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The Making of New York City's Bourgeoisie, 1850-1886

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The Making of New York City's Bourgeoisie, 1850-1886 The Making of New York City's Bourgeoisie, 1850-1886 Sven Beckert 1 Harvard University Among the most deeplyengrained popular images of the nineteenth centuryUnited States are those of the nation'swealthy. As villainsor heroes,the Carnegiesand Lows, Gouldsand Mellons have found a solid place in the nationalcollective memory. We knowabout the mansionsof the Vanderbiltson Fifth Avenue, August Belmont's sumptuousdinners at Delmonico's, and J.P.Morgan's unsuccessful jockeying for a box at the Academyof Music. Ever sinceEdith Whartonwe can picturetheir complicatedweb of friendshipand kinshipties. And if we walk aroundNew York City today,we cannothelp but encounterthe greatmonuments the nineteenth-centurybourgeoisie left behind, from the MetropolitanOpera to Central Park, from Cooper Union to the MetropolitanMuseum of Art. The nineteenthcentury, as theseobservations suggest, was indeedthe centuryof the bourgeoisie'smaking and of the makingof the bourgeoisie.From the factoryfloor to the Opera house,from City Hall to Congress,merchants, industrialists,and bankerswrought tremendous changes on the economy,social life, and politicsof the nation.Not only the Vanderbiltsand Morgans,but also New Yorkers such as John Roach,William Dodge, Alexander Masterson,and PeterCooper fundamentally transformed the way Americanslived and worked, and in the processturned the United Statesfrom an outpostof the Atlantic economyinto one of the powerhousesof the world economy.They shapedthe institutionsof a rapidlyexpanding state, and their very success helped generate a degreeof socialinequality and socialconflict that had beenunknown to earlier generationsof Americans. While the bourgeoisiein somesense "made" the nineteenthcentury, the nineteenthcentury also "made" the bourgeoisie.During the century's first decades,merchants and bankers,joined by a growingnumber of industrialists andprofessionals, controlled most of theyoung nation's capital. Yet, evenas late as the 1850sthese groups were culturally and ideologicallyquite removed from one another.Each of themespoused distinct and oftenantithetical forms of the universalistbelief in a societywithout fundamental social conflicts. Ultimately, however,the two mostprominent effects of theirrise - proletarianizationand the IThisdissertation was written at Columbia University under the supervision of Eric Foner. BUSINESS AND ECONOMIC HISTORY, Volume twenty-five,no. 1, Fall 1996. Copyright¸1996 by theBusiness History Conference. ISSN 0849-6825. The Making of New York City's Bourgeoisie/ 9 overthrowof slaveryduring the Civil War - resultedin socialcohesion among different segmentsof the bourgeoisieand the embraceof a separateclass identity. My dissertation,The Making of New YorkCity's Bourgeoisie, 1850-1886, exploresthe centralrole of New York's bourgeoisiein the makingof modern America.To do so, I focuson the intersectionof two largequestions: First, I ask when,how, and why bourgeoisNew Yorkersarticulated shared identities during the nineteenthcentury. Second, I examinehow the relationshipof merchants, industrialists,and bankersto the state changedand in particularhow the bourgeoisieeventually shaped state institutions. To answerthese broad questions, I look at the economicstructure, social life, beliefs,and politics of bourgeoisNew Yorkersbetween 1850 and 1886.It was duringthese years that the city's bourgeoisiechanged dramatically, facil- itated by the catalyticevents of the Civil War. To understandthese changes I look at merchantfamilies in theirparlors, flag wavingbankers addressing public assemblies,and industrialistsconfronting workers in front of their factorygates. I am writing on issuessuch as the socialgeography of New York City, on the changingconnection of the city's wealthywith the South,on dress,travel, and manners,on the alternatingrelationship between merchants and industrialists, and on politics.I situatethese actors in the analysisof large processes- war making,state expansion and proletarianization. And I tie theresulting narrative togetherby the broadquestions outlined earlier. Let me summarizemy argumentand then add a few generalobservations. Above all, I maintain that New York's merchants, industrialists, and bankers formed a socially cohesiveand self-consciousclass in the 1870s and 1880s. This, I claim, was a decisivedeparture from earlierdecades. In the 1850s,the city's bourgeoisiehad beensocially, ideologically, and politicallyfragmented, and had articulated various universalist beliefs in free labor, the absence of fundamentalsocial conflicts, the needfor hierarchyto maintainsocial order, and the duty of stewardshipand responsibility for the community.The Civil War and the working-classmobilizations of the 