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PA R T I Rise For a century after its 1666 founding, Newark existed largely as a quiet, deeply religious, but otherwise unexceptional village. As the network of roads expanded in the pre-Revolution era, Newark found itself on the main path between the Hudson and Delaware rivers—the most important route in American colonial history. Once bridges were built in the late 1700s to efﬁ ciently connect Newark to Jersey City, and onward to Manhattan via ferry, the tiny town fulﬁ lled its destiny and emerged as a key transportation and trade hub.

It is here, just after the colonies won their independence and Newark started its swift transformation from minor village to powerful city, that our narrative begins in full. Newark grew at an extraordinary pace in the early1800s, from forty-ﬁ ve hundred at the turn of the century to just under twenty thousand when it incorporated as a city in 1836, up to 71,941 on the eve of the Civil War. Newark’s standing as an industrial power and important hub—connected to roads, rails, and canals—blossomed during this boom time period, covered in chapter 1.

Much of the growth during the early 1800s came due to the runaway success of manufacturers producing leather and other goods sold primarily to the South, lending Newark a reputation as a “Southern workshop.” Men such as William Wright, a Newark mayor, U.S. senator, and preeminent saddle manufacturer with long-established trading partners throughout the South, openly sympathized with the Confederate cause, creating an especially tense and bitter atmosphere in Newark during the Civil War years, described in chapter 2.

After peace between the North and South was declared, Newark again experienced brisk growth as businesses expanded in both output and scope 13Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 14rise and immigrants eagerly ﬂ ooded into the city to sign on for abundant factory jobs. Newark reached a quarter-million residents by 1900, and in the course of the next decade, the city welcomed another one hundred thousand newcomers, representing its largest-ever population inﬂ ux. Chapter 3 spans this era, roughly from the end of the Civil War to 1910.

Growing pains accompanied the wild population spurts during Newark’s nineteenth-century rise to power and prominence. Efforts to build sewers, pave roads, and otherwise improve the city’s infrastructure and health lagged behind the needs of the public. Political bosses rose to power and retained inﬂ uence through the dispensing of patronage jobs and control of the ballot box. Businessmen and politicians—who were often one and the same—decided public-policy issues despite blatant conﬂ icts of interest. As residents ﬁ lled out the city’s borders, foresighted leaders realized they faced a problem potentially even more worrisome than corruption: those borders would likely be too constricting to accommodate Newark’s ambition to become one of the country’s leading metropolises. Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved.  1 Corporation sheltered puritan village to teeming industrial hub The people who founded Newark might be thought of as the purest of New England’s Puritans. Many of the families had moved from place to place for decades, always on the quest to establish a theocratic outpost where they could live quiet lives ruled strictly by God and the Bible. Their journeys had taken them from England to the Netherlands, Massachusetts, Long Island, and, eventually, to a trio of villages in New Haven Colony: Milford, Branford, and Guilford. Each settlement along the way failed to prove satisfactory largely because outside authorities—typically colonial governments or the king of England himself—prevented the rigid, uncompromising Puritans from forming the entirely God-focused community they desired.

Frustrated but not ready to give up on their theocratic ambitions, in the early1660s, the Puritans sent Robert Treat, a leading citizen of Milford, and a small party of envoys to inquire about settling Dutch-controlled land west of Staten Island. Treat’s party landed in New Amsterdam, boarded the private barge of Peter Stuyvesant, the gruff, peg-legged director general of New Netherland, and sailed onward through the narrow strait called Kill Van Kull (“water channel” in old Dutch) beyond a large bay to a place known as Achter Col (“behind the bay”). 1 The Dutch sometimes referred to all the territory that became northern New Jersey as Achter Col.

The area toured by Treat and his colleagues seemed ideal. Above the banks of a wide river were well-drained, fairly level lands that would suit farms, roads, and homes. A Dutch document written about the time of their visit described the region as having “the best climate in the whole world,” including abundant deer and other game, rivers and bays ﬁ lled with “excel- lent fat and wholesome ﬁ sh,” and fertile land that produced apples, pears, peaches, and melons of a quality that “far surpasseth” any in Europe. 2 The site 15Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 16rise also seemed remote and protected, which were assets to a band of Puritans hoping to establish a community free of outside inﬂ uence.

During land negotiations, Stuyvesant and his council agreed to let the Puritans practice their religion freely. New Netherland ofﬁ cials, however, wanted to reserve limited oversight, including the rights to conﬁ rm (or deny) the appointment of ofﬁ cials and approve (or deny) local laws and ordinances. 3 The Puritans, seeking absolute autonomy, balked.

Robert Treat again returned to this same area in early 1666, which by then had fallen under British control alongside New Amsterdam, immediately renamed New York. The territory west of Staten Island christened as New Jersey suddenly had new owners—John Berkeley and George Carteret, both wealthy friends of the royals—who were so eager to attract settlers (and begin collecting taxes) that they were willing to allow communities to pick their own ministers. The landmark Concessions and Agreements document, which served as both an advertisement and contract for early New Jersey settlers, also promised that so long as inhabitants didn’t “disturbe the civill peace,” they would not be punished “for any difference of opinion or practice in matters of Religion.” Treat and approximately three hundred people from Milford, Branford, and Guilford seized the opportunity and moved to New Jersey, banding together to try once more to establish the stable theocratic community that for decades had seemed just out of reach. 4 The settlers were an extremely close-knit bunch, many with ties stretching back to England. Of the sixty- nine adult male settlers, nine were related to at least three other men by blood or marriage. 5 While early records simply called the community something along the lines of “our Town on Passaick River,” people often referred to it as Milford.

A map from 1700 in fact labeled the area west of the river as both its tentative early name, Milford, and the one which survived, Newark. 6 Within a year of the initial settlement, the community had ofﬁ cially renamed itself in honor of the place where Abraham Pierson, its ﬁ rst minister, was ordained, Newark-on-Trent, England.

For much of the colonial era, Newarkers largely remained an inward- looking community, where lives revolved around farm work and God. The sheltered Puritan town grew slowly. There were 86 families in 1673, increasing to 100 families by 1680. 7 Alexander MacWhorter, Newark’s leading minister in the late 1700s, said it best when describing the town’s early settlers as “a remarkably plain, simple, sober, praying, orderly, and religious people.” 8 As the decades passed, however, it became increasingly clear that, because of inevitable outside inﬂ uences and simple human nature, Newark could not Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. corporation17 live up to its lofty theocratic ambitions. Conﬂ icts over land rights, religion, and business practices split the populace along class, wealth, and spiritual lines, bringing to an end Newark’s era as a one-church community.

Newark’s settlers never intended for their community to become a trade hub, let alone a teeming city. Through the late 1700s, both Elizabethtown, where New Jersey’s ﬁ rst governors established their center of power, and Perth Amboy, a prized port at the mouth of the Raritan River, were regarded as far more important towns than Newark. Elizabethtown, now known simply as Elizabeth, held the title of most populous New Jersey community at least through the Revolution. Perth Amboy, with its magniﬁ cent harbor, seemed destined to become New Jersey’s great metropolis, perhaps even rivaling Manhattan.

Ironically, Newark, which was founded partly because its location seemed isolated in the 1660s, transformed into a trade center due to that same loca- tion, which wasn’t nearly as remote a century later. Its role as a hub evolved with northern New Jersey’s growing system of roads. At ﬁ rst, crude dirt paths connected Newark to copper mines north and west of town, to villages that fell within its borders, including the modern-day Oranges, Bloomﬁ eld, and Montclair, and of course to neighboring Elizabethtown.

As the road network expanded, surveyors came to the obvious realiza- tion that Newark lay a short distance directly west of lower Manhattan.

New Jersey authorities saw the potential of connecting the city to Newark, as well as villages and farms farther west. Bridging the two rivers on the route, the Hackensack and Passaic, was out of the question in colonial times.

Construction would have been too costly and time-consuming. In 1765, ofﬁ cials authorized the establishment of ferries to cross the rivers and a new road between Newark and Powles Hook (Jersey City), where ferries already passed back and forth to Manhattan. A news account described the system—a model of efﬁ ciency in the era—as “very commodious for Travellers,” offering “short and easy Access of a large Country to the Markets of the City of New-York.” 9 Newark suddenly became a stopover on the main route connecting the Hudson and Delaware rivers. The thoroughfare was the most important in all of America, and “as ﬁ ne a road as ever trod,” in the words of founding father John Adams. 10 The village of Newark, with perhaps a thousand residents and 150 homes at the time, would never feel remote or sheltered again.

Newark’s Matthias Ward began charging for passage on the new road aboard his stage wagon at least as early as 1767. By the following year, Ward was advertising two daily round trips (Sundays excepted), most likely in open-air, ﬂ at-bed carts rolling on four wheels pulled by horses. 11Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 18rise By no little coincidence, Newark began hosting an annual autumn market for buying and selling livestock and farm equipment. “Newark, from its Vicinity to New-York, and other Circumstances attending its Situation, is by many, esteemed a most proper Place for such a Cattle Market,” a notice read.

12 Entrepreneurs in the pre-revolutionary period opened businesses in Newark at a steady pace, which in turn led to further commercial oppor- tunities. For all the growth, however, as the conﬂ ict between the colonies and mother England loomed, the town’s status was still merely that of a tiny cog in an expanding transportation network. In 1776, an English traveler passing through described Newark in a few terse words: “Nothing more than a Village.” 13 New Jersey, poised between two cities with opposite sympathies during the Revolutionary War—New York, a Tory haven, and patriots’ stronghold Philadelphia—saw more than its share of bloodshed and horror during the war. Newark, on the main land route linking the Hudson and Delaware rivers, was a particularly unstable, strife-ridden place through much of the struggle. Alternating forces came through one after another, retreating, attacking, encamping, foraging for supplies, and plundering in every way imaginable.

Once the volatile, destructive war years had finally ended, Newark recouped, rebuilt, and looked forward to a new century, one full of potential.

In many ways, by the mid-1790s Newark appeared to be a completely different town than it had been a few decades earlier. Upon visiting in 1795, a French duke complimented Newark as “one of the ﬁ nest villages in America.” 14 East of Broad Street, around modern-day Kinney Street, sat the grand six-acre estate of William Burnet, a patriot doctor, ofﬁ cer, and conﬁ dante of George Washington who had been appointed as a judge after the war.

Farther north on Broad, past freshly repaired houses and shops selling shoes, clothing, cabinets, hats, and other goods, the Presbyterian reverend Alexander MacWhorter presided over his spacious parsonage. Across the street, Samuel Sayres, a major in the Continental cause, served as proprietor of the Eagle Tavern—one of no fewer than four inns then lining Broad Street. 15 Half a block farther north was where the real changes had taken place.

The old county courthouse had been converted into a jail, seeing as the old Presbyterian meeting house had been transformed into a courthouse.

Tombstones jutting up behind the former meeting house revealed that the burying ground still remained, however. Next door, Jabez Parkhurst, a town Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. corporation19 clerk for several years, operated a tavern in his fourteen-room home. After dismounting horses and tying them up at a trough in the yard, Parkhurst’s guests could enjoy a drink in the barroom with a view of the graveyard.

Directly opposite on Broad Street was the handsome stone New Presbyterian Church, opened in 1791 with ornate Venetian windows behind the pulpit.

From atop the church’s 204-foot-high steeple, one could look eastward over treetops, the Passaic, and vast marshlands for glimpses of Staten Island, the Hudson River, and Manhattan. 16 A thirty-second walk later, one would arrive at the town crossroads, Broad and Market. Clusters of taverns, stores, government ofﬁ ces, and neat, two- story homes with backyard gardens extended in each direction. Many of the buildings were owned by Continental ofﬁ cers, including John Cummings, a colonel and later a president of Newark’s ﬁ rst bank, and William Pennington, a poor orphan who enlisted and was promoted successively, ending the war as brevet captain. Apprenticed to a hatter before the war, Pennington operated a successful hat store next door to a blacksmith and a barbershop. He later became New Jersey governor, as did his son, also named William Pennington.

A few doors away from the hat store, Aaron Pennington, William Sr.’s brother, ran one of Newark’s ﬁ rst newspapers, the Centinel of Freedom. 17 It was during this era that Market Street was named, for its function.

Previously, the road had been referred to simply as “the East and West street.” Leading from the Passaic River ferry landing, past Broad Street, westward to villages and farms, the street naturally evolved into an area where merchants met with farmers and purchased butter, grain, meat, and produce. In May of 1795, a new two-story stone building opened its doors on Market Street as the ofﬁ cial spot to conduct such business. In between Broad Street and what became Halsey Street, the tiny twenty-square-foot building had a public school upstairs and two ground-ﬂ oor stalls serving as the town’s ﬁ rst market.

With its opening, proper city life was feasible. Families at last had a conve- nient place to buy the fruits, vegetables, chickens, and most everything else they formerly had to barter for or raise themselves.

Swinging from a post at the northeast corner of Broad and Market, a large sign depicting a foxhunt announced the entrance to the hub of all town activity, the Hounds and Horn tavern. Run by a beefy, affable, unapologetic gossip named Archer Griffon, the inn was the town’s ﬁ nest and most popular spot to take tea, toss back grog, feast on quail, and hobnob with wealthy travelers and local power brokers. For spells, all the mail riders and stage coaches bypassed all other stops when entering Newark and pulled directly to the tavern’s stables. President John Adams would be a Hounds and Horn visitor more than once.Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 20rise Continuing up Broad Street, across from the Military Training common, Newark Academy’s latest building had been completed in 1792. The town’s ﬁ nest private school, established in 1774 and currently run by President (and Presbyterian minister) Alexander MacWhorter, was now housed in a stately three-story building near the corner of what appropriately became Academy Street. Another tavern, a carpenter’s shop, a saddlery business, the ofﬁ ce of the town’s other newspaper, the Newark Gazette, and several homes ﬁ lled surrounding blocks. Immediately north of the training ground, the landmark Trinity Church stood where it always had, but it too had experienced recent change. The Church of England understandably couldn’t survive in America after the Revolution. So, like other Anglican afﬁ liates in America, Trinity Church became an Episcopal afﬁ liate.

Just after Broad Street bends to the northwest, a street extended eastward to the river and remarkably continued up and over a bridge crossing it.

State legislators had realized that the system of roads and ferries organized in1765 was outdated, and in 1790 approved building bridges for both the Passaic and Hackensack rivers. Both were completed by the summer of 1795.

The Passaic’s nearly 500-foot-long expanse, “neatly framed of wood, with a draw bridge, to let the schooners and other vehicles pass,” in the words of an English traveler, was composed of several layers of logs covered with sod and gravel. 18 An even more impressive bridge, double the length of the Passaic’s, stretched the Hackensack.

More than any other advancement, the introduction of these two bridges placed Newark unmistakably on the path to growth and urbanity. America, then a ﬂ edgling nation in which more than 90 percent of men still farmed for a living, stood poised for enormous change. No town would transform more, or more rapidly, than Newark.

The new bridges established Newark as the hub of northern New Jersey, where manufacturing and industry were already taking root. Up the Passaic River, the Great Falls proved to be an irresistible power source. The visionary Alexander Hamilton and a group of land speculators had recently chosen the spot for an ambitious, experimental new town—designed in part by Washington, D.C., architect Charles L’Enfant—that was expressly created for industry, textiles in particular. The town was named in honor of then- governor William Paterson, who allowed the businessmen to operate for ten years tax free. After a slow start, in which L’Enfant’s beautiful but impractical plans had to be jettisoned, the Great Falls district’s mills and factories attained fame for churning out silk, locomotives, and Colt revolvers, among other goods. Paterson, sometimes pointed to as the spot where America’s industrial revolution was born, eventually became New Jersey’s third biggest city. 19Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. corporation21 Even before the Passaic and Hackensack bridges opened, Newark had developed steadily as a country town. Besides its reputation as a meeting place for trading farm goods, Newark’s prime location and natural resources attracted small-time merchants and craftsmen to set up businesses. In the early days of the new nation, being productive wasn’t only a means to make money, it was the duty of every patriotic citizen. With “the increase of Wool being of the highest importance to the interest and prosperity of this Country,” Newark duly sponsored a contest. “The Person who shall shear off of his own Sheep in the Spring of 1789, the greatest quantity of good clean Wool,” won £10, with runners-up receiving £2 to £8. 20 During the decade after the war ended, the town’s population roughly doubled, to two thousand. One Newark visitor reported that during the same time period land values tripled, from £10 to £30 per acre. 21 Once the bridges expedited travel to and from Newark, the population mushroomed, more than doubling again in the last ﬁ ve years of the eighteenth century.

In terms of number of residents and overall importance, Newark quickly leapfrogged neighboring Elizabethtown, which for a century had been the region’s leading town. From an estimated forty-ﬁ ve hundred people at the beginning of the century, Newark grew to six thousand in 1810, a year when surveys showed that Elizabethtown and Trenton were each home to about half that number. (The Quaker town of Trenton became the state’s perma- nent capital in 1790 largely due to its proximity to Philadelphia and what was then a sizeable population; in the years just after the Revolution, the state legislature had moved about, meeting in Perth Amboy, Elizabethtown, Princeton, and other towns. Newark was never considered a contender.) Over the next two decades, while Elizabethtown and Trenton experienced little or no growth, Newark’s population sailed to nearly eleven thousand in 1830, and to just under twenty thousand when it ofﬁ cially became a city in 1836. On the eve of the Civil War, the shift to city life was well under way. One-quarter of New Jerseyans then lived in one of the state’s six biggest cities. Newark’s 1860 population, by far the largest in the state, stood at 71,941, representing one out of every ten people in New Jersey. 22 Newark’s traditional, religious-minded community worried about how the growth spurts were irrevocably changing their once-quiet spiritual haven.

Reverend Alexander MacWhorter and other town ministers had overwhelm- ingly supported the bridges’ construction, but the faithful were uneasy that the bridges provided physical and ﬁ gurative links to all sorts of new and strange people, commercial interests, and ideas. As the end of the eighteenth century neared, all of the outside inﬂ uences apparently had resulted in a distressing trend: the sacredness of the Sabbath was clearly in jeopardy.Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 22rise Sunday was no longer being treated with proper respect, many Newarkers believed. Certain people were going about their lives as if the Sabbath was just another day, conducting business, socializing with friends, and skipping reli- gious services. A group calling itself the Voluntary Association of the People of Newark to Observe the Sabbath signed an oath on July 10,1798, agreeing to “reﬂ ect upon their ways and reform whatever they think is contrary to the word of God.” Because “vice, like a ﬂ ood, deluges a land,” members pledged that on the Sabbath they would “neither give nor partake of parties or pleasure or entertainments,” “neither ride out nor travel,” “attend divine worship on that day, and compel our children, apprentices and servants to do the same,” and “exert ourselves to suppress all manner of employment and worldly business.” Alexander MacWhorter’s name topped a list of signatures of eighty-ﬁ ve townsmen. 23 The actions of some fanatical members of the association were at odds with its “voluntary” status. They stopped the federal mail coach from running on Sunday, and on several occasions threatened to tar and feather parties traveling through town or otherwise engaged in unapproved activities on the Sabbath. The era when Newark was run strictly according to religion had long since passed, however. Ofﬁ cials in Washington warned that anyone who interfered with the mail would be arrested, and judges ordered that travelers must be allowed to proceed through town on any day of the week.

Attempts by the association to halt the consumption of liquor on Sundays also failed. A few men erected stocks on the plot where the original Congre- gational meeting house once stood, with the hope of intimidating those disrespectful of the Sabbath. The stocks were torn down within twenty-four hours, however. After one last gasp at strictly upholding the community’s original Puritanical principles, the old systems for enforcing behavior and morality disappeared forever.

One of Newark’s most enduring anecdotes from the postwar era concerns an eccentric fellow named Moses Combs, who in various incarnations was a Presbyterian preacher, tanner, shoemaker, founder of his own church and school, zealous abolitionist and temperance advocate, and town “pound master,” in charge of rounding up stray cows, sheep, pigs, and other animals.

One day around the year 1790, a gentleman from Georgia walked into the Hounds and Horn and began a conversation with the tavern’s garrulous owner, Archer Griffon. In his earlier wanderings about the streets of Newark, the traveler had noticed the abundance of shoemakers and leather goods.

Griffon suggested that the traveler visit Moses Combs, a superb shoemaker whose shop could be found on the south side of Market Street.Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. corporation23 Combs, “a little black-eyed man,” as the traveler described him, had begun tanning leather and making shoes and boots around 1780. Shoes were argu- ably the most important product then made in America—not surprising considering how much people walked during the era. Farmers often busied themselves during the slow winter months by making shoes, for sale or personal use, and some men eventually dedicated themselves to the craft as a year-round profession. By the time the traveler from Georgia popped into Combs’s workshop, he found a master craftsman. Combs’s work was so outstanding that orders for shoes were coming in from far outside New Jersey, even from the South. A handful of other Newark shoemakers also shipped shoes, no more than a few pairs at a time, down the Atlantic coast.

No one had taken on an order like the one requested by the obviously impressed Savannah businessman: two hundred sealskin shoes.

