The creation of the Republican Party and its immediate success in the 1856 city, state, and national elections gave Wood new woes. Walling, by 1857 unhappy with Wood’s domination of the police department, and the loss of much of his own power because of that, chafed. What would happen to him, to the department, if Wood became president? What would happen if he did not and remained in the mayor’s office, angry and frustrated?
Waiting on the sidelines to derail any political ambitions Wood had were the Republican governor of New York and the Republican state legislature, all of whom knew he feared them. They decided that the most effective way to undercut Wood, and destroy any drive for the presidency, was to cripple his beloved police force. That would surely ruin him.
But what started out as a campaign by the state power brokers to weaken the mayor flooded beyond its boundaries and caused an epic riot that thrust the unprepared mayor and an unsuspecting Captain George Walling into the middle of a historic political battle that dramatically changed the course of New York City and law enforcement in the United States.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Blue Blood: The 1857 Police Riots
The old police being disbanded and the new police as yet inexperienced and imperfectly organized, we are in an insecure and unsettled state at present … a state of siege.
—George Templeton Strong
The year of 1857, a watershed in the history of the NYPD and New York City, began quite naturally, with a flood of stories about crime and bumbling police in the New York newspapers during the very first week of the year. On January 1, New Year’s Day, many of the papers carried the story of a man beaten and stabbed to death in an alley in Philadelphia. It resembled numerous slayings in New York. Homicides were so frequent in New York that an early 1857 crime story began, “Another atrocious murder was perpetrated.…” Right next to that story was a narrative about Hiram Barnes, who with a friend was convicted of a scheme to burn down Barnes’s store in an arson plot.1
Worst of all, at the end of his term in December 1856, Governor Myron Clark freed nineteen convicts, among them men convicted of murder, burglary, and forgery, in a clemency proclamation that drew the fire of many New York newspapers. They said it was all part of the incompetent police/court system where even when an arrest was made the perpetrator was freed. Some went as far as to say that prostitutes and criminals’ girlfriends were persuaded by those in jail to use sexual favors to soften up the hearts of judges and politicians to gain a release. “It is very hard to get a rogue convicted and still harder to keep him in prison with an executive who yields to the most delicate outside pressure. There’s no protection for society except in revolvers, which will immediately rise in value as each new batch of convicts in Sing Sing is released. Governor Clark merits a statue from the fraternity of thieves,” wailed James Gordon Bennett over the release of the criminals in the Herald.2
In that first week of January, when the convicts arrived in New York, police also faced a new wrinkle in the criminal world. Many crooks now stayed in brothels and then went out to commit crimes. They returned to the brothels and paid off madams and prostitutes to tell an investigating police officer that they had been there in the whorehouse all day.3
It was getting harder to make arrests on sex crimes in the late 1850s, too. Not only did women not report rapes, but those raped said that they had initiated the sex. In even more bizarre cases, many women began telling police that they and their boyfriends were engaging in rough sex games, that the forced penetration was not rape at all. Judges were perplexed and usually let the suspect go. Police captains such as George Walling did not know how to proceed when confronted with rapes and sex games, and they received no instructions from the mayor or the courts.4
Sex-game investigations led to bizarre marital cases. One man arrested by police had led two lives for nearly twenty years. He married one woman and lived with her for twelve years, fathering two children. He then disappeared. It turned out that he had moved in with another woman, lived with her for five years, and died. She went to court as his legal beneficiary, but the first wife showed up, too, with all of her kids. The court ruled in favor of the second wife, infuriating the first.5
By the first week of January 1857, steal-to-order theft rings had become an industry. People throughout New York told stories of theft rings taking orders for goods and then sending a division of burglars out to procure them and a battalion of fences to sell them.6
But all of those crimes together did not generate one-hundredth the press coverage of the brutal, bloody murder of high-society dentist Dr. Harvey Burdell, massacred in his office on Bond Street in the final act of a long sex scandal that had New Yorkers talking all winter and spring. It was a high-profile murder that once again put the New York police, who let it happen right under their noses, in a very bad light.
Burdell was a rascal. He was one of the city’s most successful dentists, catering to wealthy residents, but made most of his fortune in banking and real estate speculation. One of the homes he bought was a townhome at 31 Bond Street. Burdell, who spent a lot of time in Bowery gambling halls and whorehouses, treated prostitutes at his office at 31 Bond, letting them pay for their dental care with sex rather than cash.
Burdell had started a sexual relationship with Emma Cunningham, a thirty-three-year-old widow with five children, in 1854. He bought the Bond Street townhome for her. She turned it into a boardinghouse, and Burdell took two rooms, one for a bedroom and one for an office. He and Emma quarreled constantly, and their fights became genuinely hostile after his attractive twenty-four-year-old female cousin, Dimis Hubbard, began to spend long periods of time living in the boardinghouse as his guest. Emma also learned, through conversations with the maids, that Burdell was having numerous sexual trysts with women in his office. On January 31, 1857, Burdell’s badly mutilated body was found on the floor of his office, with blood splattered over five feet high on the walls. He had been strangled with a garrote and then stabbed fifteen times with a long knife.
