry stayed briefly in London, the family soon escaped city life, renting a country cottage in Windsor, west of London, nearly in the shadow of the great castle there. Once settled in, he set himself to the task of converting his New York lectures on Christianity into a book. In May 1844, however, he experienced a sudden emotional collapse that left him spiritually shaken to his core. It has become customary to quote James’ vivid description of the event:
To all appearance it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damnèd shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influence fatal to life.63
This account, however, was written some 35 years after the events—long after it had taken on a particular meaning in the long arc of his life. It is, thus, perhaps wise to interpret it with some caution.
Unable to recover his composure, James traveled back toward London to Richmond, to take a “water cure” that was then fashionable. The treatment had little effect but while there he met a wealthy supporter of various radical causes, most especially the socialism espoused by Charles Fourier.64 Her name was Sophia Chichester. Upon hearing James’ description of his affliction, she announced that he had experienced what the Swedish religious visionary Emanuel Swedenborg65 called a “vastation”; the final sloughing off of sinful “waste” just prior to spiritual regeneration. James seized upon this interpretation and was soon in London again, purchasing as much of Swedenborg’s quite sizeable oeuvre as he could lay his hands on. He also introduced himself to London’s leading Swedenborgian, James John Garth Wilkinson, with whom he would maintain a lifelong correspondence. Swedenborg had been known to James before this—American Presbyterians mostly regarded him as having been mad66—but now Henry began a close study of Swedenborg’s spiritual thought; especially his mystical verse-by-verse interpretation of the Bible.
In October 1844, almost exactly a year after he had fled to England, James and his family returned to New York. His older son, William, was now closing in on three years of age, and his younger son, Henry Jr., was 18 months old. They returned to the exclusive uptown neighborhood where they had lived before, residing with Mary’s mother at first. While away, the Jameses had missed the worst excesses of the Know-Nothings’ administration of the city. The extremes of nativism had begun to be discredited by the time he returned, and the Democrats were on the verge of a return to power, but suspicion of immigrants was still widespread.
After about a year of living at his mother-in-law’s house, Henry James and his family left the city again, moving up the Hudson to Albany, taking a family house across the street from his own mother’s. He returned to writing up his 1843 lectures on Christianity, and he worked on his Swedenborg studies. Rarely one to compromise with institutional authority, James bickered with the Swedenborgian “New Jerusalem Church” that was centered in Boston. He gave two lectures at an Albany club on social and religious themes, publishing one of them. He also took up Charles Fourier’s brand of socialism and pursued various plans to start a periodical, none of which came to fruition. Two more sons were born—Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) in 1845, named after his Swedenborgian friend in London, and Robertson (Bob) in 1846.
In 1847 James moved his family back to New York City, this time to Fifth Avenue, between Eighth and Ninth streets—a little further north than their former home near Washington Square. The following year he moved even further from downtown, up to Fourteenth Street (see Figure 1.5). Henry took up company with a loose network of New York journalists and became deeply involved with the Fourierist magazine, Harbinger. This periodical had originally been published at the Transcendentalists’ Brook Farm, outside of Boston but, after a fire had destroyed a new building project there, it had moved to an office in New York City. The magazine advanced the cause of utopian socialism but, as one reader observed, “while the principles to which the paper is professedly devoted are distinguished for favoring the common people, the tone of the paper itself seems to us quite aristocratic.”67
Henry regularly contributed funds to support Harbinger, as well as his time. Throughout 1848 he had a desk of his own in the magazine’s office, where he wrote columns and letters under the pen name “Y.S.” His topics were often only tangentially related to the aims of the magazine: at one point, he was moved to defend a clairvoyant Mesmerist who had become popular in the city. He carried on bitter and lengthy disputes, in print, with some of the magazine’s correspondents and critics. In one astonishing essay, James seemed to argue that the wealthy and powerful, by having disentangled themselves from physical wants, become godlike. This divine status was then used to justify the exertion of control over those who are weaker and poorer. He extended this logic to the case of one business driving competitors out of the market—monopolistic capitalism as a sign of divinity? He even went so far as to defend certain types of murder in these terms.68 This seems very nearly the opposite of the utopian socialist vision of Fourier, yet the magazine’s editor appears to have done little to rein James in, perhaps fearing the loss of his patronage.