Within a few years, shoe orders ﬂ ooded into Newark, primarily from the South. One particularly large sale supposedly netted Combs $9,000.

Combs had always been an exacting, argumentative stickler of a man, which was ﬁ ne—perhaps even helpful—when it came to making shoes. He easily became frustrated with Alexander MacWhorter’s preachings and his church’s arbitrary rules, however, and traveled to Orange on the Sabbath to worship at the Presbyterian church there instead. After his runaway business success, Combs could indulge his whims. He had a two-story wooden house put up on Market Street with a school on the upper ﬂ oor. Downstairs was a small church, where Combs installed himself at the pulpit. Explaining his actions in third person, curious as ever, Combs said, “Silver showered on him so plentifully that he did not know what else to do with it.” 24 Following Combs’s lead, apprentices and journeymen ﬂ ocked to Newark.

In 1806, the inscription on the ﬁ rst-ever published map of downtown Newark stated that the town “is noted for its Cider, the making of Carriages of all sorts, Coach-lace, Men’s and women’s Shoes. In the manufactures of the last article one third of the Inhabitants are constantly employ’d.” For a town symbol, the map’s creator combined traditional American motifs—the eagle, symbol of liberty, and a shield adorned with three plows to represent agriculture—with the ﬁ gure of a hunched-over shoemaker busily crafting the product for which Newark would become renowned. 25 Combs’s success also marked the beginning of trade on a grand scale between Newark and the South. Throughout the early 1800s, Newark developed a reputation for innovation and high-quality manufacturing, often due to the work of quirky, obsessive entrepreneurs like Combs. As the years passed, Newark’s range of products expanded, and so did its busi- ness relationship with the South. In the 1820s, ﬁ ve vessels regularly carried passengers and freight between Newark and Savannah, and eight ships Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 24rise sailed twice a week back and forth between Newark and Charleston. 26 By Civil War times, Newark was plainly referred to as a “Southern workshop.” Somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all products made in town—notably, shoes, carriages, harnesses, saddles, and clothing—were shipped for sale below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Newark’s rise in manufacturing was part of a larger trend, in which river- side towns all over New England and the Middle Atlantic states rapidly grew and industrialized after the Revolution. One added impetus to the rise of manufacturing occurred during the War of 1812, when the British blockaded ships from reaching Atlantic coast ports. Forced to become self-sufﬁ cient, the United States began producing goods it had formerly imported. As a tempo- rary war tactic, the blockade may have had success. But the lasting impact was that England unknowingly fostered a rival to challenge its long-running manufacturing dominance. In the decades after the war, towns in Massachu- setts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere would match and surpass the output of Birmingham and other industrial centers in England.

One requirement for successful manufacturing was a concentrated pool of workers, which is why industrial growth during the antebellum years took place nearly exclusively in the densely populated Northeast. People in the South, on the other hand, tended to live on plantations scattered about the vast countryside, miles from anything resembling a town. As it was, the South couldn’t compete with northern states in terms of manufacturing.

Southern businessmen instead focused on exploiting the plantation system to maximize proﬁ ts. That generally meant using slave labor and growing proven moneymakers like cotton and tobacco.

A certain codependence arose. Towns like Newark thrived because Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas basically conceded shoemaking and other industries to the Northeast. In the early 1800s, the North-South division of production was a mostly balanced and mutually beneﬁ cial relationship.

However, as the power and inﬂ uence of industrial northern states soared, and the abolitionist movement gained momentum, the South rightly felt threatened. Newark and other towns with strong economic ties to the South were bound to be conﬂ icted—even hostile, as would be seen—concerning any situations that jeopardized their key trading partners.

Newark’s early success in shoes attracted more and more shoemakers to set up shop in town. All the competition led to better, cheaper products, which in turn led to more shoes sold, as well as an upswing in related industries like tanning, the gruesome, foul-smelling process of turning animal hides Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. corporation25 into leather. Businesses making saddles and harnesses naturally moved in or sprang from the ground up to take advantage of a sizeable labor force skilled in leather working. The quality, range, and overall output of products increased dramatically. Newark evolved into something of a breeding ground for innovation, and a magnet for entrepreneurs.

Amid this creative ferment, a brilliant, restless young man named Seth Boyden entered the scene. A gentle, inquisitive character who conducted experiments at all hours of night and day and was known to bathe fully clothed in a pond outside his house, Boyden was easily a match for Moses Combs in terms of eccentricity. Boyden was an odd-looking man with deep-set eyes and extraordinarily large ears. He rarely bothered with grooming. Even in formal portraits, errant clumps of hair point off into the air or curl across his forehead, as if the man just rolled out of bed or, more likely, out of the workshop. Were it not for his kindly eyes and quiet demeanor, Boyden would have been the very picture of a mad scientist. After a career in which he advanced by leaps and bounds the manufacture and production of industries as disparate as leather, iron, steam engines, and cameras, Boyden would be called “one of America’s greatest inventors” by someone who should know: Thomas Edison. 27 Born in 1788 in Foxborough, Massachusetts, Boyden was one of ten siblings. A talent for invention and mechanics was in the family blood. His maternal grandfather, Uriah Atherton, operated a foundry and reportedly cast the ﬁ rst cannon in America, which was used to attack the British during the Revolution. Boyden’s father, also named Seth, was a farmer and forge owner who invented a machine for splitting animal hides at any speciﬁ ed thickness—obviously something of interest to those in leather production.

Seth Jr. came of age in a world in transition. While most Americans remained rooted in agriculture, inventions and new business theories were quickly changing both the way people earned their living and how they lived.

Eli Whitney, also a Massachusetts native, patented the cotton gin in 1793, thereby making it possible to remove seeds from cotton ﬁ fty times faster than the traditional method of plucking them by hand. If cotton wasn’t already the South’s king crop, it was crowned as such soon thereafter. The power of steam was being harnessed by men such as John Fitch, John Stevens, and Robert Fulton, whose innovations revolutionized transportation on water and rail. A textile worker named Samuel Slater smuggled out of England designs for a mechanized mill and set up a state-of-the-art, water-powered factory for spinning and weaving cloth in 1793 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

In 1807, Slater expanded the idea and built Slatersville, an entire town dedi- cated to textiles, with a handful of factories, along with churches, schools, and stores for the workers.Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 26rise Seth Boyden received little formal education, but absorbed everything he saw in his family’s foundry, farm, and workshops, as well as what he observed in the forests, meadows, and rivers of Massachusetts. To Boyden, there was no reason to distinguish one sphere of knowledge from another. They all existed to inform him, and to inspire his creations. Though Boyden always took notice of the latest inventions and products, the largely self-taught man tended to base his own work more on what he witnessed in nature. Some men later complained to Boyden that the ﬁ re engine they commissioned him to build contained cylindrical piping, not the rectangular sort more commonly used at the time. “Gentlemen, you read your Bibles, no doubt, more than I do,” Boyden replied. “You go to church, no doubt, more than I do. But I observe the laws of God as well as you do. God, in all His works, never made a right angle.” While still a teenager in Massachusetts, Boyden built a telescope and microscope and earned a reputation for a remarkable ability to repair clocks and guns. An obsessive tinker, by the time he turned twenty-one Boyden had designed machines for making nails, brads, tacks, and cutting ﬁ les. In 1813, Boyden left Massachusetts with an improved version of his father’s hide- splitting machine in tow. He relocated to Newark, as good a place as any for an entrepreneur involved in the leather business to make a living.

Boyden’s success in Newark came almost immediately. He and his wife, Abigail, bought a house that doubled as a workplace on Broad Street, near Bridge Street. Boyden initially used his machine to cut thin layers of sheep- skin and leather for sale to bookbinders. The machine also proved handy in crafting harnesses, a widely needed product in an age when carts, carriages, and plows were pulled by horses and oxen. Always a perfectionist, Boyden was unsatisﬁ ed with the buckles and other metal parts then sold to go along with leather harnesses. So, naturally, Boyden tapped into what he had learned in his grandfather’s foundry and created a side business making all the harness peripherals in addition to the harnesses themselves.

Word traveled slowly during the era, especially among inventors and busi- nessmen eager to keep trade secrets away from competitors. Even so, reports drifted over from Europe praising a new kind of glazed ornamental leather invented in France. One day in 1818, on a trip to New York City, Boyden came across a German military helmet. The helmet’s visor, covered in what looked like thick lacquer, gave Boyden his ﬁ rst glimpse of the new leather. Though the visor was exceptionally stiff and brittle, Boyden was inspired enough to create his own version of glazed leather.

A series of experiments eventually yielded a product far more ﬂ exible, and therefore more useful, than the one sold in Europe. Boyden’s leather came Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. corporation27 as a result of applying successive coats of varnish to a hide stretched over a wooden frame. The hide was dried after each coat and ﬁ nally baked in an oven. The baking process became known as patenting, hence the name of Boyden’s invention: patent leather.

In 1819, Boyden opened America’s ﬁ rst factory for making patent leather, which was used immediately and widely in the production of shoes, harnesses, and carriages, all staples in Newark’s manufacturing world. Boyden grew rich, at least temporarily, though he never reaped the fortune he might have. Local tanners copied the new leather—ironically, Boyden never patented it or many of his other inventions. Newark’s leather industry ﬂ ourished. As of 1837, the city was home to 155 patent-leather manufacturers. By 1860, Newark was responsible for 90 percent of all patent leather made in the United States.

Never one for enjoying success or resting on his laurels, Seth Boyden seemed to tire of the leather business soon after changing it for good. He feverishly moved on to experiments with iron. Boyden slept in his work clothes—boots and all—so that he was ready to jump back into the latest trial the moment he woke. He paused occasionally to bathe, usually in a pond near his home. Even on chilly mornings, he leaped into the water with his clothes on and rarely bothered to change or dry off before quickly returning to the workshop.

The iron experiments stretched into the summer of 1826. Boyden was a committee member for Newark’s celebration of the ﬁ ftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but he was notably absent for the Fourth of July parade and all-day party. Earlier that year, Boyden had observed how a piece of cast iron reacted when it fell into the furnace. He furiously conducted test after test, heating and treating iron in the hope of creating a material that was cheaper than wrought iron, less brittle than cast iron, and more malleable than both. His work required that a ﬁ re be kept running for days at a time. To ensure that he wouldn’t sleep through the night (and risk the ﬁ re dying out), Boyden rigged an alarm clock of sorts, nailing a lit candle to the wall. When the candle burned down, it fell loudly into a pan, alerting Boyden it was time to tend the furnace.

Sometime after the parade of July 4,1826, a few of Boyden’s friends came looking for him. Sure enough, he was in the workshop near Bridge Street, oblivious to the festivities under way. Late in the afternoon, Boyden reached the goal he had been pursuing day and night for months, as he pounded away on the ﬁ rst piece of malleable iron ever produced in the country. Two year later, Boyden sold off his patent leather interests for far less than they were worth in order to open a malleable iron foundry—the nation’s ﬁ rst—on Orange Street, near the Passaic. That same year (1828), Philadelphia’s Franklin Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 28rise Institute held an exhibition on the latest iron creations, and Boyden was awarded one of the top prizes for his castings. Boyden’s malleable iron particularly suited the buckles, bits, harnesses, and other parts used in the carriage and blacksmithing industries.

In 1835, Boyden’s attentions shifted yet again—this time to steam engines—and he sold his iron foundry for $25,000. Again, it was a handsome sum in the era, but far less than the business was ultimately worth. Boyden’s operation eventually landed in the hands of the Sacks-Barlow company, which by the mid-1950s operated 113 foundries around the country, with forty thousand employees producing nearly one million tons of castings annually.

The parts it made were used in automobiles, appliances, railroad and farm equipment, and all sorts of other products.

Boyden would continue on industriously until the day he died in 1870 at age eighty-two. He built locomotives for northern New Jersey’s emerging railroad system, and periodically invented whatever interested him—steam engine valves, a hat-forming machine, an alloy used in imitation gold jewelry.

Boyden consulted with his friend, fellow Massachusetts native Samuel Morse, and helped him perfect one of the century’s monumental creations, the tele- graph. Impulsively, Boyden left Newark for San Francisco during the Gold Rush of 1849, only to return two years later, broke. He was never much of a businessman. In his latter years, Boyden lived in a rural area west of Newark which became Maplewood. He spent his days patrolling his garden barefoot, experimenting with strawberries that grew larger and more delicious with every passing season.

It was Boyden’s two early inventions—patent leather and malleable iron—that would be his greatest, most lasting achievements. Their impact in Newark was especially immediate and tangible, inspiring industries to sprout, ﬂ ourish, and multiply.

According to the 1826 census, conducted in honor of the Declaration of Independence’s ﬁ ftieth anniversary, Newark’s population stood at 8,017.

Though shoemakers employed 35 percent of the workforce, signiﬁ cant num- bers were also making carriages, chairs, hats, saddles, cabinets, and jewelry.

The census listed thirty-four individual crafts represented in town, as well as major employers including three distilleries; three iron and brass foundries; two breweries; two grist mills; and seventeen factories producing items such as tin, sheet iron, chocolate, mustard, soap, candles, pottery, glass, and to- bacco. All told, 80 percent of Newark workers were involved in some form of manufacturing. For the most part, work in these “factories” continued to be done by hand. Different artisans often handled separate tasks in the produc-Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. corporation29 tion process, but there was nothing yet resembling a mechanized assembly line, which wouldn’t fully come of age until the early twentieth century. 28 Though Newark’s growth and economic expansion in the early 1800s was extraordinary, the pace would only quicken in the years to come. The popu- lation more than doubled between 1826 and 1836. By 1860, it had more than doubled again, reaching 72,000, roughly the same number of people then living in Washington, D.C. The nation’s leading cities similarly grew by leaps and bounds. Between 1830 and 1860, Boston nearly tripled its population, from 61,000 to 178,000, and Philadelphia and New York City quadrupled, up to over 550,000 and 800,000 respectively. Newark, while much smaller than those cities, increased sevenfold between the 1830 and 1860 censuses. The only U.S. city surpassing Newark’s growth rate was Buffalo, a boomtown that owed its population explosion to the monumental 363-mile-long Erie Canal. Once the canal connected Albany to Buffalo in 1825, the population of the town on Lake Erie soared, from around 8,500 in 1830 to over 80,000 in 1860. 29 Some of Newark’s growth can also be attributed to a canal, though not nearly to the extent as in Buffalo. The idea of creating a water route between New York Harbor and the Delaware River via New Jersey’s “waist” had been around at least since 1676, when William Penn sent surveyors out to explore the possibility. A canal didn’t seem feasible. The land simply rose too high and too quickly in New Jersey’s interior. Great Pond, otherwise known as Lake Hopatcong, was the largest body of water between the Hudson and Delaware rivers. The lake was an obvious link should a canal ever be built, yet it rested at a bit over nine hundred feet above sea level. 30 Roads in the early 1800s tended to be poorly maintained and slow-going, so that sending iron and agricultural products across New Jersey was formidably expensive. During a ﬁ shing trip at Lake Hopatcong in 1820—three years after ground had been broken on the Erie Canal—a Morristown businessman named George Macculloch dreamed up an alternative to New Jersey roads.

Damming the lake could double its capacity. That, combined with locks and some creative engineering techniques, meant that a canal could at last cross the state, Macculloch believed. While vague on details, Macculloch’s plan received hearty support from the beginning among Morris County’s farmers and ironworkers, who stood to beneﬁ t most from the canal’s construction.

The New Jersey legislature was less enthusiastic. In 1822, it authorized a preliminary survey of the proposed route, from the Passaic River at Newark to the Delaware River at Phillipsburg. Ultimately, the legislature passed on funding the project—despite the conclusion drawn by Macculloch’s group that the canal would contribute to “good morals” in the community, in that “apples and cider would be exported instead of being converted into ardent spirits.” 31Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 30rise Without state funding, the Morris Canal & Banking Company, a private enterprise chartered at the end of 1824, sold shares of stock to raise money to pay for the canal. Though the distance covered was about sixty miles as the crow ﬂ ies, the canal’s route zigzagged more than a hundred miles through the mountainous countryside. In the ﬁ nal plan, the canal skirted through northern New Jersey’s two emerging industrial centers, Paterson and Newark; Elizabethtown, which also hoped to land on the path, lost out. On October 15,1825, ground was broken at Lake Hopatcong amid the celebratory roar of cannons.

Throughout 1826, eleven hundred carpenters, stonemasons, engineers, and laborers toiled along different sections of the canal route. Axmen came in ﬁ rst and cleared dense forests. Men or mules dragged away the fallen trees.

Unskilled laborers—often, immigrants from Ireland and England—who slaved away with shovels and picks earned a dollar per day. Originally, the canal they dug measured thirty-two feet wide at the water line, tapering off to twenty feet wide at the bottom, four feet down. (All dimensions would later be enlarged.) When payday came, on Sunday, workmen’s wages were paid partly in whiskey, ensuring a lively evening of brawls. 32 The digging was just one task to build the canal, and far from the most complicated. When completed, the Morris Canal would rise 760 feet from the Delaware River to Lake Hopatcong, and from there descend 914 feet to the tidewaters near the Hudson. Not only was the 1,674-foot overall eleva- tion change then the largest of any U.S. canal, slopes on the route were exceptionally steep. The Morris Canal averaged eighteen feet per mile of vertical movement, compared to only one foot per mile on the Erie Canal.

Quite simply, the engineers in New Jersey had to design a canal that climbed mountains. 33 A Columbia College professor named James Renwick accepted the chal- lenge and created a design that strategically combined twenty-four locks and twenty-three inclined planes. Basically short-track railways, the planes were used in the steepest sections. As a canal boat approached an inclined plane, the boat settled into a U-shaped plane car, or “cradle,” on the inclined plane’s track. A massive rope pulled the cradle (and boat) up the track with the assistance of an underground water turbine. At the other end of the rope, another cradle and boat counterbalanced the up-going cradle and boat. While the boats rested in the cradles, captains strapped feedbags onto the mules that pulled boats from towpaths on shore. Designers ingeniously crafted both cradles and boats in two sections with a hinge in the middle, so that they could bend at the hump of each inclined plane. 34 The Morris Canal opened for navigation between Phillipsburg and Newark Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. corporation31 in the spring of 1832. The canal path approached downtown Newark from the north and turned east at a street named in the era, Lock. From there the canal stretched along modern-day Raymond Boulevard, including an inclined plane between what were then called Plane and Bellevue streets. (Today, they’re University Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard, respectively, and the plane sat at about the dividing line between Rutgers-Newark and Essex County College campuses.) The canal ﬁ nally cut through an under- ground tunnel around Mulberry Street before reaching the Passaic. 35 Amid much excitement, as many as twenty canal boats full of coal, iron ore, bricks, lumber, and other goods began arriving daily in Newark. Almost immediately, however, it was apparent that if the canal had a prayer of turning a proﬁ t, it would have to be extended to New York Harbor. The entire length of the canal would also have to be widened to accommodate barges large enough for safe towing across open waters to New York. 36 When Thomas Gordon published his Gazeteer of the State of New Jersey in 1834, $2 million had already been spent on the canal, more than double the original estimate. Though the canal’s “use has been most beneﬁ cial upon the business of the country through which it passes,” Gordon wrote, the canal company “is deeply in debt, and pays no dividends to the stockholders.” 37 With no funds available to pay for improvements, company directors resorted to questionable, if not fraudulent, tactics to keep their businesses and their canal boats aﬂ oat. “They embarked on ﬁ nancial ventures which were nothing short of criminal,” one early-twentieth-century historian wrote.

“They participated in fake promotion schemes, ﬂ oated loans on spurious collateral, perpetrated swindles through dummy organizations, and divided illegal gains with crooked agents and brokers.” 38 Jacob Little, a New York City trader, made a fortune by manipulating stock in the Morris Canal & Banking Company, driving the price from $10 to $185 per share in 1834. 39 No one was ever prosecuted for involvement with the canal, and in 1836 an eight-mile extension to Jersey City was completed. Nonetheless, the canal company ﬁ led for bankruptcy ﬁ ve years later, only to reform as a new Morris Canal & Banking Company in 1844. The new owners then widened the canal to forty feet. Over the next decade, they repaired and rebuilt the original wobbly inclined planes and lined areas prone to seepage with clay. By the mid-1850s the canal was in as sound condition as ever and transporting over 500,000 tons annually. For the year 1860, the canal’s tonnage topped 700,000.

