They were the police. Whatever their faults were, they possessed the one thing that all the city and all the United States lacked. It was Organized Discipline. In the face of millions unorganized and undisciplined, the 11,000 policemen of the city, armed with no visible weapons except clubs, maintained the peace. They scarcely needed the assistance of the ten thousand men who had been enlisted hastily as volunteer militia and deputy sheriffs, and who patroled the streets with clubs and riot guns.[144]
Their work was facilitated by the fact that for many days past there had been a great disarmament in the city. Under the autocratic latitude of martial law, all suspected individuals had been searched wherever they were met. Houses had been visited. Warned by the riots in Connecticut, the authorities had stripped every sporting goods shop and every pawnbroker’s establishment of weapons, and stored them under heavy guard in the armories.
It had been a necessary precaution. During the days that came after the enemy forces had begun to land, factory after factory and industry after industry had stopped. Now the greater part of the city was dead. Seventeen thousand longshoremen and stevedores loitered in the water-front streets, with ten thousand sailors of all nationalities, whose ships were tied up. Fifty thousand unskilled laborers wandered around town with nothing to do. Altogether it was estimated that on this day there were 200,000 people in New York whose occupations had been lost, and fully as many again who were working on half time.[145]
The Wholly Helpless Metropolis
The leaders of commerce and finance, the most resourceful of the city’s business men, were utterly unable to suggest anything. The Chamber of Commerce, that had met many crises and evolved practical plans of action, could suggest nothing now.
The banks were practically closed. The United States Treasury Department already had declared that the center of the Second Federal Reserve District would be considered as temporarily merged with the Third District in Philadelphia.
The fire insurance companies were refusing all new business, and had called attention to the fact that existing policies on every kind of property provided that they were not liable for loss “caused directly or indirectly by invasion, insurrection, riot, civil war or commotion, or military or usurped power.”
There were thousands of other contracts and agreements that would lapse automatically the moment the first hostile soldier set foot in the city. Men had laughed for a generation at the mediæval expression in many printed legal forms that provided that the signers were not responsible for anything that might occur under “the acts of any foreign Prince or Potentate.” Now, suddenly, these mediæval words were alive.
The mails were piled high in the Post Office and in every substation. The whole United States was striving to settle urgent affairs with the city, and the city was trying as desperately to settle with the United States. It was impossible to handle the mass. It remained in bags for days, untouched, while the postal forces, heavily increased from near-by cities, struggled with the accumulations of days before.
The long distance telephone systems were so crowded that connections could be obtained only by asking for them many hours in advance. Telegraph dispatches were twenty-four hours old before they could be forwarded, and steadily their increasing accumulation was leaving the armies of swift operators farther behind.