In 1848 James launched into a passionate, if ill-advised, public defense of Fourier’s radical views on marriage and sexual relations. Essentially, Fourier had argued that the institution of marriage turns people into the “property” of their spouses and that, instead, people should be free to follow their “passionate attractions.” Because these views conflicted so starkly with conventional Christian morality, even the most committed American Fourierists usually evaded the widespread disrepute that would befall their hero by refraining from openly discussing these ideas. If forced to comment, they usually put some distance between themselves and Fourier on this issue, redirecting attention to the political arrangements that the French theorist advanced. James would brook no such compromise and published multiple columns enunciating and vociferously defending Fourier’s view on sexuality, even against other Fourierists. When the Harbinger folded in 1849, James continued to publish in other New York periodicals. Although his actions invited criticism—not least from the Presbyterian owner-editor of the New York Observer Samuel Irenæus Prime, and from the prominent Unitarian clergyman William Henry Channing69—they also brought him a degree of literary celebrity.
Credit: Image from Morse, Sidney E. & Breese, Samuel. Morse’s North American Atlas. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1845.
In 1849 James was invited to speak on the topic of socialism at Boston’s eminently respectable Town & Country Club (in no small part due to the influence of Emerson).70 The lectures were soon repeated in New York, and were notable enough to be cited three decades later in his obituary as having “attracted great attention.”71 In 1850 he began writing regularly, if usually anonymously, for Horace Greely’s New York Tribune. It is easy to see this as the period of Henry James’ greatest intellectual ascendancy. But even as Greely gave James the most public forum he had ever had, he simultaneously published counterarguments of his own, calling into question the seriousness with which James’ ideas should be taken. All this suggests that Greely saw James more as a controversial voice whose eccentric views would sell papers, rather than as a serious thinker whose views deserved sober public consideration.72
Henry James’ chief biographer, Alfred Habegger, recounted James’ writings and debates of this period with all seriousness, if rather unsympathetically. By contrast, one of his eldest son’s most eminent biographers dismissed it all as “small storms of heated rhetoric.”73 Another of William’s biographers described Henry Sr. as “mystical, astonishingly impractical, and absorbed by abstractions.”74 To be sure, Henry James was treated with respect, if not actual importance, by a small circle of New England and Mid-Atlantic social and religious thinkers. Even among them, however, patience with his bombastic style could wear thin. Bronson Alcott, a leader among the Concord Transcendentalists, once described James as “damaged goods.”75
If Henry James had hoped to be the answer to Emerson’s 1837 call for an “American scholar,” he certainly was not. His thought was far too bound up with European traditions, even if they were dissident lines of thought. An interesting comparison with James is his near contemporary, the poet Walt Whitman. Whitman was born on Long Island, raised in Brooklyn, and lived much of his adult life in and around New York City. Like James, Whitman was drawn to the transcendentalist view of the relationship between man, nature, and society. Indeed, Whitman’s first book of poetry, Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, was an explicit response to Emerson’s “call,” not, in his case, for the “American scholar” but, rather, for the emergence of a new, uniquely American kind of poet.76 But Whitman’s style was not entirely commensurate with Emerson’s vision. Whitman’s “nature” was more gritty, immediate, material—in a word, more natural—than Emerson’s idealized, quasi-Romantic vision of the cosmos. Indeed, Whitman is not generally regarded as having been a transcendentalist poet. He is more often characterized as a transitional figure between transcendentalism and realism. Although Emerson heartily praised the first edition of Leaves of Grass,77 as the controversy over Whitman’s sexual (especially homosexual) themes grew, Emerson urged the poet to curb the explicitness of his imagery, and then publicly distanced himself from Whitman.78
In any case, it was not so much the approach to sexuality that distinguished Whitman’s success in establishing a uniquely American voice from James’ failure to do so. It is, instead, in Whitman’s celebration of the new American city—especially New York—with its bustling, diverse, sometimes-violent, but always energetic throngs. This represented a development in Whitman’s lifelong moral journey. Back in 1842—the year that his now-forgotten temperance novel, Franklin Evans, was published—Whitman was the editor of a minor paper called the Aurora which denounced the “Irish rabble” and their “villainous priests,” and endorsed the mob attack on Bishop’s Hughes’ house.79 More than a decade later, though, Whitman rejoiced what he called “America’s busy, teeming, intricate whirl …”80 In that first 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman proclaimed himself to be:
Of every hue and trade and rank, of every caste and religion,
Not merely of the New World but of Africa Europe or Asia … a wandering savage,
A farmer, mechanic, or artist … a gentleman, sailor, lover or quaker,
Prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, or priest.81
By the 1860 edition he could write:
American mouth-songs!
