Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  In Five Points, too, less threatening but also unreported, was what went on within the community that would become Chinatown. In the 1840s and 1850s, only a few hundred Asian immigrants lived there, but they had already established an enclave with a mostly Chinese population that by the 1860s would grow to seven thousand. It was an independent area that ran itself and oversaw its own law enforcement. “That the majority of [the Chinese] are incurable gamblers and beings of a low moral tone is unfortunately true, but they mind their own business as they understand it and are never guilty of ruffianism.… They never appear in police courts except as complainants against ruffians who have damaged their property or brutally assaulted them,” said officer George Walling of them.18

  Criminals whose actions went unreported or undetected also included pickpockets, johns who frequented illegal houses of prostitution, illegal gamblers, counterfeiters, fake charity workers who fraudulently solicited funds for the poor, unscrupulous train conductors who convinced immigrants who could not speak or read English that they had the wrong train tickets but would be allowed to ride for a small fee, salesmen who dealt in watches that were made to look expensive but were not, thieves who stole silver and gold watches for immediate and highly profitable resale, swindlers who sold fake sports tickets or land deeds or identification papers, fraudulent clothing salesmen who collected money from wealthy people but never delivered the orders, and forgers of checks, money orders, and bank withdrawal slips.19

  In addition, there were the transgressions of the wealthy on Wall Street and the men who preyed on them. Many white-collar money crimes were never reported. An example was the theft of $1.8 million in bonds in the late 1850s. Detectives had no idea how to conduct their investigation, so they offered a $25,000 reward. Queries for the reward led them to a suburban thief who had some of the bonds. He told them that a British liquor dealer, in New York on business, had returned to London with the rest. The police then negotiated with London bobbies for his prosecution but settled for the return of the bonds. The Wall Street moguls had little interest in criminal prosecution; they just wanted their money back. In the end, none of the more than half a dozen men involved in the theft were prosecuted for the crime, and just about all of the bonds were recovered, less the reward. It was one of many such crimes for which no one was arrested as long as the money or property was recovered. The wealthy did not care about prosecutions, and neither did the police.20

  The police, under severe criticism for not cracking down on so many criminals, fought back by making thousands of detentions of poor people, usually immigrants, to pad their annual arrest statistics. Any slight transgression or misdemeanor committed by an immigrant, which would be ignored if committed by a wealthy or middle-class resident of the town, was met with an arrest, and often police arrested immigrants merely on the charge of “suspicion.” If an amount of money was stolen from a boardinghouse, an immigrant who lived there might be arrested on suspicion; an immigrant standing in a store when a robbery took place was arrested on “suspicion” of knowing something about the robbery. They were often released, but all such detentions greatly increased crime numbers at the end of the year and showed that the police were working hard.

  They were not.21

  The 1840s and 1850s were also the era of extremely lenient juries, whose members were often not certain that the inept police force had gathered enough evidence, or legitimate evidence, against those charged with any crime and acquitted suspects. In many urban areas with overcrowded legal calendars, grand jurors dismissed about one-quarter of all violent-crime charges on various grounds. Trial juries might acquit or simply refuse to bring back any verdict from their deliberation, causing the judge to declare a mistrial. In Chicago, just one-quarter of all those charged with murder were convicted by juries. Overall, a comprehensive state study showed, New York City trial juries convicted only two-thirds of those brought to court from 1845 to 1870. There were many cases, in New York and in other cities, in which juries believed there was a fine line between homicide and self-defense, especially in the many street fights in which someone was charged with a killing. What should a man do when attacked? If someone is killed in the resulting melee, is it really homicide? Many New York juries did not believe that it was. So the real crime rate was even higher than the already alarming rates reported by the police.22

  “Public opinion now requires that the utmost leniency shall be exhibited towards criminals—that the lightest punishment shall be meted out to them, and that they shall have the benefit of all doubts, flaws or deficiencies in the chain of evidence,” wrote one reporter. Leniency in criminal cases was so great that after one man was given a harsh sentence for fraud, a newspaper reporter said that he should have committed murder because the sentence would have been even less.23

  Thieves wandered the streets unchecked.

