ABSTRACT
Walt Whitman celebrated New York as a "city whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and out with eddies and foam!" He understood that the restless harbor, the crowded streets, and the busy people made New York a "proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city." Demographic change gave Gotham a diversified urban culture and provided a large labor supply for the burgeoning economy. In Whitman's words, New York was becoming a "city of the world." By 1850, New York City dominated the nation's economy as its biggest market and its center for investment, insurance, credit, and retailing. New York's cultural vitality complemented its rapid economic growth, but was complicated by increased immigration, city—state tensions, and war. During the 1840s and 1850s, most New York City immigrants came from the German states, Ireland, and England. The 1849 Astor Place Riots captured the tensions of mid-nineteenth-century Gotham. Fernando Wood capitalized on the complexity of mid-nineteenth-century New York City.
