Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  He went to a nearby police precinct and talked to patrolmen there. He learned, as he had been told by terrified residents of the neighborhood, that the new police were afraid to venture into high-crime neighborhoods or the enclaves of the street gangs, just like the members of the old force. “Police scarcely venture east of it,” Strong wrote of the area and noted that the neighborhood had been without any police protection for three days.1

  But the most remarkable event of the post-riot summer was the resuscitation of defrocked mayor Fernando Wood. Arrested, brought to court, stripped of power, humiliated, and made to look ridiculous, the crafty politician had somehow emerged stronger than ever. Wood did not hide, cower, or bow to his superiors in Albany. He went back to his mayor’s office and developed a whole new strategy toward the police and his personal power. Wood, with a wide smile on his face, not only took his seat on the new Police Commission, along with the mayor of Brooklyn, his friend, stunning all, but spent the month of July working to get one of his men appointed to a seat already vacated by one of the new commissioners. “It may lead to the very unexpected result of giving Wood and his friends the control which the police bill was expressly intended to take from them,” chuckled Strong, adding that he still thought Wood was “a scoundrel.”2

  Wood would be turned out of office because of the widely publicized police riot, but he would be back. The feisty mayor formed his own political machine, Mozart Hall, put together a coalition of immigrants and southern sympathizers, employed his old street gang thugs to disrupt elections, and won the mayor’s office for a third time in 1859. Two days later, his wife, Annie, died, leaving him with seven children to care for, as well as the ever-growing city.3

  In 1860, Wood headed for the Democratic Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, intent on becoming the party’s nominee for vice president, or perhaps president if the convention collapsed into chaos, as Wood believed it surely would. He arrived as a political hero, the wealthy and flamboyant three-time mayor of the biggest city in the country. The southerners loved him for his pro-South stands on issues. He went to Charleston in a special, lavish train car, put up all of his slate’s delegates in expensive, elegant hotels, paid all of their bills, and oversaw party after party, signing everybody’s bar bill as he did so. He received substantial press attention, and his speeches were printed in their entirety in the local newspaper. His plan was to capture New York’s delegate seats for his National Democrats, battling to oust the Tammany Hall slate. He lost.

  The Democratic Convention did tumble into confusion, as he predicted. The southerners, unwilling to nominate Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who they felt betrayed them with his shifting stand on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, stormed out of the convention and went home. Douglas could not get enough votes to win the nomination. The convention was shut down and reopened a month later in Baltimore. There Wood again failed to have his delegation seated but made many speeches and met with numerous party leaders, still hopeful of a vice presidential nod. He did not get it and went home, highly disappointed.

  Back in New York, Captain George Walling watched the “Wood for President” saga with delight. Nothing fazed the mayor. Wood was soon out of office, and Walling worked with the new mayor, advancing all of his ideas and receiving little support. Walling continued as a captain throughout the Civil War, directing his men in the famous New York City draft riots of 1863. He went on to be named police chief in 1874 and served until 1885.

  Following his third and final term as mayor, Wood served five consecutive terms as a congressman and died in 1881. When he died, the population of New York City was 1.9 million people. When he was born in 1812, it was just 96,000. During his lifetime and his political career, New York City grew into the largest, richest, and most culturally renowned city in the world—thanks to him, for better or worse.

  * * *

  As the year 1859 drew to a close, three extraordinary events took place at the same time to form a fitting end to the era. First, the brand-new, oversized, and elegant Fifth Avenue Hotel opened in August at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. The hotel boasted of rooms for eight hundred guests, all of whom were welcome to use one of the very first passenger elevators in the country, and of course to marvel at the establishment’s majestic architecture, spacious lobby, and superior restaurants. The debut of the hotel marked the success of the city as a world business hub, architectural mecca, and tourist attraction. The hotel made the metropolis the worthy rival of Paris, London, and Rome.

  At the same time that summer, construction was well under way for St. Patrick’s Cathedral at Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, an imposing edifice that would solidify the power of the Roman Catholic Church in New York and, with it, the power and influence of the Irish Catholics, who by then made up nearly one-quarter of the city’s ever-growing population.

