Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  The rapid increase in crime and murder in New York City defied the reduction of murder and mayhem that was sweeping much of the world in the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s. The countries of England, Germany, and Italy all experienced significant drops in crime and murder rates from 1830 to 1865, but the United States did not, and in New York City they soared. The difference, some have said, was the bolstering of political democracy in Europe in those years, more opportunities for formerly disenfranchised people to vote, and stronger state, regional, and central governments. Citizens of those countries were pleased that the governments responded to their plights, and that sense of security and faith toned down their anger, and that toned down criminal activity. People in those countries had their faith in their nations not only restored but strengthened by far-ranging sets of laws that gave all the people more power and control in the governmental system.

  Just the opposite happened in America. The government of much promise under Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had been badly battered by huge land acquisition and ever-exploding growth in population, especially in the cities and especially in New York. The federal government could not keep up with it, and neither could the cities.

  And by the 1840s, America had entered a new and very different era. By the end of the 1830s, all of the heroes of the American Revolution had died (President Monroe’s death in 1830 was cause for mass funerals and somber ceremonies throughout the land). The founding era was over, and the next era, an era of land expansion, transportation development, hordes of immigrants, and lots of crime, had begun. No one in New York, or the United States, knew how to manage that new era, and people were scared.

  Many believed the crime wave would be halted if more criminals were hanged. One writer in the Tribune, “T.L.,” said to be a university professor, insisted that people who killed had been taken over by the spirit of witches. He then noted that the killing of witches had been authorized by the Bible. Therefore, he insisted, all found guilty of murder had to be hanged.46

  Public hangings had been held in New York for nearly two hundred years, always with deterrence as a goal, but it never worked. Murders kept increasing, not decreasing. What would stop the murders? And when?

  People also wondered about criminal sentences. New York judges were overly harsh in sentencing felons. They believed that long terms of incarceration would deter others from committing crimes and end the interest in crime of those jailed. American and New York prison sentences were generally two to three times as long as similar sentences in England. Sentences varied, too. Ed Thompson was sent to prison for two years for a third-degree burglary in the spring of 1841, but just an hour later that same judge gave a woman, Ann Sharp, only six months in jail for beating up and attempting to kill Charles Kelley. One judge gave an Irish defendant forty years for the theft of six cents, but an hour later he released a man charged with felonious assault. Emma Francis was sent to the Tombs for three long years for attempting to kill a man. Henry Henecker was sentenced to prison for six long months just for stealing a pair of boots; a week later another man stole a pair of shoes but was put in jail for only thirty days. Two teenagers were jailed for thirty days for stealing two geese from a neighbor. A neighborhood butcher’s dog bit a child. The child’s father went to the police, and the police put down the dog. The butcher, furious at the death of his beloved pet, found the father, pulled out one of his long butcher’s knives, grabbed him by the neck, and slit his throat with the knife, nearly killing him. The butcher received only a five-hundred-dollar fine. Others were sent to the Tombs after committing unbelievable thefts, which they clearly believed they would get away with. One man appeared in court in the spring of 1841 charged with stealing a four-foot-high barrel of oil and brazenly rolling it through the middle of city streets until he was finally spotted by a constable. A New Yorker named Christopher Brennan was sent to jail for stealing the same watch twice. He stole it from one man and sold it to another. A short time later, he trailed the second man and stole it from him, too. Steve Gordon and Alex Stewart were sent to jail for selling brass watches as gold ones.

  One man stole a fireman’s coat worth four dollars and was sent to jail for three years. George Thomas stole two coats worth a total of fifty-six dollars and was sent to prison for two years. Henry Gilliam was given two years for stealing a half ton of coal. George Cisco was given six months for stealing a single set of iron castings. Ben Reynolds stuck his hand into his boss’s money drawer and pulled out a small wad of bills; the judge gave him six months. And then there were strange thefts, such as the one by Nicolas Davis, who was jailed in 1852 for stealing fifty pounds of butter. There were even stranger defenses. A man was arrested for sneaking into the backyard of a woman and examining a dozen or so shirts drying on a clothesline. He picked one out, shoved it under his coat, and ran away, only to be arrested a short time later. His defense? “I only stole one!” he told the officer.47

  There were bizarre crime stops. One elderly, well-dressed dandy stood on a Broadway street corner and, in broad daylight, made sexual remarks to every woman who passed him. The police, alerted by several incensed women, arrested him on charges of making lewd comments.

