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About the Author
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For my late and beloved wife, Marjorie, who was everything to me
Acknowledgments
The pleasure in writing a book about history is meeting so many history lovers along the way who help me with my task. They are as interested in the American story as I am, and it has been a joy to work with them. I thanked each of them at the time I met them, and I happily thank them again here for helping me to complete this book.
First and foremost, I owe a great debt of thanks to all the librarians I met in my journey: In New Jersey, thanks to Tom Glynn and his associates at Rutgers University; Head Librarian Fred Smith, Tim Stuckey, and all of their able assistants at New Jersey City University; and the folks at the Morris County Free Library, the Randolph Library, Drew University, and the Morristown–Morris Township Library. In New York, thanks to the librarians at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the New-York Historical Society, and the New York Public Library. In Washington, D.C., many thanks to the librarians at the Library of Congress.
Many thanks to my agent, Jonathan Lyons, and his assistant, Sarah Perillo, and, at Thomas Dunne Books, to publisher Tom Dunne and his assistant, Will Anderson, to editor Emily Angell and her assistant, Lisa Bonvissuto, and to copy editor India Cooper.
Author’s Note
In the decades prior to the Civil War, the crime rate in New York was about four times what it is today, and the murder rate was five or six times the current rate. Three times as many people were arrested in New York each day as the total number of those arrested in London and Paris combined. The crime wave that engulfed New York was perhaps the biggest in the history of the United States.
And there was no one there to stop it.
It [New York] is constantly changing, growing greater and more wonderful in its power and splendors, more worthy of admiration in its higher and nobler life, more generous in its charities, and more mysterious and appalling in its romances and crimes.… Its magnificence is remarkable, its squalor appalling.
—New York City journalist James McCabe Jr.
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, ha
d 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, sinc
e 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.
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