The canal peaked in 1866, transporting just under 890,000 tons, more than half of which was coal. 40 Unfortunately for Morris Canal backers, the waterway reached its prime around the same time railroads were rendering canals obsolete. There were Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 32rise only twenty-three miles of railroad in the United States in 1830, the same year that workers furiously hacked through the earth, building both the Morris Canal and the Delaware & Raritan Canal—a shorter, similarly ﬁ nancially troubled waterway connecting New Brunswick to Trenton and other towns along the Delaware. By 1840, nearly three thousand miles of railroad track had been laid in the United States. As of 1860, while the United States represented only about 5 percent of the world’s population, it was home to more than thirty thousand miles of railroads—roughly the same amount that existed in the rest of the world combined. 41 In New Jersey, forever deﬁ ned as an in-between place, railroads held enor- mous possibility. Private corporations raised money from speculators and laid tracks early and often across the state. After the Camden and Amboy line opened a section of track between Perth Amboy and Bordentown in 1832, passengers and freight could zip between New York City and Philadelphia in seven hours, including time on the ferries. The Morris & Essex Railroad began operation between Newark and Morristown in 1837 with the help of Seth Boyden’s six-ton locomotive Orange, named for the hilly region it chugged over on the route. Railroad connections expanded all over northern New Jersey in the mid-1800s, with branches reaching Boonton, Paterson, Scotch Plains, Bound Brook, Princeton, Jersey City, Hoboken, Phillipsburg, Rahway, Trenton, and New Brunswick, among other towns. Commuting was born. 42 Railroads held obvious advantages over canals. Trains ran year-round, while canals were forced to shut down after the ﬁ rst winter freeze. By around 1870 a trip via rail between the Hudson and the Delaware rivers took roughly six hours; the same journey on the Morris Canal lasted four or ﬁ ve days.

Trains could move passengers and freight, while canals handled the latter almost exclusively. One canal barge accommodated about the same amount of coal that could ﬁ t in just two railroad cars. Moving coal on and off a canal boat was arduous and time-consuming, whereas an overhead chute quickly and efﬁ ciently could dump a load of coal into a train car. There really was no competition between the two modes of transportation. Just as quickly as the canal had replaced the wagon for hauling goods, the train supplanted the canal boat. 43 In 1871, the Lehigh Valley Railroad signed a ninety-nine-year lease for use of the Morris Canal, but the waterway would never show a proﬁ t again.

Each year, the company moved more and more coal via train rather than boat. Shipping on the Morris Canal declined precipitously, down to under four hundred thousand tons in 1880—less than half of what it had been in the mid-1860s—and only thirty thousand tons per year around the turn of the century. 44Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. corporation33 Massive infrastructure projects from the pre–Civil War era left lasting marks all over increasingly urban northern New Jersey. In addition to the new canals, roads, and railroads crisscrossing the landscapes, the people brought in to toil away on the developments often stayed behind long after construction had ended. Naturally, they ﬂ ocked to where they could ﬁ nd employment. For many, that meant the factories of ﬂ ourishing industrial hubs such as Newark, which had undeniably become a city.

Though Newark was technically still only a township in the early 1830s, “city” problems—crime, poverty, housing shortages, general ﬁ lth—had already surfaced alongside the extraordinary population growth. According to an 1836 report from the State Temperance Society, in the preceding eighteen months517 people had been committed to the Newark Jail. Not surpris- ingly given its authors, the report pointed to alcohol as the cause of people’s problems. Whatever the case, Newark was obviously home to a substantial number of troubled families: a little over 20 percent of the men arrested were charged with “beating and abusing their wives and children.” 45 In the early days, Newark appointed one or two citizens to tend the town’s scant few poor. Each year, men interested in taking the poor into their homes placed bids, and the town handed over caretaking responsibilities for poor families to the lowest bidder. By 1805, this archaic welfare system didn’t seem adequate, so town ofﬁ cials approved a poorhouse to be built. A decade passed before Newark actually had its own poorhouse, however. In 1815, the township purchased a farmhouse to shelter the poor and educate their children. This arrangement too quickly proved inadequate, and in 1823 the poorhouse was expanded. 46 The State Temperance Society’s 1836 report said that during a recent eighteen-month period, 252 paupers were admitted to Newark’s poorhouse.

Again, the report blamed alcohol abuse, with more than half the cases “distinctly traceable to intemperance alone.” 47 While typical urban problems plagued Newark, signs of its farming- village roots were slow to fade. Through at least 1831, the township found it necessary to pass laws ﬁ ning the owners of pigs running at large. 48 Newark lacked street lamps, street maintenance, and other basic services that English towns half its size had. “The condition of the roads is bad, the public houses are not of that class which might be expected, and numerous other matters of a public nature are not satisfactorily attended to,” one Newark native listed only as S. F. wrote in the Newark Daily Advertiser. The writer had been away from town since 1819 and was shocked at the transformation upon his return Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 34rise in1834. He applauded “splendid rows of brick stores and dwellings” and the overall “march of improvements,” yet grieved the loss of “that innocence and simple beauty” of the Newark of his youth. 49 Newark had also recently experienced a series of other losses that seemed negligible at the time but would be viewed as missed opportunities, even blunders, a century afterward. For nearly all of its existence, and even for two decades after the Revolutionary War had ended, Newark encompassed most of modern-day Essex County. In the early 1800s, however, interests among the downtown manufacturers were increasingly at odds with the farms and villages to the north and west. In 1806, the township divided itself into three wards—Newark, Orange, and Bloomﬁ eld. Each ward measured roughly the same size (twenty square miles), and each had its own representatives and handled certain affairs independently. The arrangement didn’t satisfy Orange residents, however, who created their own township the same year.

Bloomﬁ eld followed suit in 1812. Clinton Township was the next to break off, created in 1834 out of parts of Newark, Orange, and Elizabethtown. 50 Thus, in three short decades, while Newark reveled in its runaway growth and manufacturing riches, it lost at least two-thirds of the acreage once within its borders—land that would later be some of New Jersey’s wealthiest suburbs.

The parcels themselves split into tinier towns, with slices of Bloomﬁ eld becoming Belleville, Montclair, Nutley, and Glen Ridge. Orange divided into West, South, East, and plain Orange sections, as well as much of Maplewood.

Clinton transformed into Irvington and parts of Maplewood, and a small portion returned to Newark. Had Newark maintained its earlier borders, many of its twentieth-century problems—notably, the disappearance of its tax base to the suburbs and a stagnant economy that couldn’t grow partly due to Newark’s small size—wouldn’t have had nearly as severe an impact.

While prosperity in business and manufacturing had reached Newark, the town desperately needed wise, visionary leadership to match. “Some men of inﬂ uence,” the anonymous S. F. wrote in 1834, “may yet arise who will sacriﬁ ce themselves a little for the general welfare.” A change in the way Newark was governed seemed appropriate. The town meeting form of government could no longer cope with the needs of Newark’s businesses and people, many citizens believed. They proposed ofﬁ - cially incorporating Newark as a city. If power was concentrated in the hands of a mayor and a small group of ofﬁ cials, action could be taken promptly and efﬁ ciently on behalf of Newarkers. Roads could be paved, cleaned, and kept in order, and professional ﬁ remen and policemen could be hired, supporters argued. “Do you wish to have an efﬁ cient watch to protect your wives and daughters from insults in the streets?” an editorial rallying for incorporation Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. corporation35 asked. “Do you wish to have disturbers of the peace, riotous houses, and all others offending against good order brought to speedy justice?” 51 Voters overwhelmingly answered yes on March 18,1836, selecting “Corpo- ration” over “No Corporation” in the ballot by a count of 1,870 to 325. That spring, Whig lawyer William Halsey was elected as Newark’s ﬁ rst mayor.

Progress followed, at least initially. Within weeks of the election, oil lamps lit a few street corners for the ﬁ rst time, and a team of watchmen, or policemen, began patrolling after dark. Newark’s waterfront received a boost by being designated one of the country’s ofﬁ cial ports of entry. In July, Newark and Essex County ofﬁ cials agreed to jointly build a gorgeous Egyptian-style structure to house both the county courthouse and city administration.

(Previously, Newark town meetings rotated among various churches and taverns.) Workers laid the new building’s cornerstone just a month after the agreement was signed. 52 As an ominous sign of larger trouble ahead, however, a ﬁ re that autumn tore through an entire block of buildings around Market and Mechanic streets. The following spring, years of rampant inﬂ ation and speculative real estate and money-lending schemes—often involving canals and rail- roads—ﬁ nally caught up with investors in a severe depression, the Panic of 1837. Within a few months, nearly half the banks in the United States went out of business. The aggregate loss in New York City was estimated at $100 million. Manufacturing cities suffered particularly badly. Banks and busi- nesses throughout Newark closed. A factory reportedly worth $30,000 sold at auction for $1,800. Dozens of families left their newly built Newark homes, unable to pay the mortgages. Street lamps went dark in 1838 in a cost-saving move. Despite its prime downtown location, the block burned out by ﬁ re the previous fall remained an empty, undeveloped heap of ashes for years. 53 Newark’s population, which crested around twenty thousand in 1836, dropped to just over sixteen thousand in 1838. The ﬁ rst men to lose their jobs, and most likely leave the city, were the Irish immigrants who had come to labor on the canals and stayed in the United States to work in booming factories. The number of immigrants living in Newark, estimated at 7,300 in 1835, fell to just 3,624 after the Panic. 54 The city ﬁ nally rebounded in the early 1840s, and another furious growth spurt ensued. The Irish still in Newark from the 1820s were joined by newly arrived Irish ﬂ eeing the mid-1840s potato famine. Germans also ﬂ ooded into town after the failed revolutions of 1848 in central Europe. Thousands of new homes and tenements were built. Dozens of freshly erected smokestacks and church steeples ﬁ lled the skyline. Manufacturing remained the city’s lifeblood, employing nearly three-quarters of the workforce. Between 1845Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 36rise and1860, the number of jewelry makers, leather workers, saddle makers, and trunk makers employed in the city increased at least twofold.

The factory setting itself began to evolve, with workers using sewing machines, for example, instead of stitching by hand. From 1840 to 1846, the number of factories driven by steam power in Newark went from none to more than a hundred. A Scottish immigrant named Peter Ballantine built one of the city’s ﬁ rst massive industrial plants—a brewery—in 1847 on the Passaic River near Rector Street. New white-collar businesses also made inroads, notably the Mutual Beneﬁ t life insurance (founded in 1845) and Howard Savings Institution (1857). 55 The promise that a city government would clean up the streets and deliver better services was never realized, however, at least not as quickly as citizens hoped. Throughout the mid-1800s, Newark straddled a messy line between prosperous metropolis and unkempt industrial backwater. Mansions and brand-new factories sat blocks away from overcrowded, poorly built homes and gutters clogged with rubbish, manure, and occasionally, dead animals.

Not a single Newark road was paved until the 1850s, when round stones were used sparingly. One Newarker recalled riding through the streets on his pony to do errands for his father—picking up tobacco at William A.

Brintzinghoffer’s, groceries at Whitty’s on the corner of Bank and Broad streets, and candles, soap, and other household goods at Marcus L. Ward’s store on Market Street. “The distances were not great,” he wrote, “the trafﬁ c was not dense, but the pavement, where there was any, was bad and treach- erous, if not exceedingly dangerous for a small horse.” 56 With feeble drainage systems in place, a decent rainfall turned the streets into rivers of impassable brown muck that swallowed wagon wheels and mule hooves. Flooding was worst, and the risk of malaria highest, in the marshy Down Neck (later, Ironbound) area inhabited mostly by poor Irish immigrants. The smoke and chemicals emanating from factories and tanneries were inescapable, and the stench of coal dust, animal dung, and raw sewage was everywhere. 57 Several Newarkers died each year of rabies, prompting laws to be passed allowing citizens to kill any dog on sight that didn’t have a muzzle and a collar stating its name and residence. Even with the restrictions, packs of wild dogs bedeviled Newark neighborhoods. A group of Newarkers took matters into their own hands in April of 1857, when some 150 dogs mysteriously died. After reports of the deaths surfaced, an anonymous letter arrived at the Newark Daily Mercury. For “the greatest good to the greatest number,” a group calling itself the Newark Dog Poisoners Association had lived up to its name, leaving poisoned meat in various parts of the city. (They hadn’t planned on a young Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. corporation37 boy eating some of the meat and getting seriously ill.) The writer stated that he himself had been viciously bitten by a dog the previous month, and that “nine-tenths of the community bid us God speed” in their resolve to rid the city of dangerous mutts. In July of 1857, after a pound had opened near Canal Street, a bounty of ﬁ fty cents per dog was offered. One boy alone brought in 24 unmuzzled dogs, and in just two days a total of 170 dogs were impounded.

By summer’s end nearly 2,500 dogs had been captured and killed, either via pistol or drowning. 58 In some ways, Newark’s problems were no different from those of other cities. New York and Boston were arguably dirtier, more dangerous, and less healthy than Newark in the mid-1800s. Still, there was no denying that public services lagged behind in Newark. If the city compared itself to Providence, Troy, Rochester, or other towns of similar size, “we shall ﬁ nd how far we are behind them in municipal improvements,” one Newark alderman said in 1851.

He estimated that nine out ten Newarkers believed “that our Fire Department needs many facilities which it does not now possess, that our city should be lighted, that a Market should be provided of a suitable character, that greater Common School accommodations are necessary.” 59 The main reason progressive measures came slowly, if at all, during the era was that business and industry led the city in every sense, including politically. With few exceptions, the mayors in the years preceding the Civil War were rich men directly tied to the city’s ﬁ nancial and manufacturing industries. First and foremost, their priorities in ofﬁ ce revolved around promoting business in the city. 60 Like good businessmen everywhere, Newark’s elected officials were reluctant to part with a dollar. A low tax rate would continue attracting manufacturing interests. To the detriment of the poor and working classes, and the city’s overall health, safety, and appearance, Newark spent money on professional ﬁ re and police departments, street lighting and paving, and other public services only when there seemed to be no other alternatives.

Stingy policies continued even as Newark emerged in 1860 as the largest industrial-based city in the United States—ranking eleventh overall in popu- lation at the time. 61 One especially pound-foolish decision from the era was the failure to preserve land for public parks. Other than the small triangular commons established by Newark settlers in the late 1600s, almost no lots were restricted from development. Buildings had even been erected on the colonial-era South Common, though in 1850 the city ofﬁ cially preserved and expanded the lot for four acres. It was renamed South Park and after the Civil War renamed again as Lincoln Park.Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 38rise Around the same time New York City was setting aside 843 acres for Central Park, the Newark Daily Mercury needled Newark ofﬁ cials to take similarly far-sighted steps, if not downtown than somewhere nearby. “In a few years, our population will have doubled, crowding our mechanics and laboring men into these outer wards,” an 1853 editorial stated. “It is therefore more necessary that immediate steps should be taken to secure the great advantages resulting from public parks to the health and welfare of those who most require them.” 62 Real estate was too valuable to be cordoned off for such frivolous purposes, Newark’s leadership believed at the time. Decades would pass before any signiﬁ cant acreage in Newark was reserved for parkland. By then, it was too late to follow the advice of another Mercury editorial from the 1850s. After praising the city’s economic triumphs, the paper asked “our merchants and business men” to “understand their high and responsible duties” and seek “progress in all things calculated to improve the character of our people.” A phrase of warning, printed ominously in boldface, ended the call to action:

“The future is purchased by the present.” 63Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved.   politics to the dogs southern sympathy during the civil war Among the small clique of businessmen-politicians leading Newark through its dramatic mid-1800s rise, few could boast of more wealth or better connec- tions than William Wright. Shown in a portrait with a digniﬁ ed, stern gaze, thin lips pursed smugly, almost in a frown, and dark hair curling over his ears with ﬂ air, Wright was best known as the owner of Newark’s preeminent saddle manufacturing company—the largest in the city, if not in the entire country. The Whig Party, which ruled local politics and held the mayoralty through Newark’s ﬁ rst two decades as a city, tapped William Wright to run for his ﬁ rst-ever political seat in 1841. He was elected without opposition as Newark’s ﬁ fth mayor. Serving three consecutive one-year terms, Wright began a meandering, opportunistic political career that stretched through the heart of the nation’s bloodiest years. 1 During the Civil War, New Jersey earned a reputation as the most trai- torous state in the North because of men like William Wright. Perhaps the most obvious reason Wright and other Newark manufacturers opposed “Lincoln’s war,” as they often called it, was that the conﬂ ict jeopardized their lucrative business ties with the South. Many “Copperheads,” as anti-Lincoln men were called, also clung to a prevalent stance that argued, quite plainly, nothing was wrong with slavery. The institution represented the natural state of race relations, they claimed, and it was the South’s prerogative to keep slavery legal if it so chose. The life of William Wright provides a window into the mindset of Civil War-era Newark, when the city, and New Jersey as a whole, may have ofﬁ cially adhered to the Union, but citizens were hardly united behind President Abraham Lincoln. In William Wright, one can also witness the changing state of politics, namely, in the increasingly blatant use of money to gain power and inﬂ uence.

Born around 1790, Wright was the son of Dr. William Wright, a physician with a respected practice just over the New Jersey border, in New York’s 39Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 40rise Rockland County. Dr. Wright was a Yale man, earning a bachelor’s degree in1774 and a medical degree three years later. While at boarding school in Poughkeepsie in 1808, the younger William Wright received the unexpected news that his father had died on a visit to the South, and William Wright Jr.

never had the chance to follow his father’s footsteps in college.

An uncle arranged for William to be apprenticed to Anson Phelps, a Connecticut saddle maker who had much in common with the young man.

After Phelps’s parents had died in the early 1790s, a preteen Anson became the apprentice of a saddle maker, like William Wright would be one day.

Phelps would be remembered much more for his phenomenal talents as a businessman than as a mere craftsman, however. A mercantile business he established in Hartford traded saddles for cotton from Charleston, South Carolina, which Phelps then sold in New York City or directly to England.

With his son-in-law William Earl Dodge, Phelps opened the New York–based ﬁ rm Phelps-Dodge, which traded in brass, copper, and cotton, among other goods, and still exists to this day as a mining and mineral-processing company. Phelps also founded Ansonia, a Connecticut copper-producing industrial village named in his honor, and held considerable investments in railroads, banking, and real estate. When he died in 1853, Phelps’s estate was worth more than $2 million. 2 Certainly, as a young apprentice under the brilliant Anson Phelps, William Wright learned much more than the art of making saddles and harnesses.

Sometime after volunteering as a soldier in the War of 1812, Wright had the chance to sail to Charleston, South Carolina, with a load of saddles to sell for Phelps. Wright also brought an eye open for opportunity on the trip.

Upon his return to the North, Wright gathered the $300 he’d saved over the years and convinced two wealthy Connecticut industrialists, Sheldon Smith and William Peet, to partner with him in a new venture manufacturing and trading saddles. In 1815, they opened a small store in Bridgeport, Connecticut, as well as a branch in Charleston, under the name Peet, Smith & Company.

Early on, customers assumed Wright, the most visible member of the opera- tion, was “Peet Smith,” sometimes asking why he didn’t spell his ﬁ rst name “Peter.” By 1816, with the company blooming, William Peet retired from an active role. Still in his twenties, William Wright became an equal partner in the prosperous, expanding ﬁ rm Smith & Wright. No one would call him “Peet” again.

After marrying William Peet’s daughter Minerva in 1819, the ambitious Wright turned his attentions to New Jersey. Facing increased competition and limited growth potential in Bridgeport, Wright and his partner, Sheldon Smith, quickly saw that Newark, then a growing industrial force of about Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. politics to the dogs41 seven thousand people, had two key assets for a saddle manufacturer: a ﬂ ourishing leather industry, thanks in part to Seth Boyden’s innovations, and established trade connections with the South. Smith & Wright moved its northern operations in the early 1820s to Newark’s city center, opening a factory at the southeast corner of Broad and Fair streets. (Fair later became Lafayette Street; the factory stood at about the spot of the Prudential Center arena.) The company soon attained the status as one of the country’s top saddle and harness manufacturers, with branches in Charleston, Augusta, Mobile, and New Orleans. 3 Wright immediately took an interest beyond saddles in his new state.

Over the years, he networked relentlessly and sat on the board or held some other ofﬁ cial position at the Newark Mechanics’ Bank, the Mechanics Insurance Company, the Newark Savings Institution, and northern New Jersey’s two leading transportation corporations, the Morris & Essex Rail- road and the Morris Canal & Banking Company. Wright also donated liberally to the Episcopal Church and dutifully maintained a presence in society, serving as president of the New Jersey Horticulture Society, among other organizations. 4 In due time, William and Minerva Wright owned a handsome mansion on Park Place with white pillars at the front door and a view, beyond their yard’s tall trees and wrought-iron fence, of the greenery of Military Park.

