CHAPTER ONE
Riot!
If the riots which have disgraced our city for the few days past are to be often repeated, we shall soon cease to have any claim to the character of a decent and orderly community.
—Editor of the Evening Post, July 9, 1836
Some New York residents called 1834 “the riot year” because of the dozens of civil disturbances that took place in the city. There were riots against the Irish immigrants, political parties, churches, and African Americans. The ever-growing megalopolis of nearly half a million people seemed ready to explode as angry groups of thousands of people swarmed through the darkened city streets intent on confrontation and destruction.
* * *
Summer was always sweltering hot in New York. Everyone kept their windows open so that air could circulate through their homes. Men wiped their sweating foreheads with rags. The temperature often climbed into the nineties and sometimes soared over one hundred degrees. The sun seemed to stay high in the sky all day. The city was always humid, and millions of pesky mosquitoes, who could not be killed, flew through the city air. When heavy rainstorms hit in summertime they flooded all the cellars in town. “Stifling,” wrote one New Yorker of the heat in the summer of 1836. “Wall Street, always a purgatory, has this day become a pandemonium: clouds of dust flying, chippings of granite whizzing in volleys like grapeshot.”1
The canyons of tall buildings held the hot air close to the earth and made it even hotter, no matter the summer. Wealthy New York lawyer George Templeton Strong, who traveled the city extensively and kept a mammoth diary filled with thousands of pages of notes on people and events, wrote of a July day in 1841, “Let this day be infamous to after ages as the hottest a New Yorker ever perspired under.… There will be nothing left of me by tomorrow morning.”2
The oppressive heat seemed to increase the anger that city dwellers felt in general, and the whites’ deep rage against blacks in particular. Whites seethed against blacks, and blacks feared their wrath, as they had for quite some time.
The abolitionist movement in New York City had grown rapidly by the summer of 1834, fueled by the early successes of the Underground Railroad and the brand-new abolitionist newspapers. Several slave revolts in the South had been reported and attracted even more New Yorkers to the abolitionist banner. Black-and-white tensions in New York had mounted since the 1820s, with the end of all laws legalizing slavery in the state (“the awful curse of Negro slavery,” said one New York mayor).3 All of the former slaves in the city were now free, and at times they numbered as high as thirteen thousand. That number grew throughout the 1830s as thousands of black freedmen and -women from other northern cities and villages immigrated to the city. The tension increased considerably from April through June.4
On July 7, a group of black men planned a large meeting at the Chatham Street Chapel downtown. They had the use of the chapel because another civic group had given it to them. Not all members of the other group knew this, though, and some of them arrived and heatedly demanded to use the building. The black group refused, and a riot commenced in which six black men were arrested. This kicked off five days of disturbances.
The editor of the New York Courier and Enquirer, James Watson Webb, wrote that it was all the fault of the abolitionists, who were led by Arthur and Lewis Tappan. On July 9, a group of them met at the church. Without any warning, the gathering was attacked and broken up by an angry mob of more than two hundred antiabolitionists who had arrived with little interference from the city’s weak law enforcement agents, the constables. The raucous rioters drove the abolitionists into the city streets with chains and sticks, forcing them to run any which way they could to save themselves.
Undaunted, the abolitionists reconvened at the same church the next night, and the assembly was broken up yet again by a fuming white mob. The mob chased the abolitionists away and continued to riot all night and for two entire days and nights more, fighting abolitionists and New York’s badly outnumbered, outgunned, and weary constable force. The mob broke down doors, shoved passersby on the streets, shouted down anyone they saw, and tossed rocks through numerous business and residential windows. The uncontrolled horde wrecked part of the Bowery Theater and nearby buildings and destroyed the homes of several of New York’s abolitionist leaders, including the large mansion of the Tappans, the wealthy patrician brothers who were the ringleaders of the antislavery movement in New York. Mayor Cornelius Lawrence and a band of constables tried to stop the rioters at the Tappan home but were driven away by the mob. A dozen more large homes were set on fire, and others were partially damaged. Seven churches were burned down, and a school for black children was destroyed. Thick billows of smoke rose from the city streets and drifted through the air for days. The damage from the riot was well over $50 million in today’s money.
The surging crowd of rioters, mostly unruly young men, had at first been driven back by the local constables, who threw stones and bricks at them and sometimes fired weapons, if they had them. That effort did not succeed, though, and after two long days of confrontation in the streets, the losing constables simply gave up; the mayor had to call in the three-hundred-man state militia, armed and on horseback, to disperse the crowd. After a few loud warnings, the militia opened fire into the crowd. Several people were killed, and dozens were wounded. Friends tried to bind up the wounds of those shot down with ragged sleeves torn off their shirts. The wounded were rushed to city hospitals and doctors’ offices. The dirt in the street was dotted with puddles of blood. A half-dozen black men were captured in the uprising and badly beaten; one nearly died.