  Thieves hid stolen goods in the strangest places. One man looted a jewelry store and shoved a necklace into his boot so that no one would see it. Later that night a suspicious cop asked him to remove his boots, and the necklace tumbled out. Another man slit open the lining of his pants and shoved wads of stolen bills inside, carefully sewing the pants back up. Police noticed that the bottom of his pants seemed loaded with something and arrested him; they quickly found the slit.48

  Criminals stole odd items. Teenager John Pigret was sent to the House of Refuge for stealing one hundred ornate plates with stanzas of an elaborate “Philosophy of Marriage” painted on them.49

  Did some harsh sentences deter crime? Over the next twenty years, crime soared.50

  The hordes of criminal cases that tumbled into the courts were often interspersed with unusual delights, such as the case of Isaac Steinberg. He had romanced Delia Phillips for months and promised to marry her, but refused to set a date. Tired of being put off, she sued him for breach of promise, probably hoping that the prospect of going to jail would get him to marry her. The judge did sentence him to jail, but Steinberg still steadfastly refused to marry Delia and went off to one of the city prisons. She and her relatives visited him there several times. As her impassioned pleas for marriage grew, Stenberg’s ability to put up with life in jail diminished. He finally gave in, and they were married—by the judge who threw him in jail and in that same courtroom.51

  On some days no arrests were made. On those days James Gordon Bennett joked that “the police offices yesterday were as quiet as could be desired by the public and the magistrates.”52

  The rapidly rising crime rate, the street gangs, and the hordes of street urchins who worked as pickpockets convinced many New Yorkers that there was evil in their streets. “Every fresh event … should remind our citizens that we are in this city over the crust of a volcano.… There is in every large city, and especially in this, 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 disturbance, to plunder and prey,” wrote one New Yorker.53

  Charles Loring Brace called New York’s street people “young burglars and murderers, the garroters and rioters, the thieves and flash-men … ruffians.” He said that all of them, from twelve-year-old pickpockets to forty-five-year-old killers, were the worst criminals in the world. Comparing them to European lawbreakers, he wrote, “They rifle a bank, where English thieves pick a pocket; they murder, where European prolétaires cudgel or fight with fists; in a riot, they begin what seems about to be the sacking of a city, where English rioters would merely batter policemen, or smash lamps,” and added that “the murder of an unoffending old man … is nothing to them.” He might have added, too, that New York had t
he youngest killers in the world; the number of killers between the ages of fourteen and seventeen was five times as high as the national average.54

  So many people believed in the “dangerous class” of criminals that they were afraid to do much of anything. They were so afraid that Harper’s Weekly published a cartoon of a crowded city omnibus, with a woman and her daughter reluctant to get on it. It was a “car crowded with murderers and thieves,” the cartoonist wrote derisively. The city ordered a study of the crime rate and found that not only had crime risen, but so had the fear of crime.55

  Visitors to the city seemed to be fascinated by the omnibus, the horse-drawn carriage that held twelve to fifteen people and followed planned routes. “Carriages may go two miles. Take all of these stages, west, north and east and they exceed 70, & from the cheapness of the fare are always filled,” said John Pintard in 1833.56

  The ferries that left the Battery for Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey intrigued people, too. They drew enormous crowds of people that created traffic jams. About forty-four million people rode them each year. A foreigner visiting New York said that the crowd on the shore around the ships was immense. “Troops of friends, assembled to take leave, were jostled by tradesmen, hotel keepers and hackney coachmen, urging the payment of their accounts, and by newsmen disposing of papers wet from the printing press squeezing among carts, wagons and wheelbarrows filled with luggage,” said one man. Silently slipping throughout the crowd were dozens of professional pickpockets, who treasured large, tight, noisy crowds like that.57

