Within these walls

by Rupert Hughes

The suit of Jessamine vs. The City of New York should have been a cold matter of dollars and cents and justice, but nothing has ever been hotter or more passionate than money wars. When RoBards appeared before the Superior Court to secure damages against the city for the ruination of Jessamine’s property, the corporation counsel demurred to his Declaration against the Mayor et al. on the ground that the Mayor and the aldermen had statutory authority. The demurrers were sustained. Of course, RoBards appealed to the Court of Errors, and of course it would take eleven years for his case to come up again.

This embittered him against the city as a personal enemy. Having accepted the Westchester standpoint as to the farmers’ rights, every motive and activity of everybody south of the Harlem River was an added tyranny.

Chalender and his crowd might accuse the farmers of pettiness because they would not surrender their fields to the thirsty myriads of the city. But RoBards felt that this was only a new campaign in the eternal combat between town and country. He felt that if certain kinds of mankind had their way, every stream would be chained to a wheel, every field would contain a tenement or a shop. A snuff factory and a linen bleachery had all too long disgraced the lower stretches of the Bronx.

New York was pushing its beautiful wheatfields further and further north. The old pond, called “The Collect” (and well pronounced “the colic”) had long since been drained to a swamp and replaced by the hideous crime-nest of The Five Points. The waters that ran through Canal Street were hidden gradually from the light of day as a covered sewer. Taverns and gin hells had taken root in the outlying regions above Madison Square, and the distant roads were noisy with horse races, brandy guzzling, and riotous conversation. Even on the Sabbath the New Yorkers sent their wives to church and went out into the fields for unholy recreation.

RoBards entered the lists as the champion of the rights of God’s free soil. New York was to him a vast octopus thrusting its grisly tentacles deep into the fairest realms to suck them dry and cover them with its own slime. If it were not checked, it would drive all the farmers from Manhattan Island. The real estate speculators talked of a day when the city would be all city up to the Harlem River, as if that time would be a millennium instead of a pandemonium.

Seeing his ardor and hearing his eloquence, more and more of the Westchester patriots engaged RoBards as their attorney. His battle ground was the Chancery Court, where the fate of the lands was settled.

He lost every case. The city’s claim to water was ruled paramount to any American citizen’s rights to his own land. RoBards might cry that New York was repeating the very tyranny that had brought on the Revolution against England. He might protest that the Revolutionary heroes of Westchester had incarnadined their own hills with their blood in vain, if the greed of New Amsterdam were to wrest their homes from them after all.

But the judges only smiled or yawned at his fervor. They would discuss nothing but the price to be paid for the condemned property, and RoBards could do nothing but sell his clients’ lands dear and delay the final defeat as long as he could.

He and his colleagues made New York sweat for its victory. Already the original estimate of the cost of the aqueduct was nearly doubled and three and a half millions added to the amount to be raised. The city was held in check for two years, and in those two years prosperity was lost—the lawless prosperity that had hoisted even bread beyond the reach of the poor and sent them into such a rage that they attacked warehouses where flour was stored, and flinging the barrels to the street, covered the pavements with wheaten snow.

Suddenly the banks began to topple, as a house of cards blown upon. A ripple went along the line of banks and every one of them went down. With them went other businesses in an avalanche. Prices shot from the peak to the abyss in a day. The fall of New York was but the opening crash. The whole proud nation fell in the dust, and the hardest times ever known in the New World made the very name of the year 1837 a byword of disaster. The favorite policy of the day was repudiation. Beggars, bankers, merchants, cities, states, blandly canceled their debts by denying them.