The violence thus ended, the mayor supplemented the militia presence by putting all the city’s constables on alert and adding hundreds of “temporary constables” from the citizenry, many of them armed. The sheer size of the force helped to prevent any more riots or protests for the moment. However, “the diabolical spirit which prompted this outrage is not quenched and I apprehend we shall see more of it,” said former mayor Philip Hone, who was there.5
The rioters represented “not only the denunciation of an insulted community, but the violence of an infuriated populace,” wrote the editor of the The Boston Post.6
The New York Times wrote that the events were “disgraceful riots, originating in the hatred of whites for the blacks.”7
People said that the riots were brought about by a social chain reaction, that one disturbance fed on the others, and that all exploded in a society living under incredible confusion and stress in a year, in a decade, when the nation was experiencing lightning changes everywhere. “The scene … was more disgraceful than anything we have witnessed in our city,” editorialized the New York Journal of Commerce. Most residents blamed the ineffective constables for the collapse of law and order.8
There was something deeper, though. The antislavery movement was gaining ground, and quickly, in the 1830s, and the police had no idea how to handle it and the furious reaction of the people who opposed its champions. “Abolitionism … may play the devil with our institutions,” predicted George Templeton Strong, and “grow greater and greater until it brings the whole system into a state of discord and dissension.” From 1831 on, it seemed that one of the dominating conversations in New York was the rebellion of slave Nat Turner and other insurrections. At one party in upstate Saratoga Springs, in the summer of 1831, crime was all anyone could talk about.9
New Yorkers were fearful not only of the tensions between blacks and whites over slavery. The abolitionist riot was just the surface of the river of savagery that flowed throughout the city. Riots were commonplace in that era. There were clashes over street gangs, political clubs, elections, drinking, gambling, religion, and even dog licenses. New York City had become a carnival of violence. Any dispute seemed to trigger a riot, and the frustrations of the people were deep. In the antebellum era, civil disturbances were not only expected but seemed a part of the landscape.
* * *
Constables, along with a small force of night watchmen, had been policing New York City since 1658 and were supposed to preserve law and order. The New York constable force was the second in the United States. The first was formed in Boston in 1636, the third in Philadelphia in 1700. None was particularly effective. As early as 1732, Benjamin Franklin was denouncing the constables and calling for a professional, trained, and armed police force in Philadelphia, but few listened to him.
The American constable system was based on the Asian and European constable institutions that had flourished for several thousand years. There were constables in China and Greece in 2000 B.C. Vigiles (from which the American term “vigilante” was derived), a thousand of them, served as police, along with soldiers, in Rome during the reign of Augustus Caesar in 40 B.C. In the 1500s, Spanish cities were protected by organized “brotherhoods” of several hundred men who worked as constables. Napoleon created a national constable force of five thousand men in France in 1805. None of them were trained, all owed their jobs to politicians, and few were armed. Most were ineffective, as were their American counterparts.
The abolitionist riot was the biggest riot that year of 1834 in New York, but a close mayoral election, the first in the city’s history (prior to it, the city council members chose the mayor), started another three-day riot in the spring of 1835.
“If the riots which have disgraced our city for the few days past are to be often repeated, we shall soon cease to have any claim to the character of a decent and orderly community,” wrote the editor of the Evening Post.10
The riots shook everybody, and many New Yorkers questioned the future of both the city and the country. Was this chaotic, criminal landscape the result of American democracy? Was it republicanism run amok? Former president John Quincy Adams, then a congressman from Massachusetts, shook his head. “My hopes of the long continuance of this Union are extinct.… The people must go the way of all the world, and split up into an uncertain number of rival communities,” he wrote.11
City mobs, pumped up by emotion, took on a life of their own during the riots. In one instance, a mob stormed a house of ill repute in New York where a man had fled after being acquitted of raping a New York girl. The mob tore down the entire house, littering the streets with boards, window frames, and furniture, chopped up by axes. “The excess did not stop there for the mob, once excited, continued its riotous proceedings several successive nights and many houses of ill-fame in other parts of the city were destroyed and their miserable inmates driven naked and houseless into the streets,” wrote enraged former mayor Hone in his detailed diary.
At forty-three, Hone, a tall, thin, handsome man with curly brown hair and full cheeks who lived in a large, well-appointed two-story mansion fronted by huge white columns, the Colonnade Houses, at 714–716 Broadway, near the rolling lawns of City Hall Park, had been one of the city’s social lions for years. He had made his fortune as a merchant and by about 1820 was effectively able to retire. As one of the richest people in New York, he was sought after by all of the social lionesses of the city and spent most nights as a guest at some lavish party or hosting his own. He and his wife went to the theater, served on the boards of charitable organizations, and dressed in the finest clothes; he usually wore a light blue swallowtail coat, tight gray trousers, a choker collar with projecting points, and a flowered white stock on his daytime trips around the city.12
Early on, he was sought after by both political parties and became a Whig. (He would continue to be an active member of the Whig Party all of his life and would frequently travel to Washington, D.C., meeting with presidents and greeting foreign diplomats.) He was elected an assistant alderman in 1824, and in 1826, when the two parties were unable to agree on a mayor, he became the compromise head of the city for a single year.
He also became one of the most illustrious men-about-town in New York history. He loved the stage and became close friends with stars such as Junius Booth, writers, directors, and producers. Famous authors dined with him regularly and frequently traveled with him. Actors joined writers, politicians, artists, and professors at his dining table, set in a lavish room with windows that overlooked Broadway. Later, in the early 1840s, Broadway became a wide avenue lined with four- and five-story-high stone and brick buildings, jammed with shoppers, pedestrians, omnibuses, and carriages. It was already one of the great streets of the world.