Those of mechanics—each one singing, his, as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat—the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench—the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song—the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at the noon intermission, or at sundown;
The delicious singing of the mother—or of the young wife at work—or of the girl sewing or washing—Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—At night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly, clean-blooded, singing with melodious voices, melodious thoughts.
Come! some of you! still be flooding The States with hundreds and thousands of mouth-songs fit for The States only.82
By contrast, Henry James’ eccentric philosophy seems to have been hardly influenced by the momentous events that were besieging New York at the time he lived there. From the evidence of his writings, he seems to have been almost completely aloof, in a way that only his independent wealth could make possible. His steady moves northward out the city’s core give some hint of his discomfort with what Henry Jr. would later dub, in the novel set in his old neighborhood, the “long, shrill city.”83
By the time Henry James’ two oldest boys, William and Henry Jr., were school-age, their father, decisive as he may have been in other realms, could not settle on an educational plan for them. He shuffled them around from school to school nearly every year. Some schools focused on language training, others on classics and the arts, still others on business skills.84 He seems to have been torn between his respect for classical education and his horror at the corruption, as he saw it, of the “old ways.” The ragtag “common” schools, of course, were not regarded as a serious option for a man of Henry James’ social standing. Even with his choice of the city’s private schools, he complained that his young boys had “import[ed] shocking bad-manners from the street.”85 He was clearly aware of and reacting against the social revolution that was unfolding in the rapidly swelling metropolis. Despite his outward radicalism, Henry James’ voice was still an old one steeped in European sensibility, not a fresh, new American one.
Whatever Henry James’ misgivings about New York’s cosmopolitanism were, it is certain that he was not prepared for the deluge to come. In 1847 alone, over 50,000 Irish Catholics landed in New York, then a city just over 350,000. They were, of course, refugees of the potato famine then spreading across the Emerald Isle.86 By 1850—just three years later—the city’s population had swelled by 45% to over 500,000.87 It has been estimated that over the course of the famine years, as many as 650,000 new Irish arrived in New York City.88 By the mid-1850s, New York had more Irish than Dublin. Most of those who came were not from the Irish capital, however. They had been subsistence tenant farmers from the western portion of the country. They had no experience of cities and possessed few skills that would enable them to successfully navigate a massive metropolis like New York. As a result, the bulk of the new arrivals crowded into the rapidly expanding tenement slums of the city, especially the notorious Five Points (just 1 ½ miles southeast of the Jameses’ Fifth Avenue home of 1847).
If fear and suspicion of Catholic immigration had been a strong current in American politics in the mid-1840s, by the mid-1850s it exploded. New York’s old “Know-Nothing” American Republican Party went national as the Native American Party. It nearly swept the Massachusetts legislature in 1854. Know-Nothing candidates also took mayoralties in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Chicago, and San Francisco (where the key issue was Chinese immigration rather than Irish). In New York, however, where Know-Nothingism had already had its turn, its mayoral candidate finished in third with about a quarter of the vote.
It wasn’t only refugees who came sailing into New York harbor. In 1849, 3000 ships loaded with goods of every kind sailed into the harbor from 150 ports around the world: Europe, California, China, Japan.89 Thus, New York was not only the immigration capital of North America. It had become the undisputed commercial capital as well.