1860s and 1870s, however,moved the city's merchants,industrialists and bankersto greaterunity and an articulated consciousnessof separateclass identity. Bourgeoissocial life and politics increasinglymanifested a new and greaterdistance from othersocial groups - especiallyfrom workerswhom they perceived as a doublethreat to their political and economicpower. This processaccelerated during the depressionof the 1870s.As a result,many bourgeois New Yorkersabandoned earlier universalist beliefsand their reluctant wartime support for a state-sponsoredsocial revolution in the South,articulating instead a new liberalismthat advocateda limit to the politicalregulation of marketswhile demandingan expansionof the role of the statein protectingthe ownersof property.This socialand ideological cohesion, combinedwith an entirelynew scaleof economicpower, translated into ever growinginfluence over the state.By the 1880s,bourgeois New Yorkersstood at the heartof the nation'seconomic, cultural, and political life. Sven Beckert / 10 This has to sufficehere as a shortsummary of the major findingsof my work. Let me concludewith somegeneral considerations that have framedmy study.First, the impetusfor thisstudy derived from my sensethat the historyof the bourgeoisiehas beenlargely neglected by historiansduring the last twenty years.Two very differenthistoriographical traditions have contributedto this omission. While in the late 1940s and 1950s, historians such as Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadterrecognized that the United Stateswas by the nineteenth centurythe most bourgeoiscountry in the world, they arguedthat without a historyof feudalisma distinctsocial group that couldbe termed"bourgeoisie" couldnot arise[10, pp. 7, 51-52]. More recentworks by socialhistorians have conclusivelyshown that this view of nineteenthcentury America as a middle classcountry without fundamental social conflicts cannot be sustainedin the face of how the Civil War and the emergenceof a workingclass tore at the very fabric of Americanlife. Yet theserevisionists produced an imageof the United Statesthat is alsoquite incomplete. While emphasizingconflict, the emergence of separateworking class cultures, and widespread resistance to marketrelations, theydid not explainconvincingly why the UnitedStates turned out to be suchan unusuallyhospitable terrain for the ownersof capital.The sophisticatednew researchmethods they employed - fromcollective biographies to thereconstruc- tion of socialgeographies - deepened our knowledge of workersand other social groups,yet the most basic questions about the bourgeoisie went unexplored? As a result,historians of the UnitedStates have missed a greatopportunity - the opportunityto link the conceptualand methodological insights of socialhistory to the large syntheticquestions about the natureof nineteenthcentury America andits bourgeoisie that Hartz and Hofstadter, among others, had formulated. 3 This contrastsstrikingly with the work of historiansof nineteenthcentury Europe,from CatherineHall to David Blackbourn,from JfirgenKocka to AdelineDaumard, who have demonstrated that such an endeavoris possible.4 They have shownthat to understandthe nineteenthcentury we needto under- stand the bourgeoisie,and to understandthe bourgeoisiewe need to put emphasison classrelations, identity formation, the totality of differentsocial spheres,and the family as well aspolitics and power. This bringsme to my secondpoint. In contrastto muchhistorical writing that has soughtto isolateone or the other aspect,my work aims at looking simultaneouslyat all spheresof sociallife - changingeconomic structures, the changingform of bourgeoissocial life, the emergenceof new beliefs,and the 2Amongthe few works which address these issues see particularly [1,8, 11,16, 17, 19]. 3Socialhistorians have successfully done so, especially in their analysis of nineteenth centurylabor. For example,see [7, 14, 20]. For a goodexample of socialhistory that is attentiveto the bourgeoisiesee [9, pp. 209-292]. 4ErnestLabrousse's 1955 call urging historians toengage in comparativeresearch on the bourgeoisiehas been heededin Europe. See [13]. By far the largestcomprehensive researcheffort was accomplishedin the contextof the Univeristyof Bielefeld's project on the Germanbourgeoisie in Europeanperspective. For the resultssee [12, 15]. Other importantworks on the Europeanbourgeoisie include [2, 4, 5, 18]. The Making of New York City's Bourgeoisie/ 11 relationshipto the state. Consequently,courting practices at balls are as significantas alterationsin incorporationlaw; the musteringof armsof the elite SeventhNew York Regimentin April of 1861 is as importantas changesin the marketingof manufacturedgoods. None of these levels, I emphasize,stood separately;each aspectrelated to all others. Merchants,industrialists, and bankerscannot be understoodif
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