Hone lived in high society but traveled all over town in elegant sleighs in winter and carriages in summer and observed everything and everybody. An eyewitness to the history of the city and its riots for a generation, he was vitally interested in crime in the city because his party’s livelihood depended on running the city in an orderly manner. The general breakdown of law and order troubled him greatly. Hone’s lengthy, colorful, and carefully written diary offered an insider’s look at crime and police in New York.
After his term as mayor, since he no longer worked, he had plenty of time to volunteer, and people began to call upon him in emergencies, such as the 1831 riot at the Park Theater, when they noticed him in the crowd. “His address to the crowd on the street … was so characterized by the feeling of a good citizen and a reflecting man that hundreds left the grounds immediately,” said an observer.13
When the recession of 1833 hit, the city and Hone’s finances took a beating. He and others did not just fear death and injuries to rioters and the destruction of property; they feared getting hurt themselves in the general melee. “One can’t look out of his window without the risk of being knocked down by some stray bullet or other that was intended for somebody else entirely, or fired on speculation without meaning anything against anybody in particular,” wrote George Templeton Strong.14
Riots and unruly crowds were not new in New York City. Rowdy crowds roamed throughout town in the 1820s, smashing windows with wooden clubs, kicking over cans, shoving people on the sidewalk, and generating enormous noise that unsettled all of the residents in the neighborhoods through which they roamed. In 1827, one crowd of workers surged up Broadway, and a troop of constables appeared in the street to stop them. The crowd yelled and screamed and pushed forward. The constables, mostly unarmed and all nervous, gave way and let them wreak havoc as they paraded uptown and disappeared, noisily, into the night.15
Riots were easy to start.
Those interested in stirring up some mischief in New York City merely had to distribute paper handbills telling citizens to gather in one of the city parks at a particular hour to begin the rampage. The riot mongers all had a similar pitch, defined in one handbill connected to the flour riot in the late 1830s. It was, like many riots, aimed at what appeared to be an onerous scheme by business to defraud the public. The producers of flour, one of the most necessary ingredients for cooking, had doubled the price of a barrel from $5.50 to $11. The New York Sun told its readers that there did not seem to be any reason for the price hike except excessive profits. Many agreed.16 “All friends of humanity, determined to resist monopolists and extortioners are invited to attend,” the handbill read.
At that rally at 4:00 P.M. on a chilly day in February 1837, amid controversy over rising flour prices, Hone wrote, firebrands told the crowd that the owners of the Eli and Hart store had fifty thousand barrels of flour that they would sell to enrich themselves and keep from the hungry poor. They got rich “while the city was starving,” one of the speakers said. Hone listened to it all. Then he wrote that “away went the mob to Hart’s store near Washington and Cortlandt Street, which they forced open and threw 500 barrels and large quantities of wheat into the street, and committed all the extravagant acts which usually flow from the unlicensed fury of a mob.”17
People even rioted over dogs. One summer in the 1830s, city fathers ordered the constables to round up and slaughter fifteen hundred dogs. The summer-long killing of dogs inflamed citizens, who protested often. “The poor creatures are knocked down on the street and beaten to death. It is exceedingly cruel and demoralizing,”18 wrote Lydia Maria Child, the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard newspaper and author of several books (she wrote the famous poem “Over the River and Through the Wood”) who left her troublesome husband at home in Massachusetts and moved to New York in the early 1840s, and followed city events closely. Child had spent her life deploring violence against African Americans and saw New York as the capital of that practice; she kept a close eye on racial riots, women’s issues, and other civil controversies. One of her favorite pastimes in the city was to walk the streets on routes that carried her through all kinds of neighborhoods. She remembered everything that she could to include in her well-written and well-read columns in the newspapers. She also wrote about what she saw, the bad as well as the good, in her numerous and lengthy letters to friends. Her friends back in Boston, especially, were fascinated by the view they had of New York and its savagery. She arrived at the height of the rising crime wave and the debate over the inept constable force.
Anything and everything seemed to cause a riot, because aggravated crowds realized that they could create a ruckus and wreak havoc and not suffer any dire consequences from the badly trained police force of constables. Commenting on a local stevedore strike, Philip Hone wrote that “an immense body of the malcontents paraded the wharves all yesterday and attacked the men who refused to join them … several officers were attacked by the rioters, one of whom named Brink, had his skull fractured by the rioters.”19
No one believed that the constables could halt anything. The early cops “were subject to very little discipline, and were anything but imposing or athletic. Should one attempt to make an arrest, he was either very roughly handled, or led [on] a long and fruitless chase, in the course of which he was sure to meet with many and ludicrous mishaps. He was, in fact, unable to protect himself, let alone guarding and protecting citizens and property,” said George Washington Walling, who would become the city’s police chief in 1874.20
During the nation’s first two hundred years, the small urban areas and little villages that dotted the countryside relied on a trained militia and lowly paid, or volunteer, watchmen and constables for protection. The lawmen considered it a service to their city. Residents of New York did not think much of the puny constable force, but with little crime it sufficed. The New York militia units stationed in the city backed up the constables in times of trouble and worked for free. New Yorkers liked that idea because it kept down the cost of protection while the city was battered by financial crises, such as the depressions of 1819 and 1837 and the recessions of the early 1780s and 1833. As the city grew, though, problems arose.