  Both of these successes were met in that very hot August of 1859 with a raging river of crime that flooded the city. There were murders, robberies, and felonies just about everywhere. Police statistics for 1859 showed that there were more than ninety thousand arrests, about triple the number in the mid-1840s. Roughly a hundred men and women were murdered that year, more than twice the murder rate in the mid-1840s. Crime was everywhere. The progress in the city in so many areas, such as religion, entertainment, and business, was met with no progress anywhere in law enforcement. The new Metropolitan Police were as ineffective as the old Municipals. The crime rate did not plunge when the Civil War started, either, as so many hoped it would with numerous criminals joining the army. It rose.

  The crime wave in New York would not subside until the late 1870s, after civil service was finally established. In the 1870s, there were more police, honest police, to patrol the streets, and crime and corruption declined. As an example, the murder rate in New York at the end of the 1850s was somewhere between 10 and 13 per 100,000 people, but tougher police work caused it to drop to just 5 per 100,000 by 1880 and remain at about 5 per 100,000 each year through the start of the 1920s. The rate for crime in general dropped significantly in the 1880s and remained steadily low for forty years.

  In the 1860s and early 1870s, William “Boss” Tweed would run Tammany Hall and the city with an iron fist and steal millions from city coffers, but after he went to prison the power of Tammany subsided somewhat. It was still in business through the 1920s, but never again controlled the city the way it did in the middle of the nineteenth century.

  Over the next few decades, Tribune editor Horace Greeley grew to be the most famous newspaperman in the United States, became heavily invested in politics, and was the nominee of both the Democratic and Liberal Republican parties in 1872 against President Grant (Greeley died shortly after being trounced at the polls). Herald editor James Gordon Bennett was named the U.S. ambassador to England by President Lincoln. George Templeton Strong became the head of the U.S. Sanitary Commission when the Civil War broke out. Editor Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, and went on to become one of the country’s most celebrated poets.

  The New York City Police Department served as a model for other urban law enforcement agencies in America throughout the nineteenth century. Departments in Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Richmond, Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and other urban areas replicated what they saw in New York. They all had problems with state interference, political patronage, government corruption, lack of funds, riot control, and use of weapons, as well as difficulty with the courts and neighborhood associations. They all had their successes and failures, but they turned out pretty much the same as the police in New York. Everything in New York was bigger, more complicated, more problematic, and more expensive. The gambling, prostitution, and drinking difficulties were the same in most of the large cities, but always smaller than in New York because of its size and ever-increasing population. All the other cities had street gangs and faced the same woes in controlling them, as did New York, but in time, as in N
ew York, the street gangs disappeared. The success of the NYPD, over the long run, after all of its troubles, paved the way for good policing in America. All of the city police departments made America a safer place to live, despite problems, big and small, that arose from time to time.

  * * *

  During the rest of the nineteenth century, New York grew in its splendor. Residents saw the construction of several large sports stadiums, the development of Central Park and numerous others, the growth of the boroughs, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the rise of vaudeville and the Broadway theaters. Walt Whitman wrote of the city and its harbor in the summer of 1878, “First-class New York sloop or schooner yachts, sailing, this fine day, the free sea in a good wind. And rising out of the midst, tall-top’t, ship-hemm’d, modern, American, yet strangely oriental, V-shaped Manhattan, with its compact mass, its spires, its cloud-touching edifices, group’d at the centre, the green of the trees and all the white, brown and gray of the architecture, well blended, as I see it, under its miracle of limpid sky, delicious light of heaven, above and June haze on the surface below.”4

  And walking the streets, docks, alleys, promenades, and avenues, watching it all, in rain or shine, summer splendor or winter snow, was a cop on the beat.

  Notes

  Chapter One

    1. George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Thomas, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 1:104, May 9, 1836.

    2. Kenneth Holcomb Dunshee, As You Pass By (New York: Hastings House, 1952), 75.

    3. Philip Hone, The Diary of Philip Hone, ed. Allan Nevins, 2 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), 1:46, September 7, 1831.

    4. Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 479.

    5. Hone, Diary 1:133–35, July 10, 1834.

    6. Boston Post, July 15, 1834.

    7. New York Times, August 8, 1834.

    8. Journal of Commerce, July 6, 1834.

    9. Strong, Diary 1:94, November 5, 1838; Hone, Diary 1:46, September 7, 1831.

  10. New York Evening Post, July 9, 1836.

  11. John Quincy Adams, Diary, in Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 12 vols. (Philadelphia, 1876), 9:162.

  12. Hone, Diary 1:viii.

  13. Ibid., 1:xv.

  14. Strong, Diary 1:233, May 8, 1844.

  15. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 473.