  Many of the cartmen, easily lost in the sea of people, were delivering stolen goods in their carts, hidden under blankets or boxes and unnoticed by anyone. The cartmen were often part of a ring of seven to twelve people that operated twenty-four hours a day to steal, store, and sell stolen property.58

  George Templeton Strong loved to walk the streets of the city at night, after the sun drifted over the horizon, but was appalled at the sights of the evening. He smirked at the rivers of New Yorkers he found standing in front of saloons or shops and filling the intersections. “Whores and blackguards make up about two-thirds of the throng,” he snorted.59

  Some city dwellers fled to the country. One man who moved to Connecticut, fed up with crime and the bungling police, complained about “the increase of crime, the ferocity and frequency of assaults on private citizens at night in this city” and said that his friends were buying guns for protection.60

  Those who stayed in the city complained that anybody could be the victim of a grievous crime. Ask Catherine Burns. Eight months pregnant, Burns was nearly beaten to death by William Johnson, an acquaintance, who repeatedly hit her over the head and shoulders with a large hickory stick.61

  The invention of the Colt revolver resulted in an increase in crime and a change in the way it was conducted. Surveys show that by the mid-1840s about 30 percent of all murders were committed with the new handgun, sold to the public for just twelve dollars (today guns figure in about 65 percent of all murders). Ironically, the new guns provided local newspapers with thousands of dollars in revenue from Colt and, later, others who manufactured the guns and sold the weapons through newspapers not only for protection but as symbols of both masculinity and success in New York City and America generally.62

  The guns were dangerous for several reasons. Men determined to kill themselves now had an easy method to carry out their wish. Others were accidentally killed or badly wounded when guns misfired. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier was standing on a street when a gun in the hands of a small boy nearby went off. The bullet hit Whittier in the face and exited through his neck, knocking him to the ground and nearly killing him. A middle-aged man in Manhattan was showing his young lover how to load a gun in his bedroom. The gun went off accidentally, and the bullet hit the woman in the chest, killing her.63

  Social trouble contributed to the galloping crime rate. One of the anomalies of life in New York in the era was the disproportion of young, single men with little to do with their free time. In the era, about 40 percent of men were still single by the age of thirty-five. They had no wife to discipline them and keep them home at night, no children to whom they owed a responsibility as a parent. Without traditional marital and family responsibilities, they had no ties to traditional community life, and many of them tumbled into the streets of the city and wound up at whorehouses, bars, and gambling casinos where they drank heavily and added to the huge numbers of men arrested for drunkenness and disorderly conduct. They also plunged into fights inside saloons or in the streets and alleys nearby, becoming the perpetrators or victims of assault-and-battery crimes.

  Many men went looking for trouble, armed with a rock or bottle or bludgeon. Walter Hunt accidentally encountered a man with whom he was angry on the staircase of a building. He was carrying a cane, so he looked at the man, looked down at the cane, raised it, and proceeded to thrash the man with his cane for several minutes, knocking him to the floor. The man bled all over the staircase and nearly died.64

  The 1840s and 1850s were an era when men, particularly young men, saw fistfights as a defense of their honor and a symbol of their manhood. Beating up someone was a badge of honor in New York.65 Fisticuffs were common among older men and even among distinguished older men. All New Yorkers remembered the day that the famous stage actor Edwin Forrest, angry at the attention the poet Nathaniel P. Willis paid to his wife, rushed up behind Willis on a busy street and attacked him. Forrest knocked him to the ground and then proceeded to beat him senseless with his cane, pushing off anyone who tried to interfere. The public was disgusted with the masculinity fights. Walt Whitman said that they did not build manhood; they just brought about injuries and bleeding for no good reason.66