The early New York constables had little supervision. They reported to police headquarters and then went out into their assigned neighborhoods to conduct patrols, alone. There were no rules against drinking, and many spent the night imbibing to pass time. They often slept on park benches. Many worked as constables as a second job and were already exhausted when they reported to their posts. Almost all just carried a “billy club,” or thick wooden nightstick, for protection. Few used them. They had a charge to arrest criminals they literally saw committing a crime and to provide some sort of police presence to deter crime. They rarely did this. They avoided street patrols in high-crime areas for fear of being a victim themselves. They all avoided working in the slums because that was where many of the criminals lived, and they did not want to encounter them. Consequently, crime in the high-crime areas such as Five Points and in the slums increased.21
The cops spent most of their time trying to recover stolen goods for citizens. In order to employ them without pay or at low wages, New York’s Common Council gave them rewards for collecting both private and public debts, collecting rents, foreclosing on mortgages, and serving court orders. Constables refused to investigate cases of stolen property unless they were given a bonus. To get property back, victims often gave one reward for the apprehension of the criminal and a larger reward for the return of the property (leading police and thieves into a profitable arrangement). The constables supervised no one, and no one supervised them.22
Many crimes were never solved. Constables, working with a coroner, were asked to appoint a street crowd to help them investigate a crime, usually an assault or a murder. These public investigations, by randomly selected amateurs who had not seen the crime, usually turned up no suspects and resulted in no arrests. These ad hoc investigations usually lasted only a few hours.
The city courts were one place where the constables were used often. Judges had them quiet down unruly crowds at trials. The constables, handfuls of them, would at first plead for quiet, then scream at courtgoers, and then, exhausted from all that, take out their billy clubs and pound them against the tables in the courtroom. Few paid any attention to them.
They were the descendants of an early constable force known as the “rattle watch.” These groups of watchmen, who worked the streets of New York in the mid-1600s, spent most of their time rattling a chain of keys as they walked down city streets, looking for mischief-makers and, from time to time, loudly announcing the time of the evening to residents of their neighborhood by shouting and pounding their billy clubs on the sides of houses or barns. The “rattle watch” constables also carried a green lantern on a pole as they walked so residents could identify them. When they returned to their watch house, they put the lantern outside it; this is why all old precinct houses in the city today have green lanterns beside their front entrances. The men were under strict orders not to fall asleep or engage in fistfights with each other. The New-York Gazette said of them in 1757 that they were a “parcel of idle, drinking, vigilant snorers, who never quelled any nocturnal tumult in their lives (nor as we can learn, were ever the discoverers of any fire breaking out), but would, perhaps, be as willing to join in a burglary as any thief in Christendom. A happy set, indeed, to defend the rich and populous city against the terrors of the night.”23
That half-asleep, half-drunk, and completely inept persona of the constable, then, was set in stone by 1757. In 1788, the watch force was increased to include a captain and thirty men. Crime increased that year, though, so thirty additional men were hired. A year later, when crime ebbed, the thirty new constables were all let go. That level of watchmen was not to be reached again for years.
The next generation of constables learned from them and behaved badly, too, as did the next generation, and the next and the next. By the time constables walked the beat in the 1840s, they were just the latest generation of slovenly law enforcers who really did not care how good a job they did.
Constables had “sentinel boxes” where they could store goods and keep warm on frigid nights; they were assisted by a half dozen or so marshals, who mostly worked as court officers and helped collect debts for the city. One resident complained that it was dangerous “to walk the streets at night or be in a crowd in the day.”24
The city’s pyramid of police authority was troubling, too. The mayor, not elected by the people but chosen by the aldermen, New York’s version of the city council, oversaw the police in riots. The day-to-day operations of the force were run by High Constable Jacob Hays for nearly fifty years, but by the troubled 1830s and 1840s Hays was an old man. Like the mayor, all of the police were appointed by city aldermen. After Tammany Hall swept the Federalists out of office in 1816, that corrupt political organization helped pick all of the city’s watchmen and patrolmen because they controlled the aldermen. That was clear in an 1842 motion passed by the board to name new patrolmen for two wards. The language of the motion was that the new cops were “under the direction of the Aldermen and Assistant Aldermen of the above wards,” and they were all named by Tammany.25
Civic disturbances could be brutal regardless of the presence of the constables. A reporter at one disturbance wrote that “the mob exhibited more than fiendish brutality, beating and mutilating some of the old, confiding and unoffending blacks, with a savageness surpassing anything we could have believed men capable of.”26
New York riots that started out small always grew in size and intensity because onlookers joined any melee that lasted several days. Many New Yorkers watched a riot and joined the rabble-rousers. They could be entertained and punish people they did not like. They also knew that the chances they would be arrested by the beleaguered constables were small. Organizers of riots who planned on a thousand participants soon had two or three thousand, through no extra work of their own.27
One of the most frequent riots in New York was the election riot, which took place just about every Election Day. You had an election? Someone had a riot for it. The Election Day riot was planned by one political party to ensure that its rival party did not collect votes and win offices. The goal was not destruction of a neighborhood, although that often occurred, or punishment of a group of people, although that often transpired, too. Rioters made the area around the polls so destructive, and harassed potential voters so badly, that they stayed home, fearful of venturing near the polling place. That meant that your party won its standard, say, forty thousand votes, but the other party, which might have won, say, forty-five thousand, received only thirty-eight thousand because of low voter turnout. The result—victory for your party.