As important a challenge as immigration was, it was far from the only topic on the American political agenda of the early 1850s. Slavery was rapidly becoming a critical issue as well. The Compromise of 1850 delayed the secession of Southern states for another decade, but only at the price of a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act that was unacceptable to the growing contingent of Northern abolitionists. The Act did not resolve, but merely forestalled the question of slavery in the expanding West. The publication, in 1852, of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, helped to transform the abolition of slavery from a “radical” position—one which had been opposed not 20 years before even by Stowe’s father, Lyman Beecher90—into a mainstream current of Northern politics. Just two years later, Democratic Illinois senator Stephen Douglas would design the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which not only created the two territories, but also empowered the settlers within them to determine for themselves whether to embrace slavery. Southerners sprang at the opportunity to expand their regional practice to new sectors of the rapidly growing country and, thereby build what they anticipated would be an impregnable political fortress around it. At the same time, a former Whig congressman from Illinois by the name of Abraham Lincoln would start to make a national name for himself by vocally opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act (though he would deny being an abolitionist) and, in the process, begin a rivalry with Douglas that would grow to historical proportions over the next several years. The passage of the Act persuaded the radical abolitionist John Brown that only violent action could bring slavery to an end. His “Pottawatomie Massacre” of 1856 was a major event in the violent clashes between 1854 and 1858 that collectively came to be known as “Bleeding Kansas.” National attention was also focused on the story of a young family who escaped from their enslavement in Kentucky in January 1856, crossing the rarely-frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati. When southern bounty hunters and US Marshals caught up with them, the young mother of the family, Margaret Garner, killed one of her four children and attempted to kill the other three, rather than have them returned to bondage. At her subsequent trial, the defense argued that the murder charge in Ohio should take precedence over the claims of the Fugitive Slave Act. The judge disagreed, and sent Garner back to Kentucky along with her husband.91 The following year, 1857, saw the momentous Dred Scot decision, in which the Supreme Court declared that no person of African ancestry could claim US citizenship. Two years later, John Brown returned to national prominence with his failed raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in 1859.
What Henry James thought of all this is something of a mystery. Most of his published writings betray little concrete recognition of the hoi polloi, apart from a condescending presumption that they would be better served by a Fourierist-Swedenborgian social-religious order. Although the early 1850s were among Henry James’ most productive literary years, they were mostly occupied by various spiritual and religious wars of his own making: Moralism and Christianity was published in 1850, Lectures and Miscellanies in 1852, The Church of Christ, Not an Ecclesiasticism in 1854, and The Nature of Evil in 1855. In one of his best-known essays, “Democracy and Its Issues,” he promoted an anarchic ideal of democracy which, he said, “explodes the old conceptions of government” and in which people would spontaneously exercise the “exclusive right to govern themselves” without benefit of elections, assemblies, legislation, or other institutions by which democracies typically operate. Henry James dismissed all of this civic machinery as the product of societies being “imperfectly evolved.”92 Apart from a rather generic observation that the so-called “dangerous classes” were only so because of systemic injustices which must be resolved,93 he gave little indication of how the fractious city in which he lived—with its often-violent ethnic, religious, and economic clashes—might eventually attain his utopian vision beyond declaring, rather enigmatically, that the removal of “those factitious restraints which keep appetite and passion on the perpetual look out for escape,” would “instantly” result in the brotherhood of humankind.94
James’ neighborhood, of course, was well out of the urban ruckus. Its residents were mostly businessmen, lawyers, and other professionals. His household, however, employed a steady stream of servants, mostly young Irish Catholic women. His youngest child, Alice (born in 1848), remarked much later in her life that, “we are quite wrong in thinking that our servants lie because they are Catholics.”95 This may give the most honest indication of the feeling her family had toward the new immigrants. Henry Jr. would put the matter more delicately in his novel, Washington Square, in which a character opines that “Irish immigrants … alight, with large appetites, in the New World.”96 Politically speaking, Henry James, Sr. was generally a moderate Whig. He had little patience for Democrats of the day who tended towards populism nationally, and pandered to working-class immigrants in New York. Surprisingly, however, he publicly supported the (sporadic) efforts of the Tammany Hall Democratic mayor Fernando Wood to clean up vice in the city. It may be that James had become, as his biographer claims, “increasingly alienated by New York’s filth, disorder, and corruption.”97 More personally, however, it may have been that James became passionate specifically about the topic of gambling because one of his younger brothers, John Barber James, had fallen victim to professional gamblers and Henry had been involved in cleaning up the ensuing mess.98