The press ballyhooed everything turned up in the two-week inquest, including an “official” marriage certificate produced by Emma Cunningham that stated she was married to Burdell, who she said had told her to keep their union a secret. Then there was George Snodgrass, eighteen, one of the suspects, who had a dresser full of underwear belonging to Emma Cunningham’s fifteen-year-old daughter. Another boarder, John J. Eckel, often argued with the dentist. The maids testified that the entire boardinghouse was a sexual carnival and added that one day Emma told them that she did not think Burdell would live until summer. Emma, Eckel, and young Snodgrass were all charged with murder.
Nearly ten thousand people attended the highly publicized funeral of Burdell. Emma was not allowed to go but was permitted to view Burdell’s body in the coffin. She broke down, wailed that she wished she knew who killed him, and nearly fainted. The numerous witnesses to the event said they believed she was in genuine misery over his death and seemed innocent.
At the trial, held in a packed courtroom, the defense shredded the character of Harvey Burdell, portraying him as a sexually insatiable predator. Dimis, his beautiful cousin, was described as not only a homewrecker and harlot but an incestuous one at that. Emma’s marriage certificate seemed to exonerate her. Why would she kill her own husband and lose all of his, and her, fortune? It made no sense.
It made no sense to the jury, either; they acquitted Cunningham. That did not end the ribald story, though. It turned out that while imprisoned in the Tombs awaiting the trial, Emma told numerous other prisoners that she was pregnant with her “husband’s” baby. After she was acquitted, she concocted an elaborate ruse in which a doctor she hired would find a baby and give it to her to present to the world as Dr. Burdell’s heir and solidify her claim to his money and houses. The doctor she hired to assist her in her elaborate hoax, a Dr. Uhl, went to the police, though, and told them of her scheme. Emma wound up with nothing.
People had no idea who the killer was,
but all thought the police had done a poor job in the investigation and the prosecutors a shabby one in the courtroom. “The Burdell trial seems to bring out no stronger evidence than was disclosed on the inquest. If the prosecution can prove nothing further, its case is one of strong suspicion and nothing more, and should never have been brought to trial,” said George Templeton Strong.7
* * *
The New York state legislature was pushed hard by the new Republican Party to reform the government of New York City, crush Tammany Hall, and fix the badly damaged police force. The state cut down the size of the Common Council to twelve, renamed it the Board of Supervisors, ordered that the Democrats and Republicans each had to have five members on it, and gave it power, for the first time ever, to veto the mayor’s decisions. The state also eliminated the old three-man police commission, in power for just three years, and replaced it with a seven-man commission to run the newly created Metropolitan Police District, which now included Kings, Westchester, and Richmond Counties, in addition to New York. The legislators deliberately brought in the other counties in order to get around the standard “home rule” defense of city authority to which Fernando Wood always resorted to stop state legislation from affecting his iron-fisted mayoral rule (whenever he began the “home rule” defense he brought out “watch charters” from the 1790s). The commission included five members appointed by the governor and approved by the state senate, plus the mayors of Brooklyn and New York. Mayor Wood’s power over the police ended, and abruptly, too.8
The primary reason the state took charge, though, was not the murders, robberies, and rapes. It was Wood’s continued refusal to obey the new state law that forbade drinking on Sunday. Wood told his men to ignore it, and they did. When anyone questioned him on it he launched into his standard speech on “home rule” or insisted that the law was unconstitutional. The Republicans had not just been lobbied by the antidrinking crusaders; they had nearly been strangled by them. The temperance leaders had been raising a storm over the Sunday drinking law for years and finally got their way. Wood never thought the group had that much power over any political party.9
Wood was outraged. He told all that the loss of control over the police meant total loss of control for the city, and many agreed with him. Former mayor Havemeyer said that New York officials alone should hold power over the New York City police. What did people in faraway Albany know about the problems of New York? Mayor Wood was said to have spent over $100,000 to lobby state legislators in the state capital to kill the proposal. Whenever he went to Albany, he was on the inside out for blood and on the outside extremely courteous to all, even his worst enemies. He thanked those he did see for their time and apologized for not meeting others (“I owe you an apology for not seeing you,” he started one note). He dressed immaculately, often with a bow tie adorning his expensive suit.
