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It was late 1865. The Civil War had ended, but a national healing had just begun.
Changes were afoot. Changes like soldiers returning to New York. Future citizens arriving from Europe. Separate municipalities coming together to form a great city. So much of life was in transition.
◀ After the war, thousands of veterans returned to New York City and elsewhere. Some were plagued by what we would call PTSD today. (PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, is a condition in which a person has trouble recovering after experiencing a disturbing event.) Many would arrive with back pay and bonus pay in their pockets only to be scammed out of it by clever con artists. Employment was scarce, especially for those who returned with amputated limbs. But prejudice against the veterans was abundant. Throngs of Union soldiers walked the streets of New York City. An 1865 article in Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper described it this way:
This arises mainly from the vast influx of labor suddenly let loose upon the community by the mustering-out of our armies . . . and by the hard but truthful fact that there is a prejudice in the minds of employers against the returned soldiers.
As difficult as it was for White soldiers after the war, circumstances for Black veterans – many from New York – were difficult in a different way. The U.S. War Department had authorized only White soldiers to return home. Not Black soldiers. The United States Colored Troops who survived the war were ordered to enforce the postwar policies of the government, known as Reconstruction. They were sent to places like Texas, where their lives were in constant danger due to racism. ▶
◀ Returning veterans added stress to a city that already had more than its share. Streets were full of trash, and black smog from coal-burning factories polluted the air. Diseases like tuberculosis were spreading. A solution was badly needed. The solution came in the person of William “Boss” Tweed. In 1870, New York State gave Tweed power over local politics and politicians. He used that power to clean up the city and help immigrants – and also to make millions of dollars for himself through corruption. He let companies pad the costs of city projects and pocketed the extra money. He manipulated elections to put his friends in office. And more. In the end, he was found out and went to jail.
If you told someone you were from New York City, the person might want to know which part. In 1898, New York City was created from an area that would become the five boroughs – Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Before 1898, the area was a mix of different communities, towns, and counties. Consolidating, or merging, these separate places was a controversial process. Many who opposed consolidation described it as a project of pride. It was about bigness for the sake of bigness, they said, nothing else. Andrew Haswell Green, president of New York State’s Commission of Municipal Consolidation Inquiry, argued differently: ▶
Were this criticism just, our community is the only one in history which had heeded it to the point of dwarfing our real dimensions under the sham arrangement of separate municipalities.
▲ Starting in the 1880s, streams of immigrants began arriving in New York – from Germany, Spain, Portugal, China, Italy, and Ireland. Many settled in New York City. Others put down roots in Buffalo and other communities. People from China came to escape natural disasters, like floods and droughts. People from southern Italy came to escape poverty. Jews came from Spain and Portugal to escape religious persecution. And people from Ireland came to escape a great famine. As one journalist observed at the time, “New York is the great whirlpool of the races.”
◀ The Statue of Liberty was the first thing many immigrants saw as their ship approached New York Harbor. The statue was constructed in France, taken apart, and then shipped to New York, where it was reassembled. In 1886, it was unveiled. American poet Emma Lazarus wrote a poem about the statue. In 1903, these words from the poem were added to the base:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
REFLECTION
Reflect on Emma Lazarus’s poem. What do you think it means? Is it relevant in today’s world? Share your thinking.
Think Piece!
Think about the many millions of people who passed through Ellis Island. Is it possible that one of them was an ancestor of yours? How could you find out?
◀▲ If there were ever “two New Yorks,” they came about during the Gilded Age of 1870 to 1900. On the one hand were families of tremendous wealth. They lived in the mansions built along Fifth Avenue, on what some call the city’s “spine.” On the other hand were people living in tenements. These were cramped apartments that once housed a single family but now housed as many people as possible. By 1900, 2.3 million people – about two-thirds of New York City’s population at the time – lived in tenements.