Whatever disruption of the old order was caused by the country’s new arrivals, even more was caused by the emergence of new technologies. The 1850s marked the ascendance of steam powered trains in New York City. By 1851, Albany was connected to Buffalo via the New York & Erie railway, making virtually redundant the Canal that had once been celebrated as one of the greatest engineering feats in all of human history. Later that same year, steam engines began regularly rumbling directly into the city.99 Terminating up at 32nd street (for fear that a locomotive might explode in the midst of the crowded metropolis), passengers and cargo would then be loaded onto old horse-drawn rail cars and driven down along 10th avenue, stopping at the end of James’ own 14th street, about four long blocks from his house. They would then continue down the western side of the island before cutting slightly inland to Hudson, and finally down to Chambers street (where a subway station sits today).100
The 1850s was also a decade of major political realignment nationally. The presidential election of 1848 had seen the victory of the Mexican-American war hero Zachary Taylor who, although a Virginia slave owner, had opposed the expansion of slavery into the newly acquired, formerly Mexican territories in the west. Whatever his intentions might have been, “Old Rough and Ready,” as Taylor was known, died just sixteen months into his term. He was succeeded by his Vice President, Millard Fillmore, a New Yorker who favored the expansion of slavery. In addition, in the wake of the California gold rush, Fillmore oversaw the transformation of that distant, wild, western territory into a major economic engine for the country as a whole. Thousands of people made the three-month ship voyage from the east around Cape Horn, in a desperate stab at treasure. Some, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, made millions, engineering passages across Central America, cutting a few days off the trip. Thousands more attempted the more even dangerous voyage across the vast plains and mountain ranges by means of ox cart. Some of the greatest fortunes were made by those who shipped eastern goods to the west coast, selling them to those who hoped to dig riches out of the ground or pan it out of the rivers. A man might or might not find gold, but he would always need food, clothing, tools, and furniture.101 Perhaps the most famous of these opportunistic entrepreneurs today were the three Jewish tailors, all brothers, who had just immigrated to New York from Bavaria: Jonas, Louis, and Levi Strauss. Their tough canvas, and later denim, trousers, characteristically died indigo, became the blue jeans worn by millions today.
President Fillmore was forced to admit California as a “free” state, but the future of slavery in the west remained the most pressing political issue of the day. Making merely unsettled matters into positively unstable ones, Fillmore, as a sitting president, failed to win the presidential nomination of his own party at the 1852 Whig convention. The party selected, instead, a military man, General Winfield Scott.102 During the Whig nomination process, Henry James complained in a letter to Emerson that the “votaries of Mars” would give Scott the Whig nomination.103 In the general election of 1852, however, James supported Scott for president. With the Whigs in disarray after the nomination debacle, the Democratic nominee, Franklin Pierce, easily defeated Scott for the presidency, carrying 27 of 31 states. The Whig Party immediately began to disintegrate over the issue of slavery. Anti-slavery Whigs joined with “Free-Soil” Democrats under the banner of the new “Republican Party” in 1854. Whigs who were not moved by the slavery issue aligned themselves with the Native American Party, which had been re-energized by a string of state and municipal victories in 1854, and then adopted the simplified name, the “American Party.” Henry James does not seem to have joined this group officially, but did echo the commonly heard fear that the Pope’s agents were swarming the country, plotting to overthrow the government.104 The American Party and the remaining Whigs both nominated Fillmore in the 1856 presidential election. But Fillmore carried only Maryland, finishing not only behind the victor, Democrat James Buchanan, but also behind the abolitionist Republican nominee, John C. Frémont of California.105 The debacle effectively crushed the last vestiges of Whiggism in the US, and set the country on an inexorable course toward civil war.
More than a year prior to Buchanan’s election, however, Henry James decided to flee with his family to Europe once again. Whether and to what degree this latest departure was due to the increasing clatter and chaos of the city, or a result of the dire political posture of the nation more broadly, or in deference to another idiosyncratic spasm of Henry’s eccentric philosophical spirit, it is hard to say. They set sail across the Atlantic on June 27, 1855 and, although they would ultimately return to the US, they would never again live in New York City.
New York, of course, would continue on.