  A reformer, Dr. Henry Bellows, charged that thirty thousand professional thieves lived in Manhattan alone in the 1850s.24 The police put the number of thieves at about three thousand for those same years, broken down into burglars, bank sneaks, forgers, store robbers, safe blowers, and sneak thieves. The police said most male criminals lived with female criminals and that couples often hatched plots together. Burglars often worked in clusters of four or five men. Safe blowers wrapped safes in thick wet blankets to mute the blast and then drilled holes into the walls of the safe. Dynamite was forced into the holes and lit. Windows were left slightly open so that the blast would not shatter the glass and make an excessive amount of noise.25

  Did constables chase all of those criminals? No. They wasted their time chasing men and boys swimming in the East River, usually in desolate areas so they would not be seen. New Yorkers were astonished, and some exploded at the arrests of the men in their wet pants. “We cannot at all commend the mock vigilance of the policemen, who pounce upon parties of young men and boys—arresting them and carrying them to the station houses, for the frightful crime of bathing!” wrote Walt Whitman.26 This was done in the middle of the most violent and crime-ridden era in both New York City and American history.27

  New York’s slide into criminality was in many ways due to its success. As an example, the city expanded quickly in population, and that attracted businesses whose proprietors hoped to profit off the large revenue from a much greater number of urban residents. That also meant, though, that criminals now had many more stores to rob. The bigger the stores, the more attractive their cash registers and shelves filled with expensive goods became to the denizens of the underworld. The meteoric growth in businesses, and businesses usually concentrated in a specific district, meant a smaller and easier target area for thieves and, an unintended consequence, faster escape routes.

  The growth of stores meant more shoppers, and that meant more victims for robbers. The increase in overall population also meant many more citizens walking the streets of residential neighborhoods who could be held up. The growth of the city also meant more men who could pursue prostitutes, drink at taverns, and gamble away their weekly wages. The surging metropolis also attracted tens of thousands of men from other, smaller cities and towns. No one in the city knew who they were, and many feared they might be criminals drawn to the community by its newfound wealth. Criminals not only created direct problems for New York City; the fear of them significantly compounded the apprehension of residents. “The morals and manners of youth are neglected and … corrupt society is poisoned at the fountain and all its channels and branches will soon become infected with the deadly taint,” argued a big-city mayor. The city’s increasing magnetism for out-of-towners also meant its social decline.28

  Anyone who visited New York saw immediately that it was, at the same time, dazzling and treacherous, populated by the very rich and the very poor, the highly moral and the despicably immoral. It was a “dirty, smoky, noisy, busy, great and animating emporium,” wrote one man from Virginia who vacationed there in the 1840s. It had “the princely dwelling, the costly equipage and the splendid appea
rances; and on the other hand, the squalid hut of poverty, of filth, of extreme misery and degradation.” It was filled with “eddying throngs, gathering and whirling, scattering and hurrying hither and thither.”29

  Many of those who lived there hated it, mostly because of the crime threat. “What an immense vat of misery and crime and filth much of this great city is,” wrote Charles Loring Brace, the head of the Children’s Aid Society, after he had lived in New York for several years. “I realize it more and more. Think of ten thousand children growing up almost sure to be prostitutes and rogues.”30

  Everybody knew what Brace was talking about because hundreds of abandoned children were found each year, often brothers or sisters, barely clothed, huddled together in the snow, left there by their poverty-stricken parents. Some were taken in by House of Refuge; some were cared for by families who pitied them. Others grew up on the streets and wound up in careers as young thieves or twelve-year-old whores.