The setting was more reminiscent of Charleston or Savannah than a typical northern city, especially considering that the house was staffed with black maids and cooks. 5 In contrast to her always-busy husband, Minerva Wright was “averse to taking exercise” and most comfortable at home, according to their son, Edward Henry Wright. In a letter to his sister, Catherine, Edward blamed their mother’s lonesome, “sedentary mode of life [as] the cause of those fearful attacks of headache.” Minerva Wright spent her time making “a clatter with those dishes in the morning,” keeping a close watch on the house’s troublesome servants, or “darkies,” as Edward wrote. By the early 1850s, Minerva Wright managed to convince William, a notorious penny-pincher known for saying he refused “to pay another cent,” to allow her and Cath- erine to close their Park Place household each winter for a cozy stint at the Clarendon, one of New York City’s ﬁ nest hotels. 6 Though William Wright occasionally cut back on his son’s allowance in college, and was reluctant to pay for his daughter to travel abroad, the Wright children were raised in an undeniably privileged world. Catherine Maria Wright socialized in the most elite circles and in 1855 married a Dutch ambassador. Edward Henry Wright attended the College of New Jersey Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 42rise and studied law under Alexander Hamilton before attending Harvard Law School. 7 Edward traveled extensively in Europe and in the early 1850s became an ambassador in St. Petersburg. While in Russia, he socialized with royalty, attended dozens of balls, and generally lived in splendor, complete with an African American servant kept in his place by Edward’s condescending manner. “George, my ebony servant, popped his head in my bedroom this morning, and wished me a happy New Year with the genuine African grin,” Edward wrote to his mother from Russia on January 1,1851. “There was no resisting the appeal of his pearly teeth, so I asked for my purse and made over to him the usual present.” 8 Edward and his sister Catherine—or Kit, as he called her—rarely dared to disagree with their authoritarian father. In letters, they referred to him simply as “the Member.” Like most men at the forefront of business and politics in Newark’s early days as a city, William Wright was active in the Whig Party.

During the course of his political rise, William Wright often came into conﬂ ict with another powerful Newark Whig, one-time New Jersey governor William Pennington. The families engaged in what became the bitterest of rivalries. When Minerva Wright was concerned her son might be interested in marrying his old friend Mary Pennington, Edward reassured his mother there was no need to worry. “The family is if anything more odious to me than you,” he wrote. 9 Despite their wealth, travels, and society status, William, Minerva, and their children all shared a glum, antisocial streak. “All the Wrights,” Edward wrote, “shut themselves out from the world, even if they have the best advan- tages. Whether from modesty or pride I know not.” 10 William Wright’s fallout with William Pennington began around Wright’s ﬁ nal year as Newark mayor, when the Whigs snubbed his quest to run for a House of Representatives seat. Wright decided to run anyway without the endorsement of any political party. He attracted a coalition that included Democrats and defeated William B. Kinney, grandson of doctor, judge, and Revolution-era leader William Burnet. (The “B” in Kinney’s name is Burnet.) Kinney was the regular Whig nominee for the district in question, and also a nephew of William Pennington, so Wright’s election obviously created friction between the two families. 11 Two years after Wright won the House seat, voters reelected him for another term. In 1847, the Whigs settled on William Wright as their best chance to win the governorship, despite his inﬁ delity to the party. Wright’s nomination outraged the most conservative Whigs, who distributed a pamphlet citing seventeen points why the man should not be elected. “The successive elevation of Mr. Wright to high places of honor, by the votes of Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. politics to the dogs43 the Whig party,” point number ﬁ fteen stated, “is virtually to declare that it values political expediency above true principle.” Among the criticisms were Wright’s record of “relying on money—money—as the chief element of success” in elections, “placing large sums in the hands of irresponsible persons.” With Wright at the helm of the state, point number sixteen charged, he would “set up the ofﬁ ce of Governor to the highest bidder, to make it an object of trafﬁ c for unprincipled political managers, and to demoralize and corrupt the people.” Under the subheading “The Artful Dodger,” the paper listed ﬁ fteen issues in the legislature—during a single summer—that Wright never bothered to cast a vote upon. “Never before did a man receive, month in and month out, eight dollars a day, for dodging his duty.” When he actually did address a topic, Wright managed to be “on both sides of every important question,” donating “money freely to Romanists and to Protestants” and wafﬂ ing on the always testy issue of temperance. “He gives water freely to temperance men, presides in the Big Tent, and gives them a big dinner,” the pamphlet claimed, “yet as freely affords something stronger than water to anti-temperance men, and sets the example of drinking it himself.” 12 His campaign sabotaged, Wright lost the election to Daniel Haines, a Democrat who had served as governor a few years earlier. Wright attended the Whig national convention of 1848 as a delegate from New Jersey. By the early1850s, however, even though Whig Millard Fillmore presided at the White House, it was becoming clear that the Whig Party was nearing its demise in the United States. Edward Wright attributed the Whigs’ troubles in New Jersey to “deserting their principles and ﬁ ghting for men. It was no longer a question to be asked as to a candidate, whether he was a Whig, but was he a Wright man, or did he side with the Penningtons.” 13 Many antislavery Whigs turned their allegiance to the emerging Repub- lican Party. William Pennington, for one, became a Republican. Wright, whose saddle business had been partly based in the South for more than three decades, sympathized in the opposite direction. In 1851 he ofﬁ cially defected to the Democratic Party. “I know Father is too honorable a man to have deserted his party for mere personal motives,” a hopeful Edward Wright wrote. 14 The timing of Wright’s shift seems uncanny in retrospect; the Democrats would win the next two presidential contests and triumph far more often than fail in New Jersey elections over the next two decades.

Though the public never again voted Wright into ofﬁ ce, New Jersey Democrats managed to “meet their pledges, and display their gratitude,” in the words of the New York Times, by appointing the rich, inﬂ uential Wright to the U.S. Senate twice, in 1853 and 1863. (Before the Seventeenth Amendment passed in 1913, senators were selected by state legislatures, not Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 44rise directly by the people.) “New-Jersey may be said to have touched the lowest deep of degradation,” the Times reﬂ ected upon Wright’s ﬁ rst appointment.

In pitying tones, the paper declared that Wright “is neither a very strong nor very wicked man. He is simply a weak and excessively vain one.” 15 Wright, however, was merely a “tool for designing men to use for their own shrewd purposes, and mercenary ones to bleed without compunction,” little more than “the proxy of the clique whose power placed him there.” The Times was more concerned about an earlier Democratic appointee, Robert F.

Stockton, grandson of Richard Stockton, colonial New Jersey Supreme Court justice and signer of the Declaration of Independence. A naval ofﬁ cer and ruthless businessman, the younger Stockton and his partner, Newark’s John Stevens, had combined the Delaware & Raritan Canal and the Camden & Amboy Railroad into the Joint Companies; for years the organization, known as one of the ﬁ rst in New Jersey for blatantly buying off legislators, enjoyed a monopoly on transportation between Philadelphia and New York City. “The election of Stockton was the sale of the State to a great private corporation,” theTimes stated, “and each succeeding fact is nothing more than a transfer of possession, in devout compliance with the terms of the bill of sale.” 16 Wright retired from an active role in Smith & Wright in 1854, devoting himself to public affairs and the Democratic Party. Soon after Wright’s Senate term ran out, New Jersey Democrats selected him to represent the party as a delegate at the April 1860 national convention in a city Wright knew well:

Charleston, South Carolina.

The convention wound up a bust. Delegates were deeply split on which direction the party should take regarding slavery. Compromise seemed impossible. The meeting adjourned without a presidential nomination after ﬁ fty delegates from the South walked out in protest when the party failed to adopt a vehemently pro-slavery platform. In June, Democrats reconvened in Baltimore to try to work out their differences, but this time, 110 Southern delegates walked out. Those remaining selected Stephen Douglas, a moderate who had beaten Abraham Lincoln in an Illinois Senate contest two years prior, after their famous series of debates. The protesting Southern faction nominated its own candidate, John Breckinridge. Formerly a senator from Kentucky and currently vice president under James Buchanan, Breckinridge would go on to lead Confederate troops as a general. 17 Though Abraham Lincoln received slightly less than 40 percent of the popular vote in the 1860 election, he faced a diluted opposition and carried nearly all of the northern and western states—enough for a victory. New Jersey stood out as the lone northern state that failed to give all of its electoral votes to Honest Abe. Douglas received 52 percent of the popular vote in Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. politics to the dogs45 the state, including majority support in Newark, Trenton, Jersey City, and Camden. The way the system then worked in New Jersey, however, meant that its seven electoral votes would be split, with four going to Lincoln and three to Douglas. 18 Though the Democrats lost the national election, the party in New Jersey clearly remained formidable. One of the party’s 1860 candidates for Congress was a peer of William Wright’s named Nehemiah Perry. Insulted as “Knee-High-Miah,” the short-of-stature, balding Perry wore bushy pork- chop sideburns extending below his chin. He owned a Newark clothing manufacturing company which, up until the Civil War, exported most of its goods to the South. With the help of strong anti-Lincoln sentiment, Perry beat Wright’s nemesis, William Pennington, in his reelection bid as a Repub- lican. A well-respected former New Jersey governor, Pennington was then the Speaker of the House. Many viewed his defeat in an acrimonious campaign as a national embarrassment. Pennington’s supporters squarely blamed the episode on “that band of mercenary and unprincipled men, engaged in the Southern trade”—presumably William Wright and his cohorts—“who have been foremost in producing this result,” the Newark Daily Mercury wrote. “If they had been slaves themselves, and every morning had been lashed into humility, they could not have worked more heartily to carry out the wishes of their Southern masters.” 19 As for Wright, he would have to wait until 1863—when the Democrats had another opportunity to appoint him to the Senate—before he again held political ofﬁ ce. During the interim, Abraham Lincoln came into the presi- dency, and the South seceded from the Union. New Jersey began building its reputation as a haven for antiwar Democrats, or “Copperheads,” and William Wright managed to play a role in the loudest, angriest, most inﬂ uential voice to consistently portray the war as an illegal, misguided abolitionist quest.

One of Wright’s many investments, a newspaper called the Newark Daily Journal, would handle the dirty work.

TheJournal was the child of two failed newspapers—the Jacksonian and the Newark Daily Eagle—that had both fallen into the possession of William Wright. Edward Fuller, who for ﬁ ve years had been editor of the Portsmouth- based Democratic mouthpiece, the New Hampshire Gazette, was imported to take charge of the Journal, ﬁ rst published on November 2,1857. From his second-ﬂ oor ofﬁ ce at 138 Market Street, Fuller tirelessly attacked all opponents of conservatives, states’ rights, and the Democratic Party. With the Demo- crats split in 1860 over who was the party’s legitimate presidential nominee, Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 46rise Fuller sided with the South’s candidate, John Breckinridge. A month after Lincoln’s win at the national polls—and his loss in New Jersey—the Journal proudly claimed that “New Jersey alone breasts the storm of fanaticism,” and suggested that the state openly side with the South to “place us in a position of unexampled prosperity.” In time, readers would get to know more of the views of Wright’s editor: that the abolishment of slavery would be a “worse calamity than disunion,” that the draft was nothing short of tyranny, and that President Lincoln was both a “monstrous despot” and a “perjured traitor.” 20 New Jersey, and big cities like Newark in particular, would suffer tremen- dously in a war with the South, the logic went. With Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, New Orleans, and other southern cities no longer buying carriages, saddles, shoes, clothing, and jewelry from the North, Newark and other manufacturing cities were bound to spiral into depression. Factories would shut, and thousands of workers would be laid off. “What would this place be if it were not for the South?” a Newark newspaper asked as early as 1854. “What would become of the millions of manufactured goods annually exported from this city?” 21 In the 1860 presidential campaign, a broadside addressed to the “mechanics and working-men of Newark” called the Republicans “that party which will be the instrument of taking bread from the mouths of your wives and children.” The author of the screed, listed only as “TRUTH,” was most likely Daily Journal editor Edward Fuller. 22 The prospect of a Lincoln White House stirred other fears as well—namely, a change in the “peculiar institution.” Though New Jersey legislation freed all black children born after 1846 within its borders, there were eighteen elderly human beings still enslaved in the Garden State as of 1860. New Jersey was then the only northern state to have any slaves. It was also the only northern state that allowed runaway slaves to be captured within its borders and sent back to the South.

Abraham Lincoln always presented the Civil War ﬁ rst and foremost as a means to save the Union, not end slavery. Yet, most people assumed that the institution was in jeopardy with Lincoln as president. If the slaves were freed, it was believed, they would naturally head north. Thousands would ﬂ ood into New Jersey, part of which extended farther south than Baltimore, as often pointed out at the time. Worried about the prospect of competing for factory jobs with newly freed blacks, or motivated by ignorance or sheer racism, some New Jerseyans actively fought to maintain the status quo. Still others were ambivalent about slavery, yet opposed the federal government overstepping its bounds. They might have personally thought slavery was wrong, but genuinely believed in states’ rights—that each state, and the state alone, could come to its own conclusions and pass its own laws.Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. politics to the dogs47 By the time Abraham Lincoln said “the Union of these States is perpetual” and “the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy” in his inaugural address on March 4,1861, seven states had already seceded, led by South Carolina. In mid-April, Southern forces seized Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Within two months, four more states joined the Confederacy.

The anti-Lincoln Democrats were known as Copperheads because at ﬁ rst they distinguished themselves by wearing copper Liberty-head coins clipped onto their coats. The name caught on, however, because Copperheads were viewed by many as treacherous snakes. Among New Jersey’s Copperheads, Edward Fuller and David Naar, of Trenton’s Daily True American, ranked as the most inﬂ uential newspapermen, while William Wright and Congressman Nehemiah Perry stood out as a couple of the highest proﬁ le politicians. It’s impossible to say exactly how many New Jerseyans were Copperheads. They were not a political organization per se, but a loosely associated group of extremists within the Democratic Party. Rodman Price, New Jersey governor in the mid-1850s, was assuredly one. After the 1860 election, he encouraged not only New Jersey, but also New York and Pennsylvania to “cast their lot with the South” for “every wise, prudential and patriotic reason.” After all, “slavery is no sin,” Rodman reﬂ ected. “Slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” 23 William Wright maintained a fairly low proﬁ le for the duration of the war, though the way he spent his money and the company he kept spoke volumes.

In 1861, Wright thought it prudent to sell his interest in the controversial Daily Journal. He and other Democrats continued to ﬁ nance operations, however. 24 As the war commenced, Copperheads witnessed their doomsday prophe- cies coming true. In the words of Newark Mayor (and Democrat) Moses Bigelow, “the ﬁ rst effect” of the struggle had been “a general prostration” of industrial interests, which “unless soon adjusted, will cause unprecedented deprivation and suffering.” 25 An economic malaise settled upon Newark, and what had been a rapidly growing population dropped from seventy-three thousand in 1861 to sixty-eight thousand in 1863.

Despite the bleak outlook, and feelings for Lincoln that were mixed at best, thousands of Newarkers rallied behind their commander-in-chief.

“Strong men ground their teeth in rage,” in reaction to the Southern seces- sion, wrote one New Jersey Republican. “The Union of our fathers, cemented by so much patriotic blood, was crumbling to pieces, and anarchy alone could follow.” 26 For stalwart Unionists inside and outside New Jersey, Lincoln’s inaugura- tion couldn’t come quickly enough. In the course of a twelve-day journey by Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 48rise rail from Illinois to Washington, D.C., in February 1861, the president-elect was met by enthusiastic crowds throughout New Jersey. Lincoln’s visit to Newark occurred just a few weeks after Mayor Bigelow congratulated New Jersey as “faithful to the Constitution and loyal to the rights and institutions of all her sisters in the Confederacy.” 27 Still, thousands of Newarkers gave Lincoln a warm welcome as the train, decorated in ﬂ ags, streamers, and ﬂ owers, rolled in from Jersey City. 28 “On both sides of the streets was one dense mass of people,” a Phila- delphia Inquirer reporter wrote of the stop in Newark. “Ladies waved their handkerchiefs, and men uncovered their heads. Stalwart mechanics cheered as though their lungs were made of bell metal.” Compared to other cities welcoming Lincoln, however, the ofﬁ cial reception in Newark was subdued.

There was no band, military display, or much of any formal arrangement planned for the visit, which only lasted half an hour. The crowd in the streets, however, had done a little decorating. An efﬁ gy inscribed with the words “THE TRAITOR’S DOOM” hung from a lamppost. 29 Within two weeks of Fort Sumter’s fall, Lincoln asked for seventy-ﬁ ve thousand volunteers to enroll in the armed services, and ten thousand New Jersey men had answered the call—more than three times the state’s quota.

“Friends, our country is in danger,” one Newarker cried. “Throw politics to the dogs for the present.” 30 Beyond patriotism and the feverish excite- ment war can inspire in the uninitiated, the decent pay—$15 per month combined from the federal and state governments—and a struggling New Jersey economy with few job prospects led to a surplus wanting to enlist. 31 New Jersey Governor Charles Olden named Newark’s Theodore Runyon, a Democrat who had cast one of New Jersey’s electoral votes for Stephen Douglas, as brigadier general in charge of the state’s ﬁ rst brigade.

As New Jerseyans prepared for war, “An Old Soldier” passed along helpful tips via the Newark Daily Advertiser to inexperienced volunteers. “Remember that in a campaign more men die from sickness than by the bullet,” he counseled. It was therefore essential to “keep your entire person clean” to prevent “fevers and bowel complaints in warm climates.” A small blanket would come in handy “to lay on the ground or throw over your shoulders when on guard duty during a rain storm,” while “the best military hat in use is the light colored soft felt, the crown being sufﬁ ciently high to allow space for air over the brain.” Also, the writer suggested, “let your beard grow, so as to protect the throat and lungs.” 32 Toward the end of April of 1861, a mix of national guardsmen and enlistees could regularly be seen parading the streets of Newark, clad in new shoes and blue coats issued courtesy of the local militia. At 10 am on April 29, the full regiment of 780 troops gathered at Military Park in full uniform. Throughout Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. politics to the dogs49 the day, the stars and stripes ﬂ ew in front of nearly every building. An outspoken group had even goaded the Newark Daily Journal into displaying a Union ﬂ ag in its Market Street window. Every few feet, family, friends, and random well-wishers clustered around a man bound to leave that day for Trenton, and, soon thereafter, the war. A young girl said goodbye to her brother. A teary wife adjusted her husband’s uniform. A father shook his son’s hand and left him holding a revolver. 33 By noon, crowds estimated between ten thousand and ﬁ fteen thousand ﬁ lled Military Park. A band led a procession from the green, followed by Newark’s Fire Department, dressed in red shirts and helmets adorned with Union badges. The soldiers followed the march up Broad Street, turned left on Washington Place, and then moved down Washington Street. Women waved handkerchiefs from windows and balconies of three-story row homes lining the route. Thousands cheering from the sidewalks joined the parade as it passed. Their destination was the city’s lone high school, a wide three- story stone building, opened in 1839, with three small towers and neat rows of colonial grille windows. In front, dozens of ﬂ ags decorated a platform, where city superintendent, George Sears, gave a brief speech and presented the gift of a ﬂ ag. Made of heavy silk, golden tassels, and lace, and measuring six feet six inches long and six feet wide, the ﬂ ag was the handiwork of a Broad Street craftswoman. “Take it,” Sears said, “and let no traitor ever ﬁ nd shelter under its folds.” The crowd applauded and cheered jubilantly.

“If this Regiment should ever fall, never let the ﬂ ag be dishonored,” Sears continued. “Let it never return till you have done your all to sustain the 34 stars represented on it.” 34 Theodore Runyon’s raw New Jersey troops saw action that summer in the war’s ﬁ rst major engagement, the First Battle of Bull Run (or Manassas, as it is also known). The mixed results foreshadowed a long struggle ahead. On July 21,1861, after initial signs of success, Union forces retreated from the northern Virginia battleﬁ elds back to Washington, D.C. In the aftermath of the lackluster performance, General George B. McClellan assumed command of the newly formed Army of the Potomac. The brilliant thirty-four-year-old “Little Mac” had been heralded as a prodigy since his days at West Point, where he graduated second in the class of 1846 at the age of just nineteen. Of McClellan’s ﬁ fty-eight former classmates, forty-four would ﬁ ght for one side or the other during the Civil War.

Soon enough, however, McClellan proved to be an ineffective leader on the battleﬁ eld, often slow to engage the enemy—or to make any decision for that matter. Frequently questioning orders and keeping information away from Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 50rise the president, McClellan, a longtime Democrat, had also proven contentious and pompous. “Again I have been called upon to save the country,” he wrote to his wife in typical fashion. 35 Despite having a significant advantage in troop numbers—and the battle plan of his opponent, General Robert E. Lee, placed in his hand in advance—McClellan failed to register a decisive victory at the Battle of Antietam. The conﬂ ict, on September 17,1862, would be remembered as “the bloodiest day of the war,” with some twelve thousand Union men and eleven thousand Confederates killed. Ignoring his orders, McClellan stalled in pursuit of desperate Army of Virginia troops, arguably prolonging the war. Understandably frustrated, Lincoln dismissed McClellan in November, after the commander again dawdled upon receiving orders to push troops southward. 36 A golden opportunity had been squandered at Antietam. Still, the marginal victory boosted morale somewhat in the North, giving President Lincoln the chance to make a momentous announcement. Within a week of the battle, Union newspapers published a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation. As of January 1,1863, “all persons held as slaves within” the Confederacy “shall be then, thenceforth and forever free,” the document read.

