In 1809 — exactly 200 years ago and exactly 200 years after Henry Hudson’s voyage to the New World, on the basis of which his Dutch backers founded a colony that would become New York — a book appeared that gave New Yorkers a whole new twist on their city and its origins. “A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty” was perhaps the oddest volume that had yet been published in the still-new United States. It was a vast, wacky, faux-historical farce of a tome that, against all logic, became a bestseller.
The author was Washington Irving, though the title page listed the fictional Diedrich Knickerbocker. So great was the book’s influence that Knickerbocker would later become a reference for everything from a Gilded Age Manhattan dandy to the city’s professional basketball team. Although it was a work of fiction, Irving gave his work enough of a ring of truth that it could be taken seriously. Thanks to Irving’s fanciful imagination, 19th century New Yorkers came to think of their earliest history as one in which comical, chubby, pink-faced Dutchmen waddled around the streets of old New Amsterdam, smoking their clay pipes and getting into mischief. Then, in this popular understanding, the English took over in 1664, renamed the city New York, and its real, serious history got under way.
In fact, the Dutch colony of New Netherland was a serious and immensely bold undertaking. Its founders had their own goals — the Dutch were fighting a war against Spain, and wanted to use Manhattan Island as a base from which to attack Spanish ships, plus they had their eye on beaver pelts and other furs — but the lasting legacy of the colony was something else entirely. The Dutch Republic was a strangely mixed place in 17th century Europe. All societies of the time were, or wanted to be, pure. England was English; France was French. Mixing different peoples together was thought to weaken a country. Thanks partly to its geography (it was flat, so easy to run to or to invade), Holland had large numbers of foreigners in its cities. As a result, the Dutch invented something new, which would be world-historically important: the notion of “tolerance” — not a welcome embrace of others but more of an official policy of putting up with people who were different from you — which became a kind of social glue. This society-wide rejection of the idea of racial or religious purity was remarkably successful: The tiny nation of Holland became a global empire thanks in part to the way it solved the “problem” of diversity.
Tolerance, then, became part of the colony of New Netherland, and especially of its capital of New Amsterdam, at the southern tip of Manhattan. New York’s immigrant culture is the great legacy of the Dutch period. New York’s unique beginning explains why, after the English takeover, it developed along very different lines than Boston, or any other place in the colonies. By the 19th century, even as Washington Irving’s cartoonish characterization of New York’s founders proliferated, the trajectory that the Dutch had set in motion had resulted in a completely new society.
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What kind of society? Intense, teeming, semi-anarchical . . . New York in the 1800s was no place for the faint of heart. The Dutch had seeded a colony with mixed ethnicities, and two centuries later those seeds had become a tangled, dense urban jungle. Where Boston or Charleston could rely on a relatively homogenous society, New York was such a jumble of races and creeds that it never seemed able to decide on anything. During the Revolution, it had stood out as much as a loyalist stronghold as a bastion of patriotism. The intense mix of its society partly explains why, when the Civil War broke out, New Yorkers did not support the northern cause en masse. A substantial part of the population sympathized with the Confederacy, and the fierce split in New York society, particularly among immigrant groups at the bottom of the social scale, came to a head in the infamous Draft Riots in July 1863, which were as devastating to the city as an actual battle. So deep were the divisions over the war that Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York, actually proposed at one point that the city go its own way entirely and secede from the Union.
No place better illustrates the teeming profusion of 19th century New York than the infamous Five Points neighborhood. It doesn’t exist anymore, but it stood in present-day Chinatown and was a maze of ethnicities and rivalries. Charles Dickens — no stranger to urban mayhem — was startled by its “narrow ways diverging to the left and right, and reeking every where with dirt and filth,” and by “the coarse and bloated faces at the doors . . .” But if the hordes of new immigrants pouring in gave Five Points among the highest poverty, murder and disease rates in the country, they also brought unparalleled vitality. Five Points was both the epicenter of Irish music in America and the birthplace of tap dancing and the earliest forms of jazz.
No government — city, state or federal — was equipped to deal with the intensity of immigration, and the poverty and the ethnic and other divisions that came with it, that flowered in 19th century New York. So Five Points, the Bowery and other areas developed their own laws. Various groups — such as butchers and firefighters, most of them organized by ethnicity — ran neighborhoods, kept the peace (sort of) and demanded payment from residents. Over time, they became the infamous “gangs of New York.” The most revered and feared of the gangs, including the Dead Rabbits, the Roach Guards and the Bowery Boys, controlled much of the city.
The ironic thing about the gangs was that the one thing that seemed to unite them was their hatred of newcomers. The island city was founded as a mixed settlement and they themselves were immigrants, but Manhattan, as far as they were concerned, couldn’t hold any more transplants. The violence that erupted regularly was often directed at recent arrivals, most notably the Irish.