  Many New Yorkers saw their troubled city as a magnet for killers and thieves. “The enterprising, the curious, the reckless, and the criminal flock hither from all corners of the world, as to a common centre, whence they can diverge at pleasure.… Great numbers here live with somewhat of that license which prevails in times of pestilence. Life is a reckless game, and death is a business transaction. Warehouses of ready-made coffins stand beside warehouses of ready-made clothing,” said Lydia Child, who had been shaken when she had witnessed dozens of coffins sold at auction to the families of those who had died of diseases or been slain. So many coffins had been made for the victims of crime, cholera, yellow fever, and other epidemics (75 percent of all children under the age of two died from some disease) that flowed through the city in the 1830s and ’40s that they sold at retail for just four dollars.31

  Reformers in town bemoaned the seemingly endless pestilence and told city officials that the filth and grime in the city, in neighborhood after neighborhood, caused health epidemics such as cholera and yellow fever. If the environment was brought under control, so would epidemics be brought under control. Child was as upset with living conditions in Manhattan as her fellow reformers.32

  One of those coffins had been taken by the wife of Edward Coleman, a local robber. She was one of the city’s pretty “hot corn girls” who wore beautiful clothing and sold ears of hot corn from buckets as they glided through the streets of the city. Coleman lived off her earnings. They had a fight because her earnings were not enough. Coleman killed her and became famous—he was the very first man hanged in the city’s brand-new jail, the “Tombs,” a huge, forbidding-looking granite building. He was hanged on January 12, 1839.

  The lovely hot corn girls had a dramatic effect on men. Years later, men would remember encountering them on the streets with great fondness, a treasured memory of their youth. On a chilly night in January of 1854, George Templeton Strong reminisced about “sultry nights in August or early September, when one has walked through close, unfragrant air and flooding moonlight and crowds, in Broadway or in the Bowery, and heard the cry rising at every corner, or has been lulled to sleep by its mournful cadence in the distance as he lay under only a sheet and wondered if tomorrow would be cooler. Alas for some far-off times when I remember so to have heard it!”33

  The Tombs, a mammoth stone mausoleum right on the street, was a miserable prison. It was built to hold about two hundred prisoners but usually was filled with four hundred or more. There was an inner prison for males connected to an outer prison that ringed it for females and boys. The two prisons were connected by what inmates called the “bridge of sighs,” representing your sighs as you were taken into it. The buildings, which took up an entire city block, were damp all year long and badly ventilated. Prisoners often suffered from illnesses brought on by the cold and stale air. The male prison was an ill-designed, narrow jail with four stories of cells, one on top of the other, badly ventilated, with a single small window filled with iron bars to bring in minimal light. The cells overlooked a high atrium.

  The outer prison, for women and boys, also contained a dozen or so spacious, well-appointed cells with large windows that overlooked the streets and had far more light. These were rented to convicts who could afford to pay extra money for more comfort and relative quiet and separation from the coarser general population. These usually contained corrupt politicians, counterfeiters, and merchants convicted of business fraud or the wealthy convicted of any number of crimes. The Tombs also contained a “Bummers’ Room,” which was a very large holding cell for those tossed into the jail for drunkenness and public disorder. They usually stayed but one night. Several police courts, with judges, were in the Tombs for the administration of rapid justice to the hordes of overnight convicts.

  It was, those incarcerated there claimed, a monument to the collapse of the city. Journalist George Foster, who once spent a month there, called it “a redhot furnace of corruption, bribery, theft, burglary, murder, prostitution, and delirium tremens [where] the very air is rarefied with crime.” He added that it “was filled with drunken men and women, found helpless in the street, with night-brawlers and disturbers of the public peace, and with young boys and girls who have been caught asleep on cellar doors or are suspected of the high crime of stealing junk bottles and old iron. The very lowest and most brutal form of human depravity may here be seen in all its horrors.”34