After Lincoln’s announcement, McClellan, who was not remotely an abolitionist, felt he had been used. He immediately wrote a draft protesting the doctrine, before a friend convinced him that it was unwise to send it to the president. 37 Again, Copperhead predictions seemed to be becoming reality. The Newark Daily Journal’s Edward Fuller called the Emancipation Proclamation “as absurd as it is fanatical.” The war, originally envisioned solely to preserve the country, had been co-opted by zealots, they maintained. The rights of white men everywhere were in jeopardy. “If you love your country better than the Negro, the Union better than party, drop these diverting, ruinous measures,” Newark’s Nehemiah Perry urged his peers in Congress. “Millions for the Union, not one cent for abolition.” 38 As the fall elections of 1862 neared, the New Jersey Democratic Party increased criticisms of the war’s handlers. The platform adopted at its convention included a “solemn protest against the reckless extravagance, infamous speculation and political outrages of the party in power,” while still advocating “the suppression of the rebellion.” As for abolition, the Democrats declared, “That we do entirely reject and abhor the idea that, as an object of the present civil war, any purpose of emancipation of the slaves shall be thereby promoted or at all regarded.” 39 The state Democratic Committee took Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. politics to the dogs51 Lincoln’s doctrine to task on the grounds that the government was unlaw- fully seizing private property—slaves—from their owners. In the committee’s words, the Emancipation Proclamation represented “an unconstitutional use of power to blot out of existence the institutions of whole states, and destroy the private property of the innocent people of those states.” 40 Running on a campaign that demonized the Republicans and called for “the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was,” New Jersey Democrats crushed their opponents on November 4,1862. Joel Parker, facing off in the governor’s race versus Republican Marcus Ward, a popular advocate of servicemen known as “The Soldier’s Friend,” received nearly 57 percent of the votes. Parker’s margin of victory was a record high. He lost only seven counties, all in the southern part of the state. Even in Ward’s hometown of Newark, Parker carried eleven of the thirteen wards.

Overall, Democrats increased what was a slight majority into a strangle- hold of the state legislature. They now held a forty-ﬁ ve to seventeen advantage over the Republicans in the assembly, and controlled twelve of the twenty seats in the state Senate. “Uncle Abraham,” a giddy Edward Fuller wrote in theDaily Journal, “will hear the thunder at the White House and make a note of the fact that the Jersey blues are aroused in defense of their own rights and liberties.” 41 The Democrats triumphed nationally as well in 1862, gaining thirty-four seats in Congress. 42 Now more ﬁ rmly in control of the New Jersey legislature than ever, the Democrats chose a vehement Copperhead named James Wall for appointment in the Senate. A lawyer from Burlington, Wall attended the 1860 Democratic convention in Charleston alongside William Wright and supported the Southern candidate Breckinridge. Wall wrote regularly for conservative Democratic newspapers including the New York Daily News and Wright’s Daily Journal. Wall became somewhat of a martyr in 1861 after the federal government threw him in jail for two weeks. Ofﬁ cially, his crime was protesting the seizure of antiwar newspapers, though some Republican newspapers reported that Wall had been actively encouraging Maryland to secede. Authorities released Wall after he took an oath of allegiance, but to Democrats the arbitrary arrest remained a sign that with the Republicans in power the rights of citizens everywhere were in danger. 43 Not all Democrats were pleased with the selection of an extremist such as Wall. “I would be lacking in my duty to my constituents, did I permit this opportunity to pass without entering my solemn protest against the election to the U.S. Senate of such a man as Mr. Wall,” one Camden congressman said, addressing the Democratic chairman. “It is my belief, sir, that if he had lived in the days of the revolution he would have been a British patriot . . . Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 52rise and in this second revolution, that he is a Union patriot with Confederate principles.” 44 Nonetheless, the congressman ultimately cast his support behind Wall, as did all but one of the Democratic legislators voting. Two weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect, the man called the “most implacable anti-administration, anti-war, anti-Union man in the state” was ofﬁ cially named a member of the U.S. Senate. 45 Wall made it to the Senate only as a short-term replacement. His term was due to end in late February, so New Jersey legislators still needed to vote someone into the Senate for a full term. Wall lobbied for the position, but Democrats instead selected William Wright. The elderly saddle manufacturer had apparently bribed his way to the post, throwing money around to woo support like never before. “Nothing but his wealth enabled him to be elected,” was a typical refrain in newspapers. 46 To Republicans and pro-war Democrats, Wright’s appointment was somewhat of a blessing. Compared to a feisty, outspoken Copperhead such as Wall, Wright was a harmless nonentity. He had done the bare minimum during his earlier time in the Senate. Now older and in poor health, he would repeat the performance in his second stint. While Wright would surely go along with whatever Democratic Party leaders decided, and he was believed to sympathize with the most extreme Copperheads, he had kept his personal views largely private of late. Perhaps he was not as antiwar as his friends at theDaily Journal, some speculated. Wright’s son Edward, after all, served as an ofﬁ cer in the war; he had recently returned to New Jersey with the general he had served under, George McClellan. 47 With a compliant William Wright and the rest of the new, overwhelmingly Democratic state government in place, the Copperheads “not only brought political, but social and business inﬂ uences to bear,” one New Jersey Repub- lican contemporary wrote. “The anticipated arrival of Lee’s army, at the time of the advance upon Gettysburg, was the occasion of undisguised joy among disloyalists, and they would have gladly welcomed him to our state.” 48 Times seemed especially bleak to New Jersey’s Republicans. One of their highest-proﬁ le publications, the Newark Daily Mercury, went out of business that year (1863) because of a lack of support.

Early in that same year, Daily Journal editor Edward Fuller and others invited Ohio Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham to give an address at a Union Democratic Club rally in Newark. Vallandigham was the country’s best-known, outspoken Copperhead. By May of 1863, he would be sentenced to two years in jail for treason, which Lincoln later commuted to banish- ment. 49 The February 14,1863, event at Newark’s Concert Hall drew a huge Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. politics to the dogs53 crowd that included Mayor Bigelow, William Wright, and Nehemiah Perry, who introduced the evening’s featured lecturer. Congressman Vallandigham, who the Daily Journal called a “fearless champion of the people’s liberties,” spoke for two hours to the cheering masses. He demanded resistance to the expected draft, the ousting of Lincoln from the White House in the 1864 election, and an immediate stop to “this miserable crusade against African slavery.” 50 Emboldened, some New Jersey Democrats pushed a bill on March 18 called “An Act to Prevent the Immigration of Negroes and Mullatoes.” The bill, which aimed to deport to Liberia “or some island in the West Indies” all people of color who “shall hereafter come in this state and remain therein for ten days or more,” passed in the assembly before dying in the state senate.

Another bill considered that day succeeded in being passed into law. In it, the legislature lodged an ofﬁ cial protest “against a war waged with the insurgent States for the accomplishment of unconstitutional or partisan purposes . . . against all arrests without warrant . . . against the expenditures of the public moneys for the emancipation of slaves or their support at any time,” among other measures. 51 Upon hearing of the so-called Peace Resolutions passed by their home- state representatives, many New Jersey soldiers were disgusted. One regiment sent its own letter of resolution to the legislature, calling the protest “wicked, weak and cowardly.” 52 The federal Conscription Act, passed on March 3,1863, had been one of the prime reasons New Jersey’s borderline-treasonous Peace Resolutions had been written. Until then, there hadn’t been a national draft; each state was responsible for meeting its soldier quota however it saw ﬁ t, and Union forces consisted mostly of volunteers and national guardsmen. Now, any man aged eighteen to forty-ﬁ ve was subject to induction into the service—and forced to ﬁ ght for the black race, anti-abolitionists claimed. Copperheads unsurprisingly reacted with outrage. “If the people have one tithe of virtue and manliness of their fathers,” Edward Fuller wrote, “they will steadily refuse to be offered up as victims to the infernal destructive policy of the abolitionists.” 53 For that matter, the stipulation that any draftee paying $300 was free from service drew widespread ire from pro-war Republicans and Democrats alike.

Foreseeing trouble ahead, Governor Parker contacted the War Depart- ment to arrange an alternative to the draft. He lobbied successfully for an enlistment period to allow New Jersey to meet its quota voluntarily. On June 28,1863, Parker called for six thousand volunteers and promised bonuses of up to $300 for enlistees. 54Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 54rise New Jersey had bought itself some time, and perhaps avoided major incidents such as the riots that took place in mid-July as the draft got under way in New York City. Mobs consisting mostly of working-class Irish roamed Manhattan armed with torches, clubs, rocks, and pistols. They set ﬁ res, plun- dered and looted, and unleashed their anger and frustration especially upon African Americans, eighteen of whom were lynched. Five more were shoved into the river, where they drowned. When order was restored after four days, hundreds of buildings had been burned down, and around a hundred black people, ﬁ fty soldiers, and as many as two thousand rioters had been killed. 55 Smaller riots occurred around the same time in Massachusetts, Vermont, Ohio, and New Jersey. On July 13, the ﬁ rst night of New York’s draft riots, groups of men gathered at bulletin boards in Newark looking for updates.

Discussions grew rowdy, and an elderly gentleman who apparently sympa- thized with Lincoln was punched in the face and sent running for safety.

An angry crowd moved on to the ofﬁ ce of the Republican Daily Mercury at around 10 pm, screaming, “We won’t be drafted!” The mob broke the Mercury’s front door and lobbed rocks through the windows, though no one was inside. The evening’s total damage amounted to only about $250—triﬂ ing compared to New York City’s $5 million of losses. 56 Still, the potential for serious violence loomed in New Jersey, especially with a draft expected to take place on August 1 if the state’s quota wasn’t met.

Martin Ryerson, a lawyer and Democrat-turned-Republican from Newton, wrote to Secretary of State William Seward in the hopes of sparing New Jersey “the horrors of the New York City riots,” as Ryerson put it. “In many parts of the State, especially in the cities and towns along the railroads and in the mining districts, there are large numbers of Irish, and I am convinced that they are organized in every part of the State to resist the draft, many of them armed,” Ryerson wrote. “The minds of the poor, even the Republicans, are terribly inﬂ amed by the $300 clause.” Because some local police forces and militias “are mainly composed of Copperheads,” and Governor Parker “lacks the nerve and decision necessary for such a crisis,” Ryerson requested that the draft be postponed. 57 The powers in Washington, D.C., agreed, if only for practical reasons. “The draft will not be ordered in New Jersey,” one federal ofﬁ cial wrote, “until we are prepared to enforce it.” 58 As it turned out, enough volunteers came through so that no draft occurred in New Jersey in 1863. By the following spring, however, the state struggled to meet its quotas and began conducting drafts. Crowds packed halls in various Newark wards to listen to the names being called. Men hooted, laughed, and jeered whenever a prominent politician or businessman’s name was heard.

The audience in the fourth ward rose and gave three cheers when the name Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. politics to the dogs55 of Mr. Frazee, an ardent pro-war Democrat, was proclaimed. Frazee leaped to his feet, cheering and swinging his hat. “Being a most ferocious ‘war’ man,” theDaily Journal wrote, chiding Frazee, he would no doubt rush “to the gory ﬁ eld, instead of compromising the matter by legal tender greenbacks.” Writing under his well-known alias “GEP,” Frazee responded, “I will do so, providing” that Edward Fuller, Nehemiah Perry, and other Copperheads “accompany me as a high private and go immediately to the front and ﬁ ght during the war, as I consider one good union man’s life worth ten Copperheads—otherwise I shall stay at home.” Weakly attempting to justify his actions, Frazee wrote, “I think by so doing I can be of more service to my country than with the army, as it requires a few honest war Democrats at home to attend to the so-called peace Democrats.” 59 In fact, of the thirty-two thousand New Jerseyans drafted in 1864 and 1865, fewer than a thousand would actually serve in the war. 60 On Tuesday, July 19,1864, Edward Fuller responded to President Lincoln’s latest request for men to be drafted. This time, the president called for an additional ﬁ ve hundred thousand names. “Those who desire to be butchered will please step forward at once,” Fuller wrote.

All others will stay at home and defy Old Abe and his minions to drag them from their families. We hope that the people of New Jersey will at once put their feet down and insist that not a man shall be forced out of the State to engage in the abolition butchery, and swear to die at their own doors rather than march one step to fulﬁ ll the dictates of that mad revolutionary fanaticism, which has destroyed the best government the world ever saw, and would now butcher its remaining inhabitants to carry out a mere fanatical sentiment. This has gone far enough, and must be stopped. Let the people rise as one man and demand that his wholesale murder shall cease. 61 While Fuller’s words were somewhat stronger than his usual vitriol, they were hardly atypical. Several New Jersey newspapers printed Fuller’s editorial, and at least two—the Somerset Messenger and the Bergen Demo- crat—endorsed the sentiment. 62 Even so, on the morning of Friday, July 22, Fuller was arrested and charged with violating several federal laws—notably the Conscription Act, which made it illegal to encourage resistance to the draft. The Journal reported the news solemnly, steadfastly proclaiming that citizens “can never be made slaves of Abraham Lincoln, and will oppose to the death every attempt to establish a military despotism over the State of New Jersey.” 63Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 56rise Another Copperhead martyr had been created. “If this be treason, let it be treason,” a widely quoted, deﬁ ant Fuller said, seemingly prepared to defend himself to the gallows. A week after Fuller’s arrest, a group of men from New York and New Jersey met with the editor, out on bail, and presented him with the gift of a gold-headed sword cane. “It is presented to you because you have proved yourself to be a brave man, who has never cowered before the scowling ministers of illegal and despotic power,” said C. Chauncey Burr, former editor of the Copperhead Hackensack Democrat. “The people know that you are neither a traitor nor the friend of traitors. They know that you love your country, and that you have been doing all that a brave and true man could.... Your cause is theirs.” 64 By the summer of 1864, nearly four years of war had passed and there was no end in sight. Around the nation, people seemed more anxious than ever for peace. President Lincoln himself believed it unlikely he would win the upcoming election, if an election occurred at all. (Selecting a national leader in the midst of a civil war was unprecedented, and many people predicted the election would be called off.) To attract wider support, particularly among border states, Andrew Johnson, Tennessee governor and a Democrat, was installed as vice president on the Republican ticket with Lincoln.

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, attended among others by Clement Vallandigham, who had sneaked in from banishment in Canada, selected a nemesis from Lincoln’s past as the party’s candidate. General George McClellan, dismissed by the president after faltering at Antietam, ran on a platform promising to take every possible measure to end the war quickly. Though a political novice, McClellan was a charismatic, well-known ﬁ gure, popular inside and outside the military. He had been brave and prin- cipled enough to stand up and criticize the president, supporters said, and he was still regarded as brilliant in certain circles. Moreover, with a military man as their nominee, the Democrats believed they could not be called disloyal or antiwar. A resident of West Orange since 1863, McClellan was particularly well liked in New Jersey. Most Copperheads had only lukewarm feelings for McClellan, though. To appease the most anti-Lincoln Democrats, McClellan’s running mate would be George Pendleton, an Ohio congressman, and nearly as vehement a peace man as his home-state colleague Clement Vallandigham. 65 As a campaigner, the egotistical, inexperienced McClellan was mediocre at best. Crucial Union army victories in late summer and early fall—notably, General William T. Sherman’s seizure of Atlanta and Admiral David Farra-Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. politics to the dogs57 gut’s famous “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” triumph in Mobile Bay—didn’t bode well for McClellan’s chances either. Lincoln claimed a second term in a landslide. The ofﬁ cial Electoral College votes counted 212 to 21. The incumbent even won four out of every ﬁ ve soldiers’ votes, despite McClellan’s military background. 66 The election of 1864 marked the ﬁ rst time that soldiers in the ﬁ eld could vote for the president. It was up to each state to decide whether to allow their servicemen to vote, however, and New Jersey was one of the few that declined. The state’s Democrats had voted against a measure allowing for absentee balloting, effectively cutting out of the political process tens of thousands of New Jersey soldiers. Harper’s Weekly had described the state’s absentee balloting vote as “31 Copperhead Nays to 19 Union Yeas.” 67 The presidential election gave a strong vote of conﬁ dence to President Lincoln. Yet, New Jersey again stood out notoriously from its peers. It would be remembered as the lone northern state to give its electoral votes to George McClellan. (McClellan also won border states Delaware and Kentucky.) Little Mac carried nearly all of the populous north Jersey cities, though surprisingly Lincoln took Essex and Passaic counties. The 53 percent majority McClellan received from the state seemed more than anything an indictment of the war by voters. As the Daily Journal wrote in the buildup to the election, “To vote for Lincoln is to vote for further drafts.” 68 On February 15,1865, Edward Fuller entered the U.S. District Court in Trenton to defend himself against charges he had encouraged resistance to the draft the previous summer. Fuller’s defense attorneys were as prominent and powerful as any in the state: General Theodore Runyon, the mayor of Newark, and John P. Stockton, a U.S. senator, future New Jersey attorney general, and member of the wealthy Princeton family. 69 Fuller held a document in his hand and read the carefully worded state- ment. “I have never been moved by seditious intentions; I have never designed to favor mob law, or to incite insurrection, and I have at all times supposed that in my utterances and publications I was strictly within the just limits of liberty of speech,” he afﬁ rmed. Nonetheless, Fuller thought it best “to take the advice of my counsel, and retract my plea, and plead guilty.” Given Fuller’s promise to never “interfere with the action of the military authorities” again, the judge decided against imposing a severe penalty. After paying a $100 ﬁ ne, Fuller was freed.

That April, within a week of General Lee at last ﬂ ying the ﬂ ag of truce, and on the very same day that President Lincoln’s assassination made news, Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 58rise Edward Fuller resigned from the Newark Daily Journal. Fuller offered no excuses or apologies. “What we have written and published has been dictated in an independent spirit by an honest and patriotic desire for the welfare of our beloved country,” he wrote, as obliviously conﬁ dent as ever. The publica- tion’s only fault, perhaps, was to “have carried the old standard of Democracy too high,” and to have maintained opinions that were “too unﬂ inching and straightforward and unbending to secure the highest temporary success and the largest degree of popular favor.” 70 By early June, soldiers in blue appeared again in large numbers on the streets of Trenton, Newark, and other New Jersey cities. Their arrival was unannounced, and they initially received no hero’s welcome. That wasn’t the only reason the “Jersey Blue” men felt bitter. Because of New Jersey’s Copperhead reputation, many soldiers had been pestered incessantly by servicemen from other states. Jokes about New Jersey soldiers needing to take an oath of allegiance before being released from the army were common.

The perception was that New Jersey’s troops were among the last regiments to be sent home as punishment for their state’s traitorous conduct. “Jersey seems to be left out in the cold entirely,” one soldier said. “We are snubbed on every side.” 71 For all of the grief they received, the approximately eighty thousand New Jersey men who served in the Union army and navy—including nearly three thousand African Americans—had ample reason to hold their heads high.

By war’s end, some sixty-four hundred New Jersey soldiers had been killed.

New Jersey’s troops had fought as admirably and suffered as greatly as any.

A corporal from Newark named Edgar Trelease, for example, was among the thirty-three thousand Union soldiers held at the infamous Anderson- ville prison camp, where nearly one-third died. Scurvy and other diseases ﬂ ourished, maggots ﬁ lled men’s unattended wounds, and food was in such short supply that soldiers dug through the sun-scorched Georgia dirt looking for roots to eat. Prisoners were occasionally shot by guards for approaching a row of stakes called the “dead line.” Amid such a desperate atmosphere, Trelease and his fellow POWs consoled each other in conversation. “We talked of home, of wives, mothers, and sisters, upon whose faces we did not expect, many of us, ever to look again,” he wrote. “What are they thinking and doing at home? Do they miss us, and long for our coming? Are they still among the living?” 72 For the soldiers who survived and made it home to Newark during the summer of 1865, the city they returned to served as proof that at least one Copperhead prediction was dead wrong. Business had not suffered due to the war. Quite the opposite occurred, with factories pumping out weapons, Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. politics to the dogs59 knapsacks, clothing, boots, and other supplies for the Union cause. Even Copperheads proﬁ ted greatly. Congressman and clothing manufacturer Nehemiah Perry, for example, raked in a fortune selling army uniforms.

Newcomers had arrived on Newark’s manufacturing scene as well. In 1864, William and George Clark, brothers in a Scottish family with a long history of making cotton thread, decided that Newark was the ideal city for them to found a business. Their operations proved so successful that by 1866, the immense, newly built $800,000 Clark Thread Company factory employed more than a thousand workers. 73 After the initial population drop in Newark at the war’s outbreak, the city swelled with workers through the mid-1860s to keep up with the increased productivity. As of 1865, the city was home to over eighty-seven thousand people, a rise of nearly twenty thousand in two years.

As a testament to the city’s unparalleled importance in the state, two Newarkers squared off in the contest for governor in the fall of 1865. Mayor Theodore Runyon represented the Democrats. With most of the state’s soldiers home—and therefore, ﬁ nally able to vote—Republicans chose a candidate every returning serviceman would know and like: Marcus Ward.