Election Day riots were a joint venture between a political party, especially New York’s massive and well-oiled political machine, Tammany Hall, and a street gang. The street gang would stage the daylong riot, and the political party would direct it. The street gang would not be paid for its work, but throughout the year the ruling party in office would restrain law enforcement from cracking down on the gang members as they engaged in their criminal activity. The Election Day riot consisted of tearing down broadside posters, destroying opposition party newspapers and literature, forcing speakers off their platforms, and haranguing people not to vote for the rival party. Polling places in that era were not secret voting booths such as those we enjoy today. Most were open-air tables on a sidewalk in a town square. People surged around them all day. Everybody surrounding the table would shout at you when you arrived to convince you to vote for a particular party. It was here, in the few yards around the polling-place table, where the election riots and their leaders created the most havoc, sending panicked potential voters scurrying home without casting a ballot. The neighborhood around each polling place was full of overturned tables and chairs, torn-down posters, and garbage.
Some political parties staged their own riots on Election Day. One of the more infamous parties was the Know Nothings, who thrived in the 1850s, particularly in cities and especially in New York. They hated foreigners, Catholics, and blacks. Its members would surround polling places and hand out printed ballots with Know Nothing candidates’ names already checked off. Anyone who did not take, and use, his printed ballot was shoved, punched, or beaten up. “What we have here is the demon of democracy,” said one urban resident in that era.28
Few of the rioters were caught, because they knew how to run and hide in the city’s landscape of myriad narrow, crooked streets, which were filled with tiny, dark, twisting alleys. There were a thousand places to hide, and the rioters knew all of them. The police who tried to chase them? Their skills were so low that in 1841 the New York City Common Council officially described them as men who were charged to “prevent the running of swine in the public street.” What could be expected of them?29
* * *
New York had been crippled by riots for years. In the 1830s, New York was plagued with laborer riots against employers; the biggest was the stonecutters riot of 1833. Marble contractors and stonecutters were scheduled to put all of the marble into a new New York University building, but the university learned that it could buy marble cheaply, and get free labor, at Sing Sing prison, in upstate New York. The university turned down the stonecutter members of the Manufacturers of Marble Mantels Association. After several fruitless meetings, 150 stonecutters stormed the store of the NYU marble works contractor, destroying much of it with rocks and brickbats in a daylong riot. The National Guard had to be called in to put down the disturbance. In 1835, constables failed to hold back a wave of looters who descended on lower Manhattan following a terrible fire that wiped out one-third of the area, and the militia had to be called in to curb the troublemakers. In the mid-1830s, constables were unable to contain crowds in antislavery riots, and again a militia unit was called in.30
Many people laughed at the militia, too. “Neither the officers nor the men have got the necessary pluck for anything but marching round a puddle,” sneered George Templeton Strong as he watched them saddle up for an encounter in 1839.31
Riots were not uncommon in other cities in the era either; in fact, they were the norm. Historian Richard Maxwell Brown counted thirty-five in Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia alone. According to historian John Schneider, “at least seventy per cent of American cities with a population of twenty thousand or more by 1850 experienced some degree of major disorder.” Abolitionist leaders, who kept close tabs on civil disturbances, counted 209 riots in the 1830s and 1840s. Abraham Lincoln, then a state legislator in Illinois, said that there were too many, and in every part of the country. They were, he said, “the everyday news of the times.”32
Still, New York had become, by the mid-1830s, the largest city in America, with more than 400,000 residents. It was a bustling city that was a vision of beauty to the eye, an American Athens. The town was an expanding metropolis of thousands of buildings, businesses, warehouses, churches, tenements, and theaters, packed in tightly between Fourteenth Street and the Battery, with the Hudson and East Rivers on each side of it. Most buildings did not rise higher than four stories because of fire regulations, and a long, necklace-like string of bustling docks filled with tall oceangoing vessels stretched around the city to service the growing shipping industry.
The city had become the banking, entertainment, and publishing capital of America. It was the nation’s chief manufacturing center and the heart of America’s shipbuilding industry. It was filled with fascinating museums, gorgeous mansions, and lovely parks. But beneath its glimmering exterior was a dark and sinister interior. New York had too many people and too few jobs, forcing thousands into poorhouses, and other thousands to live in poverty in rancid tenement hovels with little warmth in winter, oppressive heat in summer, and starvation all year long.