  16. Frank O’Brien, The Story of the Sun (New York, D. Appleton, 1928), 71.

  17. Hone, Diary 1:241–42.

  18. Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 93.

  19. Hone, Diary 1:199-200, February 24, 1836.

  20. George Walling, Recollections of a New York City Chief of Police (New York: Caxton Book Concern, 1887), 32.

  21. Larry Whiteaker, Seduction, Prostitution and Moral Reform in New York, 1830–1860 (New York: Garland, 1997), 24–25.

  22. David Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld: The Impact of Crime on the Development of the Urban American Police, 1800 –1887 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1942), 48–49.

  23. Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1955), 108–9.

  24. James Richardson, The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) 13; Augustin Costello, Our Police Protectors: A History of the New York Police (1885; Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972), 51.

  25. Proceedings of the Board of Alderman of the Municipal Assembly of the City of New York Proceedings of the Council of the Municipal Assembly of the City of New York (New York: Board of Alderman, 1902–1935), 120 vols; Proceedings, Board of Aldermen, Minutes, September 5, 1842, 24:276.

  26. Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 42.

  27. Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 73.

  28. Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 55–62.

  29. New York City Common Council report for 1841.

  30. Willard A. Heaps, Riots, U.S.A., 1765–1970 (New York, Seabury Press, 1966), 17–18; James Richardson, Urban Police in the United States (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974), 21.

  31. Strong, Diary 1:118, December 10, 1838.

  32. John Schneider, “Mob Violence and Public Order in the American City” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1971), quoted in Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 3, 7; Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: Selected Speeches, Messages, and Letters, ed. T. Harry Williams (New York: Rinehart, 1957), 7.

  33. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London, 1892; Reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005), 127–28.

  34. John Runcie, “‘Hunting the Nigs’ in Philadelphia: The Race Riot of August 1834,” Pennsylvania History Magazine 39, no. 2 (April 1972): 191–92.

  35. Eric Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City: A Visual Celebration of 400 Years of New York City’s History (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 65.

  36. Hone, Diary 1:30, November 27, 1830.

  37. James Fenimore Cooper, “From Notions of the Americans in New York,” in Empire City: New York Through the Centuries, ed. Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 142.

  38. Brown, Strains of Violence, 95.

  39. Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 12.

  40. Ibid., 14.

  41. Strong, Diary 1:177–78, April 12, 1842.

  42. Leonard Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 86–87, 90, 92.

  43. Quoted in Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 20.

  44. J. M. Matthews, Fifty Years in New York: A Semi-Centennial Discourse Preached in the South Dutch Church (New York: D. Fanshaw, 1858), 32.

  45. Hone, Diary 1:169–70, August 2, 1835.

  46. Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 81.

  47. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Journals (Garden City, NY: International Collectors Library, 1968), 634.

  48. Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, The Flash Press, 125.

  49. Sidney George Fisher, A Philadelphia Perspective: The Diary of Sidney George Fisher, Covering the Years 1834–1871, ed. Nicholas B. Wainwright (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1967), 169.

  50. Michael Gordon, The Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York City, 1870 and 1871 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 211.

  51. Strong, Diary 1:336, December 2, 1848; Hone, Diary 1:49–50, October 15 and 17, 1831.

  52. Niles’ Weekly Register, August 23, 1834; Hone, Diary 1:136–37.

  53. Richardson, Urban Police in the United States, 21–23.

  54. Hone, Diary 1:452, January 2, 1840.

  55. New York Herald, July 14, 1842.

  56. Cohen, Gilfoyle, and Horowitz, The Flash Press, 182.

  57. Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 106–9.

  58. Ibid.

  Chapter Two

    1. Oliver Carlson, The Man Who Made News: James Gordon Bennett (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942), 142.

    2. Hone, Diary 1:32, December 1, 1830; Mark Caldwell, New York Night: The Mystique and Its History (New York: Scribner, 2005), 104–5; O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, 58–59, 93.

    3. Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: Norton, 1992), 287.

    4. George Foster, New York in “Slices,” by an Experienced Carver (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1848), 37.

    5. New York Evangelist, D
ecember 8, 1832.

    6. David Montgomery, “The Working Classes of the Pre-Industrial City,” in Urban America in Historical Perspective, ed. Raymond K. Mohl and Neil Betten (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970), 110.

    7. Strong, Diary 1:15, April 12, 1836.

    8. Caldwell, New York Night, 110–11.

    9. New York Herald, April 11, 12, 1836; Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Knopf, 1998), 6–7, 20.