“The Soldier’s Friend” had recently secured pensions for those wounded (or for the families of those killed), visited ﬁ eld hospitals, and transformed an old Newark warehouse into a military hospital with volunteer doctors and borrowed beds. Thousands of letters were mailed to Ward during the war because of his reputation for giving soldiers and their families all sorts of assistance. He helped them navigate the maddening bureaucracies involved with sending money, arranged for wounded soldiers to be moved, or simply get paid by the federal government. “Dear Sir,” one man from Paterson wrote on behalf of his neighbor, a private wounded at Fredericksburg, “He has received no pay since he joined the Regiment and his ﬁ nances are very low at present. When you visited us in Paterson you told me you were the soldiers’ friend, and as such I would recommend him to you.” In another letter, a minister from Elizabeth contacted Ward for a woman whose husband was killed outside of Richmond, asking who to contact regarding the deceased’s pension. “Will you please give her a few words writing to the said ofﬁ ce for the pension?” the minister asked. “She is a poor woman with her children.” 74 References to the war filled the governor’s campaign. A pamphlet, satirically titled “Copperhead Love for the Soldier,” criticized the Democrats, particularly their refusal to allow servicemen to vote by absentee ballot.

“They were not Democrats—they were Copperheads—rightly named for this cold-blooded, slimy reptile that comes unaware, and strikes with his Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 60rise deadly fangs without warning,” the pamphlet stated. “Copperheads they are, and as Copperheads will they be known in all history, taking rank next after the Tories and Refugees of the Revolution!” 75 Republican campaign songs appealed to returning servicemen who “fought a valiant ﬁ ght” and should now “defeat the trait’rous Copperheads” who had been “ﬁ ghting in our rear.” 76 Theodore Runyon had actually served in the Union army early on in the war, but his extremely brief, unsuccessful stint had earned him more criticism than accolades. One song roasted Runyon’s military performance as downright cowardly: “The Copperhead Candidate/ Runyon, we know/ Was noted for running/ Some four years ago.” 77 Serving as a preamble to the statewide contest, on October 10,1865, Newark overwhelmingly elected a trunk manufacturer named Thomas Peddie—who incidentally worked for Smith & Wright early in his career—as the city’s ﬁ rst Republican mayor in nearly a decade. A month later, the city gave its endorse- ment to another Republican for governor. Marcus Ward beat Theodore Runyon by nearly sixteen hundred votes in Newark, the home city of both candidates. With 51 percent of the votes statewide, “The Soldier’s Friend” became governor. Statistics weren’t kept regarding the vote of returning soldiers, but it is assumed the vast majority threw their support to Ward.

One soldier was quoted as saying he’d “rather lose my right arm than not vote for Ward.” 78 In the same election, Republicans gained majorities in both branches of the New Jersey state legislature. Voters had their say regarding the most outspoken war critics; the number who could be called full-ﬂ edged Copper- heads fell from twelve to four in the assembly. 79 On December 18,1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratiﬁ ed, abolishing slavery throughout the land. While most state legislatures had approved the amendment the previous February, Democrat-dominated New Jersey had postponed a vote until March, whereupon there was a stalemate. That is how the issue stood through the rest of 1865. Once in ofﬁ ce in early 1866, Marcus Ward asked the legislature to ratify the amendment, even though it had already become U.S. law. Legislators consented, and New Jersey redeemed itself somewhat at the national level, voicing a symbolic, if inconsequential, message: it too approved of the abolition of slavery. 80 That November, William Wright, U.S. senator from New Jersey, passed away. For months before his death, Wright had been in exceptionally poor health and had all but disappeared from society and the political scene. On November 3, the day of the funeral, Wright’s family, friends, business associ- ates, and colleagues in politics gathered for prayers at his Park Place mansion.

It was an assembly of Newark’s most powerful and inﬂ uential politicians, lawyers, and businessmen seeing one of their own off with dignity.Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. politics to the dogs61 In the afternoon, a procession left the Wright property, streamed past Military Park and up Broad Street, just past the Lackawanna Railroad tracks to a brownstone church with a sharp A-frame roof and a tall steeple. William Wright had been a member and benefactor of the Episcopalian church known as the House of Prayer since it had been built in 1850. William Maybin, the House of Prayer rector, performed the ceremony with the assistance of reverends from four other churches, including one who came in especially for the service from New York City.

Afterward, family and friends proceeded a few miles north. They walked along shaded paths to a soaring rectangular column at the center of the fenced- off Wright family burial plot, which was perched on a bluff overlooking the Passaic River in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Opened in 1844, the forty-acre oasis was ﬁ lled with huge monuments, elegantly crafted statues, and marble mausoleums popular among the wealthy in the nineteenth century. William Wright’s old rival, William Pennington, had been interred there in 1862. It would also be the ﬁ nal resting place for luminaries such as Copperhead politician Nehemiah Perry, inventor Seth Boyden, and one of Wright’s pall- bearers, current New Jersey governor Marcus Ward. White ﬂ owers and a cross sat atop the black cofﬁ n as it was lowered into the ground. 81 A simple stone memorial tablet at the House of Prayer honors William Wright as “The loving husband and father, the faithful friend, the prudent counsellor, the benefactor of this, his parish church, from the laying of its corner stone to his last hour.” Just above a line from Deuteronomy—“The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms”—is the inscription that “charity was the rule of his life.” The Dictionary of American Biography, by contrast, memorialized Wright this way: “He is said never to have debated in either house, and his chairmanship of the Senate committee on manufactures alone saves him from virtual oblivion in the records.” 82 A week after the funeral, Governor Ward named Frederick Frelinghuysen as interim replacement for Wright in the Senate. The Wrights and the Frelin- ghuysens knew each other well. Years earlier in his Whig days, William Wright had been a great supporter of the political career of Theodore Frelinghuysen, Frederick’s uncle (and adopted father after the boy’s father died). Theodore Frelinghuysen had been Newark’s second mayor; he also ran as vice president on the 1844 Whig ticket with Henry Clay in a campaign loudly supported by William Wright. Whereas Wright eventually fell in with the Democratic Party, however, the Frelinghuysens joined the Republicans. In 1860, Fred- erick Frelinghuysen and William Wright had both been delegates at national political conventions, but they represented opposing parties.

Signs of the changing times—and changing power structure—continued to surface in Newark in early 1867. After Lincoln’s assassination, a city alderman Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 62rise proposed to rename South Park in the president’s honor. Democrats rejected the motion in 1865, and did so again when it was presented the following year. One bitter alderman opposed to the motion claimed that Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and others were far greater ﬁ gures than President Lincoln, and they didn’t have parks named for them. Finally, on March 1,1867, the suggested name change came up again, and Newark’s aldermen passed it by a vote of eighteen to three. The Republican mayor, Thomas Peddie, approved the resolution in early April, rechristening the colonial-era South Common as Lincoln Park. 83Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved.   gr eater n ewa r k a metropolis blooms with the dawn of the twentieth century At 7pm on Tuesday, August 20,1872, the doors opened at downtown Newark’s old skating rink, a long, thirty-ﬁ ve thousand-square-foot building with an arched roof at the corner of Washington and Court streets. Coming by train, on foot, and in horse-drawn streetcars and carriages, crowds streamed into Newark past belching smokestacks, neat row homes, a few ornate, four- story ofﬁ ce buildings, and church steeples that would have ﬁ t the scenery in small New England towns. It was opening night at the Newark Industrial Exhibition, the ﬁ rst event of its kind in the United States, and spectators were curious about what kind of show New Jersey’s biggest city could muster. 1 In England, booming industrial towns such as Shefﬁ eld and Birmingham had recently begun hosting exhibitions of goods made in their respective cities as a way to stir up business and investment. A similar showcase of the best products of Newark, a city colloquially known as the “Birmingham of America,” had been discussed but regularly dismissed by skeptics for years.

In January of 1872, with Newark in the midst of yet another wild growth spurt—approximately 30,000 residents had been added since the end of the Civil War, bringing the population to about 115,000—government and business leaders agreed that the time for the city’s own exhibit was ripe.

Arguably no other U.S. city was so closely associated with industry and manufacturing. Newark ranked third in terms of overall industrial output, despite its comparatively small population, ranked thirteenth in the country.

The transitions from selling goods to the South prior to the Civil War, to selling goods to the U.S. government during the war, to selling goods postwar to all sorts of U.S. and foreign cities, had occurred fairly smoothly, thanks to Newark’s diversity of goods and quick reaction to the marketplace. Nearly everything then manufactured, bought, and sold in the United States could 63Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 64 rise be found in Newark, probably within a ﬁ fteen-minute walk of the Passaic River. “We not only manufacture,” the Newark Daily Advertiser proclaimed in April 1872, “but we make the things to manufacture with.” 2 Even so, some Newark factories still stamped their goods MADE IN NEW YORK to help them sell. A magazine published in Newark after the Civil War pointed out:

“The average American citizen knows less about Newark than he does about any other point of equal interest in the United States.” 3 To gain a new level of prominence for the city, a committee led by Mayor Frederick Ricord and Marcus Ward—then out of ofﬁ ce as governor and running for Congress—organized the 1872 exhibition, an early progenitor of the business convention. For maximum exposure, the committee invited all local businesses to participate for a reasonable $25 fee. Admission charges for the public were kept low, and the exhibition would last nearly two months.

Early on in the planning stages, it became apparent that Newark’s old roller- skating rink, which everyone simply called “the Rink,” was the best facility to host the event. As more and more ﬁ rms signed on to participate, even the Rink seemed too small to accommodate all the merchandise to be displayed. Local companies quickly put up the money to build two new wings onto the main building, bringing the total exhibition space up to ﬁ fty thousand square feet.

The weather during opening week was awful, with sweltering days in the upper nineties, as well as storms violent enough to uproot trees and take the roofs off a few buildings. Even so, the exhibition’s inaugural festivities drew a large crowd; estimates ranged as high as four thousand attendees.

Inside the Rink’s front entrance, a marble fountain decorated with ﬂ owers and ﬁ lled with goldﬁ sh sprayed water twenty-ﬁ ve feet high, cooling the air a bit on the steamy opening night. Hundreds of gas jets shaded by opal globes spread a rainbow of light through the hall. Funhouse-style mirrors added to the festive atmosphere, distorting the images of patrons as they walked by.

Colored streamers and bunting draped the rooms, and ﬂ ags from France, Germany, England, and other nations hung next to the Stars and Stripes.

Under the Rink’s three-story-high ceiling, artisans, laborers, and their families, as well as rich men in three-piece suits and society ladies wearing long, poofy skirts, inched past displays. “The wealthiest and lowliest mingled together with good democratic freedom,” wrote the Newark Daily Journal.

“The silk robed wives and daughters of the prosperous manufacturer exam- ined with as much interest the elegant wares from his establishments as did the plain but neatly dressed wives and daughters of the hard working mechanic.” 4 The people of Newark all came “for a common purpose—to see what they had made; to hear about themselves and what most nearly concerned them,” in the words of the Daily Advertiser. “It was the story of Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. greater newark 65 their lives, told not only in words but in a sort of picture writing, in which the characters had substance as well as shapes of glowing beauty.” What exactly had Newark made? Without knowing it, people around the country probably owned dozens of articles that originated in the city. “The trunk you travel with is, nine times out of ten, of Newark manufacture,” the New York Times explained. “The hat you wear was made there, the buttons on your coat, the shirt on your back, your brush, the tinware you use in your kitchen, the oil-cloth you walk on, the harness and bit you drive with, all owe to Newark their origin.” The Times’ partial list of goods represented at the exhibition included “agricultural implements, machinery and castings, all kinds of plain and fancy lamps, upholstery, gold smelting, cutlery that looks as ﬁ ne as Shefﬁ eld work, gas-ﬁ ttings, paints and colors, brushes, cabinetwork, pottery, fancy metal work, piano-fortes, oil-cloths, silverware, and very many other articles too numerous to mention.” Also, “as to your wife’s chain, bracelets, ear rings and pendants, they have been fashioned by some cunning Newark goldsmith.” One of the most prominent items at the exhibition was a huge ﬁ fty- horsepower engine from Passaic Machine-works. Women gathered around a marvelous, state-of-the-art “baby-jumping machine,” with the designer’s own child happily bouncing away in demonstration. Another favorite among the ladies was a trunk that, after a quick conversion, doubled as both a cradle and bathtub. Baseball bats and models of steamships and schooners drew attention from boys. There were also countless innovative new goods for the home—burglar and ﬁ re alarms, door locks, wax ﬂ owers, decorative collections of butterﬂ ies and leaves.

Two wide, newly constructed staircases in the Rink led visitors to a spacious gallery, where patrons viewed statues and paintings of local artists, most notably Thomas Moran. Born in 1837 in Langshire, England, Moran lived in Baltimore and Philadelphia and apprenticed with a wood-engraver as a teen. After studying in Europe, he became enamored with landscape paint- ings, particularly that of Englishman J.M.W. Turner. Moran lived in Newark in the days after the Civil War, and in 1871 he joined a geological expedition to the Yellowstone Territory. Critics instantly praised his work from the trip, particularly Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. In it, two dark, tiny ﬁ gures in the foreground stand on the edge of an immense canyon that’s speckled with evergreens and glowing in shades of orange, yellow, and white.

Newark Exhibition leaders originally planned on showing Moran’s Grand Canyon, but the federal government, which sponsored the Yellowstone expedition, claimed the painting three weeks before opening night. Instead, Moran contributed with similarly romantic, warmly colored landscapes Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 66 rise inDreamland,Hemlock Forest, and Children of the Mountain. The Newark Morning Register declared the last, featuring a waterfall crashing over craggy rocks at the center and soft, low-lying clouds with hints of purple and yellow above, “undoubtedly the ﬁ nest work of art in the gallery.” 5 For many, Moran’s powerful, idealized natural landscapes depicted a great big world waiting to be explored, one of nearly endless possibility. Consid- ering how rapidly industry was changing how people lived, with advances in trains, electricity, lighting, and farm equipment making age-old toils disappear, Moran’s paintings struck a chord—particularly with the people of Newark, a city that prided itself on being at the forefront of such advances.

From another perspective, however, the romantic works of Moran and the popular Hudson River School artists were a direct reaction to the urbaniza- tion of the era when people moved en masse to cities and lost their connection to nature. The crowds loved the scenes because they were beautiful and pure, without a grimy factory, polluted river, or ﬁ lthy street in sight.

At 8 pm on opening night, Reinhard’s Band, a well-known brass outﬁ t that played at Newark picnics and balls, kicked off the festivities with the elegant Grand March from the opera Bellisario. The band also performed a theme song written expressly for the event, which would be heard regularly for the duration of the exhibition. The song began with the lyrics, “Now glory to the workingmen, whose cunning hands to-day/ Have wrought the wondrous things we see spread out in grand array.” After music and an opening prayer came the introduction of Marcus Ward, the Newark native and prominent city merchant, Civil War-era “Soldier’s Friend,” and former governor. Ward was enough of a local celebrity to be the subject of one of the paintings in the exhibition gallery. As president of the Industrial Exhibition committee, the sixty-year-old Ward approached the podium with his distinct shaggy, mustache-less beard to give the opening address. “The city in which we live is emphatically a manufacturing one,” Ward said. “Its growth, its prosperity, its wealth are inseparably connected with these mechanic arts which are here developed in a thousand forms of beauty and taste.” By all accounts, opening night, as well as the rest of the Newark Industrial Exhibition, was a runaway success. The city received what it hoped for in terms of widespread press coverage, especially due to prominent visitors like New Jersey–born General Thomas B. Van Buren, the U.S. commissioner to Vienna. “If the people of Europe could go through the hall, and view the samples of work here shown, they would be amazed at the perfection of American mechanism,” Van Buren said during a September visit to Newark.

“They would be astounded at the extent of the productions of one single city of this country.”Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. greater newark 67 Horace Greeley, the most inﬂ uential newspaperman in the country and then the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, also made an appear- ance. Two nights after Greeley’s visit, his opponent in the election, President Ulysses S. Grant, likewise stopped at Newark for a tour of the exhibition, during which the Rink was “crowded to such an extent that neither the Presi- dent nor anybody else could see, hear, or move,” according to the Morning Register. 6 Standing in front of the gallery, Grant bowed to cheers from the crowd below. “This far-famed city of Newark has done well,” said President Grant. “The excellency of your manufactures is working a large inﬂ uence on the importation of foreign manufacture. I heartily thank you for this great pleasure.” By the end of the exhibition’s ﬁ fty-two-day run, the event had attracted an estimated 130,000 visitors, including many manufacturers and wholesalers from Philadelphia and New York City. More than a thousand exhibitors participated in the show, with presenters periodically altering displays and bringing in new merchandise. Many local visitors opted for the $3 season ticket rather than the one-time 30¢ admission, to view the changing roster of items, as well as to take in the lively social scene. A brass band from Bavaria performed in late August, and other musicians and entertainers played in rotation. “The Rink during the Exposition has become quite a fashionable evening rendezvous for our young people,” a social column in the Morning Register read. “The music is so ﬁ ne, you know.” 7 Just as at the opening, Reinhard’s band played and Marcus Ward spoke on the exhibition’s ﬁ nal night, October 11. “All the good expected from it has been realized,” said Ward. “The value and character of our manufacturing interests have been clearly shown.” Newspapers uniformly agreed, with the Sunday Call describing the exhibition as “the grandest enterprise ever under- taken by the people of Newark.” The New Jersey Freie Zeitung wrote that “Newark has achieved an enviable prominence among her sister cities. She has thus demonstrated that the name of a ‘great manufacturing city,’ which she has already borne, was no empty title.” “All those from abroad who have honored the city by their attendance have spoken of the Exhibition in terms of the highest praise,” said the Newark Evening Courier. “The fame of Newark has therefore spread over the land.” Toward the end of the year, a lengthy New York Times article proclaimed that “Newark has grown, as the old ladies say, beyond all knowledge, and with a rapidity of late years which throws the growth of New-York and Brooklyn into the shade.” 8 All indications pointed to continued success in the days ahead. As written in the Morning Register, “No city of its size in the Union has a more prosperous present manufacturing status, and none of any size a brighter future.”Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 68 rise Newark hosted an industrial exhibition in each of the next three years, though none matched the success of the original; the Panic of 1873 dampened the spirits in the follow-up year in particular. In 1876, with Philadelphia poised to attract hundreds of thousands for its monumental Centennial Exhibition, Newark dropped its industrial fair indeﬁ nitely.

However much attention the events brought to manufacturers, the exhibi- tions also revealed Newark for what it was: a largely one-dimensional city.

The variety and sheer amount of items it made had grown exponentially, but simply put, Newark was a producer that sent goods elsewhere to be sold. Newark had built itself up as such, and seemed rather content in its status. “We are only a workshop, a community of manufacturers rather than merchants,” the Daily Advertiser counseled in 1870. “The transfer of trade must be made mainly in New York, which is our national exchange. Our streets will never be ‘crowded with buyers,’ but will be with hurrying wagons of goods already sold.” 9 The local board of trade held that since “there is a manifest unﬁ tness of our city for a great commercial centre,” Newark should focus its energies toward its role as “a monster workshop.” 10 By deﬁ ning itself, Newark had limited itself. And unfortunately, even as the city was heralding its strength in manufacturing, other industrial-based cities were challenging its dominance. Newark may have been growing as the end of the century neared, but not as rapidly as emerging manufacturing cities such as Detroit and Cleveland. They would both surpass Newark’s population by the 1890 census.

While the Industrial Exhibition of 1872 helped to ﬁ rmly establish Newark as a manufacturing power, many Newarkers grasped that it was unwise to place all of the city’s eggs in the lone basket of industry. In the decades ahead, the city needed to expand what deﬁ ned Newark. New endeavors, particularly in banking, insurance, retail, electricity, entertainment, and education, would be introduced, as would new transportation systems and, at last, beautiful green spaces with fresh air for residents to enjoy. Many of the issues brought to light in the 1850s—unpaved roads, the absence of a public-sewer system or a safe, ample water supply, the proliferation of disease—would need to be addressed. Attempts would also be made to annex signiﬁ cant neighboring lands so that the city might expand physically.

As had already become tradition in Newark, entrepreneurs, inventors, and businessmen took the lead in the city’s next stage. Moving well beyond the city’s manufacturing staples involving leather, wood, and jewelry, innovators created products for the modernizing world.

While still only in his twenties, Thomas Alva Edison used some of the $40,000 given to him by Western Union for his latest telegraph machine to Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. greater newark 69 hire more than a hundred workers and operate as many as ﬁ ve shops simulta- neously in Newark in the early 1870s. To Edison and so many other inventors and entrepreneurs, Newark was a quieter, more affordable alternative to New York, with a skilled labor force and ample businesses that produced iron and brass castings, tools, chemicals, and other supplies necessary for endless exper- iments. Newark was exactly what the young genius needed before moving in 1876 to his famous “invention factory” at Menlo Park. While in Newark, Edison worked on various sewing machines and a new quadraplex telegraph that relayed four messages at once. He also built an electric pen, which, in the era before photocopy machines, proved useful. A tiny needle in the “pen” created stencils for drawings, maps, pamphlets, circulars, and legal briefs. 11 John Wesley Hyatt, another inventor from the era, came to prominence for creating a plastic material he called celluloid. With the backing of New Yo r k ﬁ nanciers, Hyatt built a ﬁ ve-story plant on Newark’s Mechanic Street.