In the 1830s, there was still no substantial running water in town, and people had to haul heavy wooden buckets of imported water up four or five flights of stairs in order to wash dishes or take a bath. Dozens of people, rich and poor, died in summer from heat exhaustion. Transportation, on congested dirt streets, was a mess. British author Charles Dickens, who toured the city in 1841, said of the city’s overcrowded neighborhoods that the buildings there “were hideous tenements which take their names from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.”33
Thousands of street urchins, many of them pickpockets, roamed the town. Street gangs flourished, and the crime rates were far higher than they would be later, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, when the city was home to eight million souls. Prostitution, drinking, and gambling were causing the crime rate to soar. The city was home to over four thousand bars, seven thousand prostitutes, five hundred gambling casinos, and hundreds of daily and weekly lottery, or “numbers,” gambling parlors. Burglary was so common that newspaper editors called the coming of winter “the burglary season.” One distraught woman said that New York was “the criminal capital of the world.” More than thirty thousand arrests were made each year, more than the number in London and Paris combined. Among the city’s estimated seven thousand prostitutes were hundreds of eleven- and twelve-year old girls. “One cannot walk the length of Broadway without meeting some hideous troupe of ragged girls, from 12 years old down, brutalized beyond redemption by premature vice clad in the filthy refuse of the rag pickers, obscene of speech, the stamp of childhood gone from their faces,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary.
* * *
The riots that threatened to ruin city life had many causes. The city was jammed with young, headstrong men who had no work and nothing better to do than cause trouble. Most disturbances took place in the summer, when, in oppressive heat, tempers flared. One riot in mid-August was remembered by participants as taking place on “the hottest day of the year.”34
The signs of trouble and riots were in the faces of the poor and those out of work. The population of downtown New York City was tired and angry. The economy of the mid-1830s was shaky, and the masses, uncertain why that was so, turned their anger on institutions and racial targets.
New York had become a grim place to live. Critics said the growing city was too crowded and that its hundreds of buildings were blotting out the sun and creating a perfect dark, sinister setting for crime and public disturbances. “Commerce is devouring inch by inch the coast of the island, and if we would rescue any part of it for health and recreation it must be done now,” argued William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Post.35
Public events often drew huge crowds in which people pressed against each other, argued, engaged in fistfights, shoved others, and constantly threatened riots. In 1830, tens of thousands of New Yorkers participated in a memorial parade following the death of President James Monroe. Military guards protected the speakers’ platform, but those in the front line of the parade pushed them away and threatened to overrun the stage. The main speaker at the event, pleading and waving his arms, had to calm down the entire group to prevent what all thought was going to be a riot. This pressure was continual.36
A decade earlier, observant novelist James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans) had predicted problems because of the rapid and uncontrolled growth of the city, which was not anticipated by anyone. It was a growing city with no plan.37
Many New Yorkers used the Boston Tea Party of 1773 as an example of the need for good, noble citizens to use violence to achieve a deserved goal denied them by the system. The Tea Party riot had worked for the colonists, so why not continue the practice? Many city residents argued that no one in the system would acknowledge their presence in it, that they (for “they,” choose any ethnic group) were invisible in public life. Excluded, they felt that staging riots would bring attention to them and give them a place in the world. Dissidents suggested that rioting expressed “people power” and that it was the truest way to define Americanism.
The extremists, the vigilantes of the era, cited that idea often. “We are the believers in the doctrine of popular sovereignty, that the people of this country are the real sovereigns, and that whenever the laws, made by those to whom they have delegated their authority, are found inadequate, to their protection, it is the right of the people to take the protection of their property into their own hands, and to deal with these villains according to their just deserts,” wrote one vigilante leader.38
Huge waves of immigrants had arrived in New York, trudging down the gangplanks of a thousand ships, eyes wide open, intent on populating a new world. Their dreams died fast, and they were forced to live in overcrowded buildings in run-down, congested neighborhoods. Unable to get jobs that paid well, or any jobs at all, they took to the streets to protest their conditions. On the streets marching and shouting amid hordes of people and vendor carts, too, were native New Yorkers who resented the new immigrant arrivals. Americans had a fear of anybody who spoke a foreign language or still had a foreign accent. “The day must come, and, we fear, is not too far distant, when most of our offices will be held by foreigners—men who have no sympathy with the spirit of our institutions, who have done aught to secure the blessings they enjoy, and instead of governing ourselves, we shall be governed by men, many of whom, but a few short years previously, scarcely knew of our existence,” said one city dweller in the 1840s.39
By the 1830s, the Protestants and Catholics living in New York had begun to hate each other. These antagonisms erupted into religious riots and the wholesale burning of churches and neighborhoods where large percentages of religious groups lived. Many New Yorkers trembled as they saw the Irish Catholics, who arrived in droves, taking over jobs, schools, and political clubs; they feared that the Irish would take over the entire city and the country. In a few short years, they assumed, Washington, D.C., would be replaced by an Irish Catholic city as the nation’s capital. They had to be driven out.40
An example of that intense dislike of Catholics took place April 12, 1842. A Roman Catholic church had its windows broken when a mob attacked it. Later that evening, Bishop John Hughes’s home was partially destroyed in an attack. “They were like the no-popery riots of old,” said George Templeton Strong.41