The gangs were part of the city’s political landscape. Political leaders joined forces with gang leaders as they tried to gain power. This unholy alliance reached its high (or low) point with the career of William Magear Tweed, a k a Boss Tweed. Tweed is considered the epitome of New York political corruption, and with good reason. As the boss of all ward bosses in the Tammany Hall political machine, Tweed siphoned money from construction and railroads, rigged elections, lived like a king, and wielded power like a caesar.
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Both Tweed’s career and New York’s rise in the 19th century can be traced back to the city’s Dutch beginnings, for Tweed’s swagger and New York’s sprawling influence had to do with the success of the mixed society the Dutch set in motion. But history has largely overlooked the fact that Tweed was also a force for good (even if his first priority was himself), and in many ways he anticipated the kind of political change that was to come. He streamlined the naturalization process for poor immigrant families and provided jobs and medical care at a time when government did not provide social services. Along the way, Tweed helped create Riverside Drive, Prospect Park and Central Park, and otherwise played a part in one of the other great trends of the era: the urbanization of New York.
For over the course of the century Manhattan lost its bucolic vestiges as the grid pattern first envisioned in 1811 steadily engulfed the island, with the farms and pastures north of 59th Street succumbing to right-angled streets and avenues. As the city’s wild places were tamed, lawlessness gave way to social order. The social services that New York first provided ad hoc — via the gangs, then via Tweed’s graft and chicanery — eventually became institutionalized. Many of the policies of the New Deal, and basic elements of the nation’s social safety net today, such as Social Security and Medicare, had their origins in New York and the need to manage and aid its immigrant groups.
And there were other ways in which 19th century New York both pointed back to the Dutch founding and foreshadowed what was to come. The first Dutch settlers had used Manhattan as a base and traveled up the Hudson River to the intersection with the Mohawk River. Indians brought furs from the west, down the twisty Mohawk, and at this intersection traded them. The first settlers, then, knew this route was a vital corridor into the continent. In the 19th century, that potential was finally realized. When the Erie Canal was completed, in 1825, it bridged gaps in the Mohawk River, allowing for a contiguous waterway from the Hudson River all the way to the Great Lakes. From that moment, the cities around that intersection — Albany, Troy, Schenectady — took off as industrial era powerhouses. From that moment too, the cities on the Great Lakes — from Chicago and Detroit to Gary, Ind., to Green Bay, Wis. — rapidly developed. And after the canal was opened New York quickly became the largest and busiest port in the nation.
So, in both a social and a geographic sense New York in the 19th century was elemental to what America would become. But there was another influence the city would have, arguably greater still. America in the 1800s was gripped by a hunger for “purity.” This was the time when the popular reverence for the Puritan and Pilgrim founders of the American saga was at its height. Organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution became immensely popular. Politically, this took the form of an anti-immigrant stance. It had its roots in the belief that the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England had left the corruption of the Old World and been allowed by God to settle in a new Promised Land. This in turn related to the idea of “manifest destiny,” that Americans had a God-given right to move westward, take the land from the natives, and use it for their own, “nobler” purposes.
New Yorkers took part in this national longing for purity — the term manifest destiny itself was coined by a New York journalist, John O’Sullivan, in 1845 — but their city suggested another reality. They were half-breeds and polyglots; their streets were jumbles of languages and races and religions. They may have wanted to believe in American “purity,” but the voices echoing in the halls of their own tenements told them it was only myth.
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Even while they struggled to hold their Puritan convictions, however, those 19th century New Yorkers were building another American story, one symbolized by the Statue of Liberty, which arrived in New York Harbor in 1886, and which would later be given new reality when nearby Ellis Island became the world’s biggest immigrant processing center. This was the story of America as the land of immigrants, the land of opportunity for all. New York’s multi-ethnic founding, its world-class harbor, and its gritty and freewheeling variation on the upward mobility theme meant that as the great waves of immigrants came from Europe over the course of the 19th century, they came by and large into New York Harbor.
Many of them went no farther, and helped the city take what would be its full, mature shape, as it annexed first The Bronx, then Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, so that by 1898 New York City was complete in its five-borough form.
But many had other plans. They took in the whole heaving, roiling stew of the city and were beguiled by this newly unfolding chapter of the human drama. They carried what they found with them — jangling in their heads, soothing their hearts — as they boarded wagon trains and moved westward: to Ohio, Kansas, California.
They called this raw striving force and this fecund culture “America.” In reality, it was New York, but they didn’t know any better, and in the end they were right: It had become America.
Russell Shorto is author of “The Island at the Center of the World,” about the Dutch founding of Manhattan, and, most recently, of “Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason.”