  Charles Dickens was an authority on rotting prisons from his days in London, but he was thunderstruck when he was taken to the Tombs. “Do you thrust people into holes such as these?” he asked. “Do men and women against whom no crime is proved lie here all night in perfect darkness surrounded by … noisome vapors … and breathing this filthy and offensive stench? Why, such indecent and disgusting dungeons would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world!”35

  Many Americans agreed with Dickens. Senator William Seward was appalled by the jails of the city and state. “New York penitentiaries often exhibit scenes revolting to humanity; and many a youthful prisoner, instead of being subjected to salutary discipline, becomes more depraved,” he wrote.36

  One area of law enforcement that irked all was the sentencing of young boys and girls, some just ten and eleven years old, to the Tombs. One boy who beat up the owner of the Atlas was sent there for thirty days. More usually, judges sent children off to the House of Refuge for a few weeks or months. An example was Joseph Solomon, who stole a collection of India rubber goods from a downtown store and was caught by the proprietor. A magistrate sent him off to the House of Refuge.37

  Many reformers saw the Tombs, and other jails, as useless. “Society … seek[s] to protect itself from [crime] by the incalculable expense of bolts, bars, the gallows, watch-houses, police courts, constables, and ‘Egyptian tombs,’” complained Lydia Child in the Anti-Slavery Standard.38

  Men and women hated being locked up in the Tombs, and many attempted to escape, some using complicated schemes. One man used a bent utensil to remove several stone blocks from the wall of his cell, but the noise he made on the final block awakened the man in the cell below him, who alerted the guards, who stopped the escape.39

  The Tombs itself was a cauldron of corruption. Constables who found money stolen from people returned it in a court inside the Tombs, but only half of it. They pocketed the other half. Many of those taken to the Tombs complained that they not only had to pay fines but had to pay fees for the constable who arrested them, and usually a bribe to a constable for a good recommendation to the sentencing judge. These prisoners who had committed a single crime were forced into a string of them.

  Women who were not prostitutes but committed a crime of some sort were dumped into jail with whores and had to listen to the “drunken, bloated, diseased white and black women cursing and blaspheming,” wrote George Foster.40 The Tombs and other, smaller city jails were so overcrowded that jailers put dozens of women in the hallways, where they slept curled up next to each other, leaning against the cold bars of jail cells. Guards tiptoed thro
ugh their sleeping bodies to reach other parts of the prison. It was not until 1841 that the Common Council voted to clear out two large rooms where debtors had been held and turn them over to the women prisoners so that they could enjoy some comfort.41

  The massive overcrowding and poor health conditions caused the city to institute the Prison Association of New York in 1844. It was a reform organization that sent its members to visit prisons to ensure proper care for inmates and to investigate inmates’ claims of unfair imprisonment. They conducted investigations and interviewed prisoners. By the late 1860s, the Prison Association had obtained releases for over six thousand prisoners and convinced judges to free more than seven thousand others jailed on a first offense. The members of the association also helped prisoners who were released in obtaining food, housing, and a job. Between 1844 and 1869 they aided 156,000 inmates or ex-inmates.42

  The city’s newspapers campaigned for prison reform, too; the Sun was the first, calling for improvements at and eventually the closing of Bridewell, a City Hall Park prison for local debtors.43

  Within ten years of the Tombs’ opening, prison administrators admitted that it and other city jails had failed in their goal of rehabilitating the incarcerated. They did punish people who had committed crimes, but these men and women were just released and drifted back to a life of crime in the city. Recidivism rates were high, too, and the idea of reforming the great mass of criminals through jail time and facility programs failed and failed badly.44

  * * *

  All New Yorkers despised killers, whether men in bare-knuckled fights or men with knives or guns. One wrote that a murderer “must have had a heart seared and blackened by the fiercest fires of hell, and an arm nerved to steady firmness by the most infernal hatred and revenge.” Walt Whitman said that “there sometimes occur cases of murder so horrible, that the universal indignation of humanity rises up against them and cries out for the blood of the homicide.” Editors at the Sun made the same charge.45