Rioters were not warned to curb their actions, but encouraged in their work by important members of the community. Several prominent Bostonians led an anti-Irish riot in Massachusetts. Rioters were urged on by ethnic newspapers, dozens of them, which were read by tens of thousands in New York. “The bloody hand of the Pope has stretched forth for our destruction,” roared the Native American in 1844.42 In Utica, New York, in 1835, a grand jury ruled that the upcoming antislavery convention there was not only wrong, but criminal sedition, and implored locals to “put it down.” A Utica newspaper said locals had to use the law of the land or the “law of Judge Lynch” to stop it. One Utica newspaper editor, Augustine Dauby, said that he would stop the convention “peacefully if I can, forcibly if I must,” to the roar of a crowd. A riot followed.43
There was unbridled anger in the hearts of tens of thousands of disenfranchised and frustrated people. That resentment grew deeper each year in the 1830s and ’40s. “We have evidence too strong to be either doubted or denied that if the great among us are growing better, the bad are growing worse,” wrote one newspaper editor then.44
Rioters had no respect for the law. “There is an awful tendency towards insubordination and contempt for the law and there is reason to apprehend that good order and morality will ere long be overcome by intemperance and violence,” argued Hone, who added sadly, “My poor country.”45
Riots were also seen as a way to celebrate something via destruction. Many said that riots were summer parties. One man wrote after a race riot in Cincinnati in 1843, “The mob in Cincinnati must have their annual festival—their carnival—just as at stated periods the ancient Romans enjoyed the Saturnalia.”46
All of America’s cities found that they had the same problems in the 1830s and ’40s. None were immune. In Philadelphia in 1838, the evening session of an abolitionist society meeting at Pennsylvania Hall was attacked by weapons-toting whites in a crowd of some twenty thousand angry city residents. Much of the hall was destroyed and the abolitionists were forced out of the building as hundreds of constables stood by and did nothing. Several people were seriously wounded in the melee. White women and black men walking arm in arm in an earlier protest march ignited the fury of the whites in the attacking crowd. In Baltimore, large mobs of depositors inflamed over the collapse of a bank attacked the bank and wrecked it. Then they went on a lawless spree, burning down the homes of several bank employees and marching on the home of the city’s mayor. They forced him to resign his office. The city’s replacement mayor, who hurried from his home to the scene of the disturbance, promptly called up a posse of three thousand volunteers, all armed, who attacked the rioters and put down the rebellion.
In Charlestown, Massachusetts, now a part of Boston, a mob of over two thousand anti-Catholic men insisted that a novice Ursuline nun be released from a convent. They had heard a rumor that she had been physically abused there. This followed a series of newspaper articles by a former novice who had left the convent and claimed the nuns tried to make her accept strident religious views that were against her wishes. When the novice was not turned over to the men, they stormed the building, injuring several nuns and burning it to the ground, the flames lighting up the night sky. Bostonians were horrified. “If the wishes of the lowest class that suffer in these long [Boston] streets should execute themselves, who can doubt that the city would topple in ruins?” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.47
These riots targeted specific groups. There were few riots in New York in which a general melee erupted. Riot organizers selected groups to victimize, such as blacks, Irish, a street gang, or a political party.48
Many believed that rioting would destroy the foundation of American democracy. Writing after yet another riot in Philadelphia in the late 1860s, Philadelphia resident Sidney George Fisher said that the United States was “destined to be destroyed by the dark masses of ignorance and brutality which lie beneath it, like the first of a volcano.”49
All New Yorkers trembled at the thought of a riot. “Every fresh event should remind our citizens that we are in the city over the crust of a volcano.… There is in every large city, and especially this one, a powerful, ‘dangerous class’ who care nothing for our liberty or civilization … who burrow at the roots of society … and only come forth in times of disturbances, to plunder and prey,” said one New Yorker of an 1830s riot.50
New Yorkers always seemed ready to riot, though, especially in situations involving large crowds. At an opera performance in New York in 1848 the audience began to boo singer Sesto Benedetti as soon as he walked onstage. The hissing and booing was so loud (“a hurricane of sibilation,” said a man in the theater) that he could not sing and walked offstage. That brought on more boos. An opera official took the stage to calm the crowd and Benedetti returned, to quietude. It was typical of crowd responses in New York and how heated feelings became in a large theater filled with people. Back in 1830, the crowd booed lustily at a British actor, Anderson, who everybody thought had insulted America in a newspaper article. He was hissed off the stage several times and then a riot broke out. Philip Hone, who was there, said that “apples, eggs and other missiles were showered upon the stage.” To quiet the mob, the theater manager announced that a different play would be held the next night, and it was. Two nights later the play with Anderson was brought back again and another riot ensued and lasted through morning with damage to the theater, neighborhood windows broken, and a shabby police force failing to control the protestors.51
All had different views of who the rioters were. Hezekiah Niles, publisher of Niles’ Weekly Register, wrote that “sober and peaceable individuals are called upon to defend their own personal rights, or those of their neighbors, by force … instead of relying upon … the law.” Philip Hone was more to the point. He said the rioters were all “a set of fanatics.”52
Each riot built on the last, and there was little law enforcement to stop them. There seemed to be only one villain. Everyone in the public and the press blamed the spineless constable force for the riots and predicted more, and worse, public disturbances if the force was not discontinued and a new police department installed—and quickly.
There were many reasons why riots started and could not be controlled in New York City, but without a doubt the greatest was the lack of professional police. The city was defended by a small six-hundred-man force of inept constables, who were little more than security guards, in a huge city. They were spread woefully thin. Broken down into three daily shifts, there were roughly two constables for every 2,500 residents (today there is one cop for every 150 people).