Throughout his half century in the city, Hyatt received dozens of patents while perfecting his plastics, which were molded into knife handles, dental plates, buttons, combs, novelty gifts, and, with the advent of the automobile, axle bearings. 12 A doctor and chemist named Edward Weston created dynamos and generators for a New York City company before settling in Newark in 1875 and opening factories for the production of motors, batteries, fuses, magnets, and nearly everything else involved in the exciting new ﬁ eld of electricity.

Weston’s especially bright arc lights, which could glow in any color desired, impressed city leaders enough to give him a contract to illuminate Military Park in 1881. Two years later, Weston’s lights glowed atop the era’s most spectacular new marvel, the Brooklyn Bridge. In 1884, Weston helped found a much-needed institution in his adopted city, the Newark Technical School, which would evolve into the New Jersey Institute of Technology. 13 John Fairﬁ eld Dryden, a Yale College dropout from Maine who had failed in several insurance ventures, introduced a concept in Newark in 1873 that was arguably more life-altering than electricity. Insurance at the time was aimed almost exclusively at wealthy customers, with expensive premiums that were paid monthly or quarterly by mail. The middle and lower classes, which constituted the vast majority of Newarkers, could ﬁ nally afford insur- ance through Dryden’s new Widows and Orphans Friendly Society. Agents visited customers once a week to collect premiums on policies that cost as little as three cents a week (and paid off beneﬁ ts as meager as $10). 14 Dryden’s outﬁ t renamed itself the Prudential Friendly Society in 1875, before settling two years later on the Prudential Insurance Company. The business expanded extraordinarily quickly, opening new branches in simi- larly working-class Paterson, Jersey City, Elizabeth, and Camden. Customers Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 70 rise bought more than a million Prudential policies by 1890, and three million more by the turn of the century. As a testament to the company’s success, an opulent, turret-topped castle of an ofﬁ ce building rose on Broad Street in 1892 to serve as Prudential’s home ofﬁ ce for some four thousand employees.

Ornate murals, gargoyles, stained glass, rich wood paneling, and marble decorated the building’s every corner. Perhaps most surprising of all, every room was equipped with telephones and electric lights. As a friendly touch— and an unusual one for the era—a drinking fountain was installed for the public. Within a decade, four additional buildings were completed to form a downtown headquarters complex. In the twentieth century, Prudential would expand into a multibillion dollar insurance and ﬁ nancial ﬁ rm, one more closely identiﬁ ed with Newark than any other company. 15 In retrospect, Dryden’s insurance pitch ﬁ lled an obvious need. Life among turn-of-the-century factories and tenements was unstable and dangerous.

Perhaps Dryden’s smartest concept was the guarantee that beneﬁ ts, however minimal, would be paid off within twenty-four hours of a death certiﬁ cate— of particular appeal to the working classes living paycheck to paycheck.

Immigrants, of course, were well represented in that category, and in Newark in general. From the Civil War well into the new century, the number of Newark’s foreign-born residents hovered at around one-third the popula- tion. Together with their American-born children, the newcomers constituted the majority in the city. 16 By the late 1800s, the “early” immigrants from Ireland and Germany were ﬁ rmly entrenched in the city. Though the Germans still received grief for their insistence on keeping beer gardens open on the Sabbath and the Irish were occasionally excluded from certain lines of work, the two groups had made inroads in politics and business, vastly improving their status since arriving in the United States.

While Newark’s biggest ale house was run by Scotsman Peter Ballantine, Germans were responsible for producing most of the lager in the city’s enormous brewery industry. In 1876, a writer touring Newark’s German quarter, a two-square-mile hilly section of middle-class immigrants just northwest of downtown, encountered no fewer than eight breweries, where customers walked into arched cellars stacked with barrels. “German habits and German customs appear on every side” of the neighborhood, where most families owned their homes and raised vegetables in backyard gardens, she wrote in Harper’s. “At noon you will see women and children running across the streets and up and down with pitchers in their hands. They are Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. greater newark 71 going for lager-beer to drink with their dinners, which is as indispensable as the dinner itself.” 17 Germans also had a large hand in the jewelry industry, one of the city’s top-three moneymakers. Just two years after leaving Germany for Newark, Edward Balbach Sr. saw a niche in the city’s expanding jewelry business. In 1850 he opened a silver and gold reﬁ ning plant. The company focused on handling the sweepings from other jewelry factories; previously, particles too tiny for use had to be sent off to reﬁ ners in Europe. Edward Balbach Jr.

patented a new desilvering process in 1864 that rapidly separated silver and gold from base metals. At the time, only U.S. mints and the Balbach factory were capable of such work. Business boomed as jewelry companies from around the United States, Mexico, and other countries sent their metals to Newark for processing. 18 It was factories such as Balbach’s that provided work for the tens of thousands of newcomers, primarily from southern and eastern Europe, who arrived during turn-of-the-century immigration waves. Most were motivated to emigrate due to the dire, oppressive lives they endured in Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Greece, or Russia. One Italian immigrant, as a fairly typical example, was born in 1872 into a large family in Oratina, a farming village north of Naples. His father grew corn, wheat, and other grains to provide for his family, but did not own the farm. The children worked the ﬁ elds with their father and were paid only with food and the occasional new pair of pants or shoes, “providing crops had been good and Father could manage to sell part of our share of the crops, which didn’t happen every year, you may be sure,” the man later recalled. “Work on the farm was hard and I didn’t care for it much.” When an uncle wrote from Newark and offered to pay for his passage to America, the ﬁ fteen-year-old said goodbye to his parents and never saw them again. 19 Immigrants came to Newark for unromantic reasons. They heard work was available. Often, there were already at least a few of an immigrant’s countrymen living in the city, providing some degree of comfort. The newcomers charmed and muscled their way into whatever job they could get, digging ditches for trolleys and sewers, selling vegetables from pushcarts, rolling cigars in factories, or sewing corsets in mills. They usually worked ten hours a day, six days a week. One of the few niches available to young Greeks with limited English skills was the shoeshine parlor, where the workday often lasted sixteen hours. “At night, all the boys slept in the back room,” the daughter of one such Greek bootblack said. “My father slept under the sink.

There was no heat, the water dripped on his head, and it was freezing.” 20 Immigrants were happy to ﬁ nd work, however monotonous and dangerous Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 72 rise it may have been. At the Balbach factory, employees breathed in the smell of gas and acid constantly. Heavy machinery put workers at risk of being burned or maimed. Men scalded by molten metal were occasionally seen bounding frenziedly from factories into the cool waters of the Passaic River.

Workers at hat factories inhaled volatilized mercury, which brought on muscular tremors, or the “shakes,” giving rise to the expression “mad as a hatter.” In fact, hat workers breathed in all sorts of unhealthy materials; even two weeks after quitting, they continued sneezing and hacking up black dust.

The clothing of hat workers often got soaked in the course of the day, either from sweat or regular chores, and a study of Newark factories from 1878 to 1883 showed hatters correspondingly suffered from an unusually high rate of respiratory tract diseases, tuberculosis in particular. With all of the risks, a hatter’s life expectancy at the time was less than forty-one years. 21 When the workday ended in Newark, immigrants could expect to walk through foul-smelling, garbage-strewn streets to overcrowded, poorly venti- lated tenements without running water. The grim conditions were similar or worse than the slums of New York City, which the public learned about in the 1890s due to publication of works such as Jacob Riis’s photos and essays in How the Other Half Lives and Newark native Stephen Crane’s novel Maggie:

A Girl of the Streets.

While all bustling industrial cities faced struggles similar to Newark’s, the city’s especially rapid, haphazard, and unplanned growth reached a peak—or perhaps, a low point—around 1890. Based on death and disease rates, water supply, and other factors, Newark was statistically America’s most unhealthy big city. It ranked highest in mortality of infants and children under ﬁ ve, and had one of the nation’s highest percentages of typhoid, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases. 22 Newark’s wealthy, conservative citizens had long been reluctant to use tax money for widespread health reforms and infrastructure advancements. Yet the squalid conditions of the city could no longer be ignored. Beyond the obvious concerns, being labeled as the country’s most unhealthy city was bad for business. Besides, as working- class groups rose to prominence, a shift in city leadership became inevitable. More and more, power was being taken away from the old-money aristocrats and placed in the hands of popular champions of the people.

In the fall of 1883, Newark’s working classes elected as mayor a man they saw as one of their own: a burly, sociable, silver-bearded Democrat with a common touch named Joseph E. Haynes. Before entering politics, “Honest Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. greater newark 73 Joe” was a school principal. “There should be no privileged classes in this country,” Haynes said in a typical appeal to constituents. Addressing the state of Newark schools, Haynes said they were all “good enough for the rich, and none too good for the poor.” With obvious disdain, the Daily Advertiser stated that “the undesirable elements”—immigrants and political bosses, in other words—were responsible for putting Haynes into ofﬁ ce. 23 During the ten years Haynes ran the city, the headstrong mayor battled with Republicans and the press, often over the patronage positions he liberally handed out to supporters. Shortly after Haynes entered ofﬁ ce, for example, theNew York Times reported the mayor was replacing forty Republican police ofﬁ cers with forty Democrats. The Newark Board of Health, which was stacked with Haynes’s friends, was referred to as the “Board of Junket” by the Newark Evening News. Haynes in turn called the paper the “Evening Nuisance.” 24 Nonetheless, Haynes remained popular with a large section of voters, at least partially because he managed to force through a few improvements in street paving, sewer supply, and other services. His most noteworthy achieve- ment was attaining a new water source for the city. Utilizing the Passaic River was clearly not a healthy option. Sewage and factory waste ﬂ owed freely into the river in Newark and upstream communities like Paterson, Passaic, and Belleville. “You stop to ask if all the people of these places drink out of the Passaic River,” one visitor to the area wondered. “Then you cast your eye up and down and recall to memory what you have seen along its banks, and wonder if you shall ever be thirsty again.” 25 A noted lover of the outdoors who rarely turned down an excursion into the country or a sail out on the water, Haynes accompanied some businessmen into the bucolic hills west of the city one day and became infatuated with the idea of tapping into water from the Pequannock River, twenty miles from Newark. In early 1892, after three years of building pipeline and reservoirs, the Pequannock water reached Newark’s reservoir in Belleville. Haynes kept the ﬁ rst jugful as a souvenir. Though critics panned the project’s $6 million cost as outrageous, typhoid deaths in the city dropped 70 percent after the water supply changed. 26 “Today,” Haynes said, upon the water reaching the city, “the number of the opponents of the new water supply in Newark bears about the same relative proportion to our entire city’s population that the number of the inmates of the County Jail holds to the entire population of Essex County.” 27 As a whole, however, Haynes wasn’t nearly the honest reformer that supporters liked to portray. He earned a reputation as “Picnic Joe” for “his bacchanalian fraternization with every target company that has been able Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Haynes notoriously accepted gifts in exchange for city contracts. In one instance, an asphalt ﬁ rm made a presentation to city ofﬁ cials regarding a possible paving contract while Haynes was in Trinidad on a junket arranged by the company. Among Haynes’s backers were men who had all but perfected the arts of dishing out patronage positions and stufﬁ ng ballot boxes—including Leon Abbett, New Jersey’s two-time governor and boss of the state’s Democratic machine, as well as members of Jersey City’s infamous political ring. Haynes “gathered about him a municipal ring that, if it were exposed, would probably be found to be as much more venal and corrupt than the Jersey City ring as Newark is richer than Jersey City,” the Times charged. “Water and pavement jobs and street railroad franchises have covered his administration with scandal. Heelers and barroom rowdies are growing rich under the fostering shield of his machine, while self-respecting men are relegated to the rear.” 28 Even though Haynes held the mayoralty for a decade, he often squeaked out electoral victories by the smallest of margins. In the 1887 contest, he received 10,630 out of 25,333 total votes—just over 40 percent—yet the opposition was split among a Republican and a Prohibition candidate. Four years later, at least three Newark banks reported Democratic henchmen placing orders to pick up $10,000 apiece on election day, stipulating that the money come in one- and two-dollar bills—which could be used to pay voters checking Haynes’s name. “The air is rife with rumors that the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company,” which had a vested interest in the Pequannock water project, “has sent a big check for the use of the bosses,” the Times said. Nearly a thousand immigrants—mostly poor and Italian—were quickly granted citizenship (and the right to vote) days before the election. Haynes again edged out a political victory, perhaps related to the fact that some precincts curiously reported their results in envelopes that had been used in previous elections. In the precinct with the most old envelopes, Haynes received more than double the votes of his opponent. 29 Two years later, Haynes declined to run for mayor, taking the comfort- able position as Newark postmaster instead. Republican Julius Lebkuecher defeated Democrat James Seymour by nearly ﬁ ve thousand votes. The Times surmised Seymour had been crushed because he’d been “burdened with the record of the ring which has controlled the city for the last ten years,” and which was as “low-lived a gang of political thieves and gamblers as ever disgraced a State.” 30 Republicans had long pleaded with the brilliant, meticulous Julius Lebkue- cher to run for ofﬁ ce. Born in Baden, Germany, Lebkuecher emigrated at the age of four with his family in 1848 to live brieﬂ y in Jersey City, before settling Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. greater newark 75 in Newark. Lebkuecher apprenticed with a Newark jewelry manufacturer and at a New York City mercantile company, and for a time worked as a traveling salesman. In 1869, he and his cousin, George Krementz, founded a jewelry manufacturing ﬁ rm at 49 Chestnut Street in Newark. Within ﬁ ve years, Krementz & Co. sold a range of ﬁ ne gold jewelry and employed more than a hundred workers. The tight-ﬁ sted, obsessively organized immigrant owners grew wealthy. Thanks to the success of their unique one-piece collar button, patented in 1884 and for years the only such model on the market, the company became one of the country’s largest gold manufacturers. 31 Lebkuecher wore a thick, jet-black mustache that extended over his upper lip and curled out past his smooth, ﬂ at cheeks. Wireless spectacles covered his dark eyes, which sat under a high forehead and closely-cropped black hair.

While always keeping tabs on his jewelry business, Lebkuecher dabbled in ﬁ nance and banking. He became an ofﬁ cer in the Union National Bank, the Franklin Savings Institution, and the Fourteenth Ward Building & Loan Asso- ciation. Always an active Republican, Lebkuecher must have been disgusted by his party’s losing streak versus the patronage king Joseph Haynes. Lebkuecher, as a German and a member of a Newark singing society, was also probably doubly offended in 1891 by Haynes’s dismissal of the German Saengerfest—a huge choral festival hosted by Newark—as nothing more than an ordinary picnic. Haynes was reportedly angry because he wasn’t named an honorary vice president in the celebration. He refused to name the festival an ofﬁ cial city holiday. Perhaps the death of Lebkuecher’s ﬁ rst wife in 1893 also played a role in prodding Lebkuecher into running for public ofﬁ ce. 32 Despite Haynes’s claims of progress and reform, the city turned over to Julius Lebkuecher desperately needed discipline and guidance. Unqualiﬁ ed, incompetent workers remained on the payroll. As late as 1890, two-thirds of the streets—in a city of more than 180,000 people—had yet to be paved.

Mayor Haynes steadfastly maintained that a comprehensive sewer system was simply too expensive for the city, and thus two-thirds of downtown and a higher percentage of outlying area had no sewers at all. 33 Mayor Lebkuecher sought solutions to city problems methodically and immediately. One of his early steps was obvious: collecting the $89,000 in outstanding claims owed to the city by various corporations. The mayor wrangled with state lawmakers to pass a bill allowing cities to pay for street paving over several installments at low interest rates; previously cities had to cover the expenses up front or expect hefty interest penalties. Over sixty years, Newark had paved only about sixty miles of streets; as a result of the new law, Lebkuecher’s administration was able to pave thirty additional miles in just two years. With the pace set, by 1910 all but 85 of the city’s 620 miles of streets would be covered in cobblestone, brick, or asphalt. 34Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 76 rise What few sewers Newark did have had been constructed piecemeal over ﬁ ve decades, and they often clogged and emitted horrendous odors because they were too small or poorly graded. Mayor Lebkuecher, in a report to the board of health, said the sewers, “built in the main without regard to general utility or future requirements, fall far short of our needs, and the lack of them, in many instances, is a menace to public health.” In 1893,112 miles of sewers ﬂ owed under Newark streets. Thanks to the course the city began under Lebkuecher, there would be nearly three times that many miles of sewers—310 miles in total—as of 1910. 35 According to an 1885 study, Newark contained but eleven small parks—18.36 preserved acres in total. By contrast, two cities with similar populations— Buffalo and Washington, D.C.—had 620 acres and 1,000 acres of parkland, respectively. In Lebkuecher’s second year of ofﬁ ce, Newark signed over 60 acres of swampy reservoir and hilly land northwest of downtown to the newly created Essex County Parks Commission. Studies had been conducted as early as 1867 about creating a park 700 acres in size around the reservoir.

Decades passed before any action was taken, however, and when it was, in 1895, only one-third of the originally proposed site was still undeveloped.

The Ballantines and other families donated land to the long, narrow Branch Brook Park, as it became known, which eventually expanded to 360 beauti- fully cultivated acres. 36 It didn’t take a cunning business mind like Julius Lebkuecher’s to grasp that the massive projects under way in Newark cost a lot of money. The mayor’s streamlining of operations and cutbacks on Haynes-era extravagances and inefﬁ ciencies meant tax increases had been minimal. But, as the city pushed further improvements along involving roads, public transportation, elec- tricity, and other conveniences, the tax rate was bound to rise.

One way to minimize the impact on city taxpayers was the idea of dispersing costs over a wider area and larger number of people. At the end of the nineteenth century, Bloomﬁ eld, the Oranges, Montclair, and other neigh- boring towns that had once been a part of Newark faced similarly steep costs for sewers and other municipal projects. For half a century after the Civil War, many people believed it inevitable that Newark would engulf the land around the city and thereby create a “Greater Newark.” “Perhaps Newark,” one writer speculated in 1876, “with her aspiring tendencies, will yet spread forth her arms and embrace the whole of Essex and Hudson counties.” 37 All over the country, consolidation was a trend. Chicago, for example, had been founded in 1837 with only ten square miles of territory. In 1889,Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. greater newark 77 neighboring towns voted to be annexed by the city in order to share costs and receive better public services. As a result, Chicago expanded to 185 square miles by century’s end. With a couple hundred thousand more people counted as new city residents in the 1890 census, Chicago passed Philadelphia as the United States’ second most populous city. New Year’s Day of 1898 marked the merging of the nation’s ﬁ rst and fourth largest cities, when Manhattan and Brooklyn combined into a new New York City, which also encompassed the Bronx, Staten Island, and Queens.

Newark recouped most of Clinton Township in parcels acquired in 1869, 1897, and 1902, and annexed Woodside in 1871 after agreeing to cover some of the woodsy northerly area’s debt. In the late 1880s, two towns on the other side of the Passaic River—Kearny and Harrison, also known as East Newark—openly sought to join Newark and break from ties with their corrupt, distant county seat, Jersey City. Newark leaders stalled and an agree- ment was never reached.

As the years passed, suburban towns not only lost interest in consolidating with Newark, they steadfastly opposed such a measure. In the fall of 1894, with rumors spreading that Newark had its sights on acquiring several adjoining Essex County towns, a movement began to consolidate the Oranges and thereby present a united front against Newark’s overtures. “Advocates are coming forward on all sides and declaring that it is simply a ﬁ ght for self- preservation,” the Times reported. “They say that if the project is not success- fully carried through it will not be many moons before the City of Newark will have absorbed all four of these delightful suburbs and their identity and individual attractions will have been lost.” It was believed that Newark would also target Bloomﬁ eld, Montclair, Belleville, Irvington, Vailsburg, Millburn, Short Hills, Caldwell, Roseland, Livingston, and Verona. 38 The following March, news broke that Mayor Lebkuecher and a handful of other leading Newarkers had stealthily asked former city attorney Joseph Coult to ready a bill for the legislature. A composed man with a neatly trimmed white beard and small, oval-shaped spectacles, Coult was a dedi- cated Republican, regarded as a genius in surreptitiously getting bills signed into law. He had just recently written a bill, which many legislators heard about only after its passage, in which Glen Ridge separated from Bloomﬁ eld and incorporated as an independent borough. Supporters of the so-called Greater Newark bill were hoping to get it passed quickly and quietly just before the legislature adjourned. In the bill, the consolidation of Newark with the Oranges, Vailsburg, Clinton, Montclair, Bloomﬁ eld, Belleville, and Irvington would be put to a vote. “As Newark has three-fourths of the entire population of the county, a good majority in favor of the project there would Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 78 rise settle the matter,” the Times wrote, “The other places, which would bitterly oppose the measure, would practically have no voice in the deciding the question.” 39 TheTimes reported that Lebkuecher’s goal was to push through his ambitious plan before his two-year mayoral term expired. Always a man of decisive action, Lebkuecher was more motivated than usual to seize the moment. Republican bosses, upset the independent-minded Lebkuecher had made appointments that didn’t tow the party line, had already begun lining up against him in his quest for a second term as mayor. 40 The consolidation issue stirred debates throughout the region. Some people agreed with Mayor Lebkuecher that a Greater Newark made economic sense. The majority of suburban residents, however, were wary of joining forces with a city—especially one known for unhealthy conditions and, in the recent past, corruption. To avoid being annexed by Newark, most resi- dents in the Oranges seemed to be leaning toward consolidating themselves into a mid-sized city that would rival Newark. “There is no other course to be pursued,” said Dr. Francis J. E. Tetrault, the city physician of Orange.