  The teenage boys, especially the immigrants, were worse than the men. Crowds gathered around men and boys fighting, but no one broke up the brawls. All just watched for entertainment. People who saw a fight as something noble were doubly prone to engage in one if they were drunk, and did. The city rapidly became a cesspool of unattached young men, drinking and fighting and winding up in the crime statistics, which grew as the years went by.67

  The onslaught of crime, starting with the Jewett murder in 1836, was not quiet. Murders were extremely violent, rapes brutal, and robberies messy and raucous. As the 1830s rolled into the 1840s, the settings for a criminal world in the streets of New York grew—more prostitutes, worse gambling, prolonged drinking and drunken bar fights, pickpockets, and extreme poverty. These sins invaded other cities, too. A writer at the Chicago Tribune wrote of “the proximate incitements to theft and violence … [namely] drinking, gambling and prostitution.”68

  * * *

  The relentless rise in crime in these years helped to break down the citizenry’s historic reluctance to embrace a standing army or a police force. No one supported a new police force more than Walt Whitman.

  People listened to Whitman, even though many had mixed feelings about him. Some thought him crude as a writer, as crude as many of the ruffians he wrote about. One critic said that he showed “the quality of the celebrated New York ‘rough’ full of muscular and excessively virile energy, full of animal blood, masterful, striding to the front rank, allowing none to walk before him, full of rudeness and recklessness, talking and acting his own way, utterly regardless of other people’s ways.” Others saw the tall, thin, bearded writer who always kept his shirt collar open and wore a slightly floppy, dark-colored hat as not just a penny scribbler but a deep thinker and street-corner philosopher who found remarkable ways to write about city life.69

  None saw him as clearly as he saw himself. “Tall, large, rough-looking man, in a journeyman carpenter’s uniform. Course, sanguine complexion, strong, gristly, grizzled beard; singular eyes, of a semi-transparent, indistinct light blue, and with that sleepy look that comes when the lid rests halfway down over the pupil; careless, lounging gait,” he wrote of himself in Leaves of Grass.70

  When he became the editor of the Aurora
in 1842, he started wearing a more formal frock coat and tie, used a cane, switched to a high hat, and sported a boutonniere. He arrived at the newspaper office around 11:00 A.M., stayed until shortly after noon, and then strolled lower Broadway and the Battery for an hour or so. He loved that area of New York. “The crowd and the jam were tremendous. Hundreds of splendid women and fashionable men filled the pave, and between the curb stones whirled one incessant clang of omnibuses, carriages and other vehicles,” he wrote in the spring of 1842.71

  William Sutton, a printer for Whitman in 1842, said that he would write his editorial in “a beautiful hand, plain as a pikestaff, punctuating it all the way through, so that the compositor only had to follow copy.” He added that if anybody changed a single comma of his work they would be chastised severely by Whitman.

  Whitman had an unshakable faith in newspapers, which he saw as the great defenders of freedom, and once wrote that he wished for “a newspaper-ruled people.” He earned the praise of the people and rival newspaper editors. The editor of the Brooklyn Evening Star said the Eagle under Whitman had “a brilliant lot of editorials,” and the Tribune’s Greeley snorted that it “was well got up.” Charles Eliot Norton said of him that he was “a compound of New England transcendentalist and New York rowdy.”72

  By the time his Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, Whitman had served as the editor of eight New York newspapers, written for twenty, and put together small collections of fiction writing based on his newspaper work.

  The poet/journalist had written a few short sentimental stories for the Long Island Patriot when he was twelve. Then, a few years later, he wrote some short stories for the New-York Mirror and was thrilled. “I remember with what half-suppress’d excitement I used to watch for the big, fat, red-faced, slow moving very old English carrier who distributed the ‘Mirror’ in Brooklyn; and when I got one, opening and cutting the leaves with trembling fingers. How it made my heart double-beat to see my piece on the pretty white paper,” he wrote in his journal.73