The stumbling constables, political party appointees, often were not paid a salary. They were paid for services rendered or received bonuses for work well done, but not for arrests. As an example, they were given fees for the delivery of legal papers on behalf of the city. They were also given bonuses for finding stolen property. Consequently, the constables had little interest in maintaining law and order and putting themselves at risk without any reward. Constables in New York usually flinched when asked to make an arrest or break up a fight. Many declined to do so. If they were reluctant to do that, how could they possibly handle a mass riot?53
They were often made fun of by New Yorkers; in his diary, Hone always added, after an entry about their arrival somewhere, that they’d come “tardily.” Newspapers ran cartoons of them sleeping on the job and running from a confrontation. Constables and watchmen were the worst possible choices to defend a city and its residents in the middle of a ferocious riot filled with fires, explosions, hails of musket balls and bullets, and fistfights along the streets.
There was universal disapproval of the constables. Hone wrote after a riot that “the police came after some time, but they have no energy and want courage to resist an army like this. They are appointed as a reward for party services performed at the polls, not to quell riots created by the very fellows who assisted to place the men in office from whom they derive their support.”54
Rioters knew that and had no fear of the constables. Hence, one riot followed the other, each longer than the last, with little chance that the constables could stop any of them. An example was a fracas started by thug Yankee Sullivan and his mob in the spring of 1842. Sullivan and his men beat up a dozen or so Irishmen in the bar of the Sixth Ward Hotel, fearing interference from the constables, and getting none. The bloodied Irish retreated to their neighborhood, recruited more than a hundred men, all armed, and went looking for Sullivan and his men. They found them and launched an all-out attack, clubs bashing heads, fists flying, and blood flowing. The Sullivan men fled, recruited their own small army, and descended on the Irish neighborhood, beating up anybody they could find, with no one arrested.
New York newspapers reflected the citizenry’s attitude toward the force. James Gordon Bennett had arrived in New York from Scotland ten years earlier and in the mid-1830s had become the editor of the Herald, one of the first truly sensationalist newspapers in New York, which routinely covered riots and crime. He disdained the constables, often referring to them as the “corps of leather skulls,”55 and said that they were cops who had no right being cops. His newspaper rival, the oddly dressed Horace Greeley, was so involved in riot and crime coverage that by the early 1850s he was running a complete column of murder stories from across the United States along with lengthy riot stories and frequent complaints about the constables.
Public figures and citizens all argued that the police had two jobs, not one. They not only had to put down riots when they started, but had to work to make certain that there was enough law enforcement in place, trained law enforcement, to prevent riots from happening at all. Police had to establish a preventative law enforcement framework that included informers, liaisons, and community contacts to prevent riots and ease the public’s fear of them. In the 1830s and ’40s, that was not in place.
Another reason why a police force made up of constables was ineffective was that the law enforcement agents were untrained and too few in number to establish any kind of intelligence-gathering ring to thwart a riot. It is hard to pick up intelligence on the activities of mob leaders in a small town, but much more difficult in a city. To do that in an extremely large city like New York with such a small force was nigh impossible.56 The constables did not have a network of contacts within the public realm to stop riots when they began, either. Today, all big-city police departments have dozens of local civilian leaders, men and women they can get in touch with immediately and work with to stop a riot. In the 1830s, constables did not know any local leaders; when public disturbances started, there was no one they could contact to quell the trouble. It put law enforcement at a distinct disadvantage.
The last resort, and the best at the time, was the heavily armed state militia. The problem there was that since they were not called until after the New York constables had put up a fierce battle and then fled, they were often quite late. A full day of rioting might have taken place before they rode into a town square and loaded their rifles and fired on demonstrators.57
Riot organizers traditionally planned activities in areas where they believed the police to be neutral and not predisposed to harass them. In New York, the police were simply missing from the riot neighborhood completely. This knowledge that there were very few police to put down their riot greatly encouraged the leaders of civil disturbances. Crowd organizers want to create havoc, but they do not want to get arrested. In New York City, with its bumbling police, that was easy to do.58
Why were New Yorkers so reluctant to hire a new, armed, trained, and professional police force to quell the city’s riots and patrol its streets?
The British army had occupied several American cities prior to the American Revolution and continued to do so during the conflict. The people hated the British for doing that. That sour feeling continued to be felt for generations, and the people saw the proposed police force as another occupying army, loyal to the mayor and not the residents. New Yorkers, and people throughout the country, also feared the enormous cost of a large and professional force. The country had just staggered through two recessions and the financially catastrophic Panic of 1837; citizens were careful with every penny of public expenditures, and a police force would cost a lot of money. Americans also believed that the troubles of the 1830s and ’40s would end and peace would be restored to the streets.
That restrictive attitude would soon change. For a number of reasons, not least the long chain of fatal and destructive riots, by the early 1840s the people of New York, fed up with chaos and havoc, finally would begin a strong push for the dismantling of the ragged force of constables and call for professional, trained police. The streets would be covered with rivers of blood by the time they did that, though.
Copyright © 2017 by Bruce Chadwick