Like many suburbanites, Tetrault feared that if their towns became part of Newark, “the New-York business men who now live here would forsake us for the more rural communities of Summit, Morristown, and Madison, further up the road.” 41 Joseph Coult and Julius Lebkuecher distanced themselves from the Greater Newark bill as soon as news of it surfaced. At ﬁ rst they said the bill did not exist, then they assured the public that if any vote did occur, each community would get to decide its own fate, regardless of what Newarkers supported.

Coult spoke at length with reporters about the beneﬁ ts of a Greater Newark, including enormous region-wide savings on sewer, water, and electrical systems. “The new public park scheme, too, offers a powerful argument for consolidation,” said Coult. “As one city Newark and the suburbs would work together harmoniously to have parks placed where they would do the greatest good to the greatest number.” 42 After months of discussions, however, a Greater Newark bill never materi- alized. The Oranges never rejoined with each other either. Talk of consolida- tion didn’t entirely disappear, however. A group of real estate owners in the Oranges organized a petition in 1898 to join Newark. In 1899, East Orange, then a wealthy Republican stronghold of about ﬁ fteen thousand residents, incorporated as a city, presumably ending the conversation about consolida- tion. Yet a year later, as the expiration of East Orange’s contract for water loomed, and leaders in all of the Oranges anticipated millions of dollars to pay for sewers, discussions revived concerning a Greater Newark. 43Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. greater newark 79 By then, the issue had long been taken out of the hands of Julius Lebkue- cher. After two brief, remarkably productive years in ofﬁ ce, Lebkuecher lost in the campaign for a second term to James Seymour, the same man he had faced off against in 1894. Apparently too many people in the city had grown weary of Lebkuecher’s unyielding, businesslike rule. Without the unanimous backing of the Republican Party, Lebkuecher lost by over four thousand votes, roughly the same margin by which he had won in the previous election. 44 Lebkuecher returned his focus to the jewelry business, though he still managed to follow through on a long-desired public-health initiative. As commissioner and chairman of the Passaic Valley Sewer Commission from 1902 to 1912, he helped put an end to the polluting of the river by building sewers in communities from the Great Falls in Paterson all the way to Newark.

The steady ﬂ ow of U.S.-bound immigrants turned into a tidal wave after the turn of the century. “The invasions of the Goths and the Vandals destroyed the Roman empire,” read an article printed by the Newark Sunday Call in 1906. “Will the invasion of the hordes of ignorant Europeans destroy our republic?” The news column voiced what was a widespread concern at the time. More than a million immigrants had entered the United States over a recent twelve-month period. “Don’t you think Uncle Sam is biting off more than he can chew?” the writer wondered. “A million in the raw is a big mouthful. Can the country masticate and digest it?” 45 Worries over the newcomers centered on cities such as Newark, where two- thirds of the city’s 350,000 population (circa 1910) were either foreign-born or the children of immigrants. Well over one hundred thousand Newarkers were Jews, Italians, and Slavs—the “ignorant Europeans” referred to by the writer.

At ﬁ rst, Newark’s immigrants lived wherever rent was minimal, work was nearby, and the landlords would have them. Other than the sections where the middle-class Germans or Irish were dominant or on High Street and other areas where the wealthy industrialists built their mansions, most neighborhoods had a mix of ethnicities, perhaps with Italian, Greek, Jewish, and African American families living in tenements on the same street. As time passed, however, to create power in numbers, for personal comfort, a sense of connection to the old country, or simply because they had no other viable places to live, those of similar background gravitated to certain areas. A map issued to Newark social agencies in 1912 pinpointed nearly thirty distinct Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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According to the map, a particularly rich mix of different ethnic neigh- borhoods stretched the length of Springﬁ eld Avenue. Beginning at Market Street and walking southwest along Springﬁ eld in the early 1900s, one would ﬁ rst pass a thin Greek enclave, where Greek men played cards and talked of politics, work, and women at the local kefeneion (coffeehouse), followed by a larger section of Negroes, as the map then labeled African Americans.

(The inﬂ ux of African Americans into Newark will be handled in a later chapter.) High Street, later to become Martin Luther King Boulevard, marked the beginning of a German neighborhood, which around Howard Street gave way to a large Jewish section that included Prince Street, the cobbled shopping thoroughfare where people ran errands on mule-drawn carts and vendors selling vegetables, clothing, and other wares called out to mothers pushing strollers. Farther along Springﬁ eld, one would have encountered areas carved out by Slavs, Jews, and Germans, and, within a few blocks, Greek, Italian, and Irish residents.

Neighborhoods were often in ﬂ ux in terms of ethnic demographics, and the takeover of an area by an emerging group could be ugly. Street brawls and racial epithets were common, for example, as more Italians moved into what had been a mostly Irish area north of the Lackawanna Railroad Depot.

Eventually, Italians primarily from Avellino and other southern provinces ruled the section known as the First Ward (later, North Ward). Immigrants from other parts of Italy—including Nocera, San Gregorio, Buccia, and Calabria—settled in Newark’s Down Neck section along Ferry Street. A group of mostly Sicilians established themselves around Fourteenth Avenue.

In each of these neighborhoods, Italian bakeries, restaurants, and social clubs sprouted. Vegetables and grapes grew in the tiny backyards of tenement homes. By 1901, Newark held four Italian churches, including Saint Lucy’s, established in 1891 in the First Ward, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel in a Down Neck building that was converted from a former Protestant church around the turn of the century. 46 Likewise, Newark Jews lived and worshipped not simply with other Jews, but with those from as similar a background as possible, sometimes former neighbors in the old country. Polish Jews attended Temple B’nai Abraham, which moved locations several times before building a gorgeous synagogue on Clinton Avenue in 1924. Russian Jews instead tended to join Anshe Russia, which was founded in 1885 and headquartered on Prince Street.

In lieu of government-run welfare programs, which were nearly nonex- istent, Newark’s temples, churches, and ethnic-based social groups helped provide for their people, ﬁ nding them jobs and giving ﬁ nancial and other Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. greater newark 81 assistance to families in need. Anshe Russia dues of $6 annually paid for a place to worship and socialize, as well as burial plots and sick and death beneﬁ ts. Various Jewish groups created organizations for health, welfare, and social needs, including the Friendly Sisters and the Young Men’s Welfare Society. One group, the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, leased a three- story building in 1881 on Pine Street—renamed Hebrew Hall—that included a library, bowling alley, gymnasium, and dance hall. In response to anti- Semitism, Beth Israel Hospital was founded in 1901. 47 With the wheels of reform already set in motion thanks to Julius Lebkue- cher and other progressives, and with newcomers in Newark holding clout if only due to their sheer numbers, life slowly improved for everyone in the city. Newark’s schools, overwhelmed by the inﬂ ux of immigrant children, hired about a hundred more teachers in 1898, bringing the average number of pupils per classroom down from sixty to forty-eight—a progressive change by that era’s standards. 48 The Newark Public Library, built of granite and marble, opened in 1901 facing Washington Park. John Cotton Dana, a ﬁ erce-looking Vermonter with a bald head, bushy white mustache, and furrowed brow, ruled the institution with a fervent belief in the power of books from 1902 until his death in 1929.

“To attend a movie is to be primitive; to attend a lecture is to be a cave man,” Dana wrote. “To read is civil.” The head librarian emphasized serious works in his collection, which he expanded to include books in Polish, Italian, Yiddish, and Russian, among other languages, in order to cater to Newark’s newcomers. He set rigid standards for his staff, including “Buy of recent novels only a few,” “Spend less money on ﬁ ction,” and “Spend the money saved on duplicate copies of other good books.” Viewing the culture in his adopted city as severely lacking, Dana led the way in fostering museums, music performances, and literary associations, as well as improvements to Newark’s schools, parks, and overall appearance. In 1905, Dana took matters into his own hands and opened a science museum on the library’s fourth ﬂ oor; its descendant, the Newark Museum, was ofﬁ cially founded inside the library in 1909. In 1926, thanks to a generous donation from department store tycoon Louis Bamberger, the museum moved into a restored mansion on Washington Street, a few buildings away from the library. 49 The replacement of horse-drawn trolleys with electriﬁ ed models in the 1890s was met with mixed emotions. People loved the convenience and deplored the trafﬁ c and danger. “Life is not as safe as it was before ‘Rapid Transit’ came,” Mayor Haynes related in his 1891 city council message.

“Mothers who formerly allowed their children to play in the streets, ﬁ nd it necessary to call the roll frequently to ascertain if any are missing.” Sadly, “the Coronor has been called in a number of cases, but the electric cars are here to Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 82 rise stay,” he wrote. “I do not like the overhead wires, neither do I like the reeking horses, and the overloaded cars, that are to be seen upon the recurrence of every storm.” 50 By around 1900, more than 300 trolleys crossed the corner of Broad and Market each hour during peak times; a decade later, more than 550 trolleys per hour passed the intersection. The city installed trolley islands down streets as a safety measure, but without a comprehensive system to regulate all the trains, trolleys, pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, and a growing number of automobiles, accidents inevitably occurred. In 1903, a grisly colli- sion between a train and a trolley killed nine and injured thirty. 51 Hazardous and frustrating as it was, Newark’s widely expanded public- transportation systems and an emerging class of citizens with newly discov- ered disposable income made a vibrant, welcoming, cleaner, and more modern downtown possible. Newark became more than simply a solid place to live and work. It evolved into a regional destination, an exciting, convenient magnet for people in outlying towns seeking big-city diversions, with shopping at the top of the list.

The early winter of 1906—one of the best holiday shopping seasons ever, store managers then said—is as good a time as any to take a close look at Newark’s thriving downtown. Nowhere was prosperity more apparent than in the city’s wondrous department stores, including Bamberger’s, Plaut’s, and Hahne’s.

Originally a seller of birdcages, Hahne & Co. transformed into a general merchandise store in the 1870s. By 1900 the company ﬁ lled a grandiose building bounded by Broad, New, and Halsey streets, becoming one of Newark’s “mammoth establishments rivaling the great stores of New York,” in the words of the Sunday Call. 52 Around Thanksgiving of 1906, Hahne’s advertised that “the store never held such gigantic stocks, never displayed such a multitude of gift things, never showed such a variety, never had such splendid facilities for transacting the enormous business sure to come to us this season.” Among the long list of recommended gift ideas offered by Hahne’s were tool chests, mirrors, sewing machines, music cabinets, soup ladles, butler’s trays, dress patterns, perfumeries, and writing desks. A twenty- ﬁ ve-foot-high Santa Claus with a six-foot head decorated a three-story-high aisle in the heart of the store. Santa pointed the way to the vast toy section on the second ﬂ oor. Children were encouraged to send letters for Santa directly to Hahne & Co. “Mail them in or hand them in to the store,” an ad suggested.

“Mamma will tell you which is best to do.” 53Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. greater newark 83 Plaut’s, the city’s oldest department store, likewise invited children to address their Santa letters “care of L. S. Plaut & Co.” Nicknamed the “Bee Hive” for the unique shape of its building, Plaut’s had been founded in 1870 by a Jewish man from Connecticut. Louis Bamberger represented an even greater Jewish success story. Bamberger had bought the bankrupt stock of a Market Street dry goods store in 1892, and by 1898 Bamberger’s occupied all six of the building’s ﬂ oors. (An even bigger store opened in 1912 at the corner of Market and Washington streets.) Bamberger’s ads for the 1906 season heralded its state-of-the-art “moving stairways” that zipped patrons among the ﬁ rst four ﬂ oors. 54 Bamberger’s and its competitors ushered in a new era for shoppers. With set prices listed on every item sold, Old World-style haggling all but disap- peared. Not only did they offer an astonishing mass of goods for sale, the department stores ushered in a previously unheard-of “customer is always right” policy. Conscious of their image on every level, the enormous stores also presented a beautiful appearance inside and out. Streets in shopping areas correspondingly became cleaner, more welcoming, and better for business.

Big and small stores alike in downtown Newark were generally busiest from nine in the morning until noon. Women from the suburbs and every Newark neighborhood came by trolley and train or the family’s horse-drawn carriage. “Up to four years ago it was the practice of wealthy Newark and New Jersey women to do all their shopping in New York,” one department store manager said in 1906. “But they have learned from experience that they can do better in Newark stores.” Department stores hired hundreds of extra workers solely to deliver purchases via carriage to shoppers’ homes, as was the custom for all but the smallest items. 55 Before the turn of the century, Newark had been described by various visitors as “a prosperous but uninteresting city,” in which because “New York is too conveniently near,” there was little “encouragement for artists and actors.” 56 Now, however, the city had transformed into a haven for shoppers as well as a growing entertainment hub. The theater section of the Newark Sunday Call previewed the 1906 holiday season’s shows at the city’s six main theaters, including Brigadier Girard, the latest comedy from Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, at the Newark Theatre; singing comedian George Mack’s performance as a jockey in Ruled off the Turf at Blaney’s Theatre; and The Golden Crook Spectacular and Extravaganza Company, a forty-person variety show at Waldmann’s Opera House. Proctor’s Theatre was hosting a musical quartet that had been scheduled to play in San Fran- cisco but had to cancel due to the catastrophic earthquake that killed at least three thousand earlier in the year. 57Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 84 rise As the peak of this prosperous, festive holiday season neared, Newark held the opening of the magniﬁ cent new City Hall on December 19. The elegant, imposing building rose from Broad Street as a powerful symbol that the city had evolved from its role as a mere industrial workshop and fully arrived as a cultured, cosmopolitan metropolis. “Newark, queen city of New Jersey, came into her own today,” the Newark Evening News proclaimed, proudly noting that the building had been designed and constructed by Newarkers. It was truly “a triumph of local genius and civic enterprise.” 58 From the sidewalk on the east edge of Broad Street, a grand stairway led up to the Renaissance Revival-styled building’s ﬁ ve-story granite façade, topped with an enormous dome. Inside, the centerpiece was a glorious rotunda nearly eighty feet high and encircled with balconies and soaring pillars. Speakers addressed the masses below from a large platform reached by a pair of winding marble staircases. With all the municipal ofﬁ ces housed in the new building, better communication and a more efﬁ cient government were expected. “The dignity of digniﬁ ed and cleanly surroundings can not but sooner or later impress itself upon the individual,” the Sunday Call reﬂ ected. 59 The previous City Hall, as many men recalled during the opening cere- monies, was a converted hotel across the street that Newark purchased for $120,000 during the Civil War, when the population stood at around seventy thousand. The new facility, supposedly large enough to house all city ofﬁ ces for a century, had been constructed at a cost of $2 million. It was a luxury that many of Newark’s three hundred thousand residents believed the rising star of a city deserved. The handsome building was the crowning achievement for a hard-working people made good. A Sunday Call illustration showed the brand-new city headquarters atop a sturdy tree, along with a tiny, acorn- shaped Puritan meeting house, all under the headline “A Mighty Oak from an Humble Acorn.” 60 While the city seemed eminently pleased with itself, decision makers could not have been entirely happy with the way money was raised for City Hall’s construction. Newark had sold off several parcels of land, most notably the Old Burying Ground downtown. The cemetery, which held Puritan settlers’ remains, had fallen into disrepair at least by the pre–Civil War era. Headstones slumped over or sat atop each other amid overgrown grass and shrubs. Part of the two-acre plot was even converted into a public urinal. In 1858, a law passed forbidding the burying of more bodies there.

To much dismay, in the late 1880s the remains in the cemetery were dug up, dropped into pine boxes, and carted off to make way for development. The desecration was unforgiveable to many Newarkers, no matter how valuable the piece of land may have been. Former mayor Theodore Runyon reﬂ ected on Newark’s shameful treatment of the dead during an 1872 speech rallying Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. greater newark 85 the city to build a monument to one of its great citizens, the recently deceased Seth Boyden. “We pile their tombstones in a great heap together,” Runyon said, “and long for the opportunity to run a street through the old Burying Ground where their ashes rest.” 61 When Jacob Haussling, the mayor-elect soon to begin the ﬁ rst of his four terms, spoke at City Hall’s opening, he addressed another issue of which the city could not be proud. “We have not, I fear, been as careful of outward appearances as we might be,” Haussling said. “Much of our time is spent in the streets, and when we fail to do things that make them attractive, we are depriving ourselves of part, and a very important part, too, of the pleasure of life.” He stated his dreams of a new era accompanying Newark’s new City Hall, a period when every part of the city would became more attractive and healthier, and when the quality of life would improve for all Newarkers. “Is it too wild a hope,” Haussling asked, for an era to follow in which “the gloomy, forbidding factory shall disappear and in which the ugly tenement shall be abolished?” 62 The following autumn, the keys to another $2 million ediﬁ ce in downtown Newark were handed over to the freeholders in a ceremony opening the new Essex County Courthouse at the corner of Market Street and Springﬁ eld Avenue. “There was no graft in this building,” the commissioner in charge of construction said, somewhat defensively. “It is a structure built with clean hands.” 63 Behind the courthouse’s double Corinthian columns, huge murals and sculptures of bronze and marble decorated the various halls inside.

As Jacob Haussling envisioned, efforts to further beautify the city and counter the foul-smelling factories were well under way in his ﬁ rst years as mayor. “A city that lacks beauty is a city behind the time,” stated an appeal from Newark’s Shade Tree Commission, which by the end of 1907 planted more than three thousand trees along twenty-ﬁ ve miles of streets. “Trees are among the ﬁ rst things which impress a stranger in forming a judgment as to whether a city is, or is not, a good place to live in.” By 1910, the popular movement had shaded 290 miles of streets with trees. 64 Other attempts to provide for Newark’s current and future needs weren’t quite as successful. Although Vailsburg, a small suburban neighborhood surrounded by the Oranges and Irvington, had been annexed by Newark in1905, efforts for comprehensive consolidation into a Greater Newark had been met with strong resistance. Irvington residents debated the possibility of being annexed by Newark before putting the issue to a vote in 1903.

Pro-annexation leaders argued that Irvington citizens would receive “Tech- nical School privileges for young men; better ﬁ re protection; better police Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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Copyright © 2009. Rutgers University Press. All rights reserved. 86 rise protection; increased property valuations; equal taxation of property; City Hospital rights, and all that implies, and better trolley service,” according to the Newark Evening News. Voters overwhelmingly defeated the motion, however, 614 against to only 273 in favor. 65 After Vailsburg approved consolidation with Newark in 1905, Irvington stood out as an independent wedge surrounded by the bigger city on two sides.

Momentum built toward another vote, which was scheduled for November of 1908. At a large meeting of anti-annexation forces, one judge warned, “If we go into Newark, we simply go into it blindly and take what we can get, which to my mind will be very little but promises.” Another speaker said, “The city of Newark is bonded to its limit,” and would only use Irvington to increase its tax base. Still another cautioned, if Irvington were to be annexed, “They will do with us as they did with Vailsburg—just what they please.” 66 Again, Irvington voters rejected Newark’s advances. Through the years, the Newark Board of Trade and other groups occasionally gave lip service to the dream of a Greater Newark. As late as 1936, when twenty-ﬁ ve hundred people gathered at Newark’s Mosque Theater to kick off the city’s centennial, speakers proclaimed the wisdom of large-scale consolidation. 67 Well into the twentieth century, older U.S. cities in particular continued attempts to engulf surrounding lands. While some efforts were successful— Baltimore, for example, annexed ﬁ fty square miles around World War I—most failed. Typically, outlying areas didn’t want their fates tied to metropolises that they viewed as unwieldy, inefﬁ cient, and corrupt. Ambitious consolidation efforts planned for Boston, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Birmingham, Louisville, and other cities never came to fruition. Suburban towns often preferred to go it alone. 68 As for Newark, Vailsburg would be the last suburb it successfully annexed.

As of the 1910 census, Newark ranked fourteenth in population of all U.S.

cities with a count of 347,469 people. The city had experienced its largest-ever population expansion, adding approximately a hundred thousand resi- dents in just a decade. Yet Newark measured only about twenty-four square miles—tiny compared to Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, which each had well over a hundred square miles of land. Of those in the 1910 census’s twenty most populous cities, only Jersey City and Milwaukee occupied less territory than Newark.

Newark would remain stuck at its 1905 size, which was sufﬁ cient to allow for relative prosperity over the next few decades, especially due to war-related industrial booms. But as Sun Belt cities such as Phoenix and Jacksonville— roughly four hundred and eight hundred square miles, respectively—came of age, Newark’s twenty-four square miles seemed ridiculously small. In certain ways, Newark’s fate had already been sealed.Tuttle, Brad R., and Brad Tuttle. How Newark Became Newark : The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City, Rutgers University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=435064.

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