He signed all of his letters in a high, florid style, “Fernando Wood.” Sometimes his charm worked and sometimes it did not, such as in the case of the police bills.10
Wood took the police issue all the way to the state supreme court, where he lost in late May 1857. At the beginning of May, the mayor, deeply wounded, went to his police and told them that if they worked for the new commissioners and Wood eventually won a court decision, they would all be fired. About 80 percent stayed on, as did all of his captains, including George Walling. In late May, all of the police in Manhattan refused to work for the new commission and were dismissed for insubordination. The men, supported by Mayor Wood, refused to leave their posts. The mayor refused to turn over any police property. The new commission, furious, appointed a whole new police force of eight hundred men. The mayor told the old force to keep patrolling. New York City suddenly had two police departments.11
The public was confused. Suspects arrested by one force were freed by the other. One force would refuse to conduct sweeps ordered by the mayor, but the other force would undertake them. Walling and the other captains of the mayor’s force battled over who had control of the precinct houses and the patrols on the streets. The criminals did not know whom to fear, whom to obey, or whom to bribe. Chaos reigned.12
“Public peace and security of person and property in Brooklyn, New York and their enormous suburban villages have been of late injuriously affected. Murders have increased and an inattention from the police authorities accompanied their fatal circumstances. Highway robberies have multiplied. The escaped convicts from other states, cities, countries and foreign lands have been allowed to congregate together,” read that part of the act that expressed a need for sweeping changes in the police department in New York City.13
The police were confused and angry, too. Captain Walling, part of the old troop, wrote that “there were two complete sets of policemen on duty, covering the same beats throughout the city. Collisions were frequent.”14
The New York Times agreed. One of its editorial writers said that crime had increased dramatically from the spring of 1856 to the spring of 1857, “only to be accounted for under a system when the police force is perverted from its proper calling and made the political machine that it notoriously has been and still is.” The Times blamed Wood and his fabled “one man rule” for that. So did Horace Greeley. In one of his rougher editorials, he said in the Tribune that Wood was “a bold, bad man.”15
Many city newspapers and magazines published in New York applauded the state’s intervention to reorder city business and reform the police department, which many said was the most corrupt in the United States’ history. Wood had promised all that the police, under his leadership, would shut down brothels and illegal bars; they did not. He said that the administration of the department would be clean and honest, but when he took over he gave himself the power to fire cops for any reason at all. He was ordered by the legislature to command the police to close bars on Sunday; he never did so. He fired police who were not members of his party. Police were ordered to contribute money to his 1856 campaign fund and asked to harass his political enemies. Only Democrats were allowed to hold jobs as police officers. On Election Day, the police allowed the street-gang toughs in Wood’s employ to run roughshod over polling places, beat up voters, and disrupt the entire election, which Wood won. Throughout the year, Wood and some of his City Hall cronies would hold top-secret, all-day meetings with the police commissioner and captains to evaluate the patrolmen to determine whether or not they would keep their jobs.16
Crime had become the ruination of New York and had to stop. “The truth is that the misgovernment or no-government … must inevitably force upon the minds of our people the fact that cities of the size of ours … cannot be governed on the pure Republican plan of frequent election and universal suffrage, unless some new check or element of discipline is introduced,” said one man.17
The Democrats chortled at the new police force. Since the Republicans were the dominant party in the state legislature, New Yorkers saw the elimination of the old force and installation of the new as a way in which the Republican Party could control New York City and make the police the standing army of the party (they skipped over the fact that for decades it had been the “standing army” of the Democratic Party). “The mass of our people will see in the change only an adroit trick by which the police department ceases to be the tool of one party only to become the tool of another,” argued a writer in The New York Times.18
The Democrats all said they had reformed the city. They had decentralized many departments and taken the government out of City Hall and brought it to the people. The Republicans countered that they did not diffuse power but scattered it about so carefully that it could not be found—but was always there. James Parton, a reformer, asked in 1866, “Was there ever such a hodgepodge of a government before in the world?”19
Tammany leaders said that reformers like Parton had missed the point. The point was, they argued emphatically, that New York was governed the way it was, had to be governed the way it was, because the huge metropolis had become a great democracy. In a
great democracy, power and influence belonged to all, so the carving up and distribution of power by Tammany made sense. “New York City … is the hot-bed of American democracy,” said the editor of the Democratic Review.20
And, too, Tammany leaders all said, using other words, to the victor belong the spoils. “We are not answerable for the conduct of those who either from malice or because they are irretrievably bad, or because they desire to occupy the offices which we now hold, circulate stories calculated to injure those among us who are known to be among the best and firmest of our citizens,” said William “Boss” Tweed, looking back on the Wood mayoralty in 1871.21
In 1857, crime was nearly completely out of control in New York City. The murder rate had nearly doubled over the last ten years, as had the overall crime rate. The power of the street gangs in Five Points had grown considerably. There were more whores and drunks than ever, and illegal gambling casinos dotted the streets. Everybody was frustrated by crime and the inability of the police to curb it.
“Mobs and murderers appear to rule the hour. Everybody who feels himself aggrieved takes the law into his own hands and appeals to the revolver. The revolver rules; the revolver is triumphant. Juries discharge, without leaving their seats, the gallant and lion-hearted fellows who fire revolvers at unarmed men, and avenge their wrongs without the bore and expense of a criminal trial.… No punishment follows crime,” wrote a disheartened Walt Whitman.22
And so the new, new Metropolitan Police were appointed by the state legislature. Mayor Wood, who controlled almost all of the city’s patronage and ran the police with an iron fist, objected. He charged that only the city could administer a police force and that state interference was blatantly unconstitutional. The state insisted it was correct. Wood refused to acknowledge the new force and supported the old one.
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