10. Carlson, The Man Who Made News, 151.
11. New York Herald, April 13, 1836.
12. Carlson, The Man Who Made News, 157.
13. New York Sun, April 13, 1836.
14. Boston Post, April 16, 1836; Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, 32–33.
15. New York Herald, April 17, 1836; Strong, Diary 1:15, April 12, 1836.
16. Hone, Diary 1:210–11, June 4, 1836.
17. Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, 302–5.
18. Ibid., 211.
19. New York Herald, June 9, 1836.
20. Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, 322–23.
21. Hone, Diary 1:372, December 9, 1838.
22. Strong, Diary 1:23, June 8, 1836.
Chapter Three
1. American Annual Cyclopedia for 1861 (New York: D. Appleton, 1862), 525.
2. Foster, New York in “Slices,” 104–5.
3. James D. McCabe Jr., Lights and Shadows of New York Life; or, The Sights and Sensations of the Great City (1872; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 738, 73.
4. Thomas Floyd-Jones, Backward Glances: Reminiscences of an Old New-Yorker (Somerville, NJ: Unionist Gazette Association, 1914), 2–5.
5. New York Sun, November 9, 1833, June 28, 1838.
6. New York Aurora, March 26, 1842; David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995), 98.
7. Catherine McNeur, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 129; Daniel Ray Papke, Framing the Criminal: Crime, Cultural Work and the Loss of Critical Perspective, 1830–1900 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1987), 37; O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, 2, 8.
8. John Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 26; New York Sun, July 21, 1834.
9. O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, 11, 86.
10. Horace Greeley Papers, New York Public Library.
11. New York Herald, May 6, 1835.
12. Douglas Fermer, James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald: A Study of Editorial Opinion in the Civil War Era, 1854–1867 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 44.
13. Ibid., 72.
14. New York Herald, March 26, 1842; New York Aurora, March 26, 1842.
15. Carlson, The Man Who Made News, 125.
16. New York Herald, July 28, 1841.
17. Ibid., January 13, 1840.
18. Carlson, The Man Who Made News, 65–67; Frederic Hudson, The History of Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872 (New York: Harper Brothers, 1873), 429.
19. Lambert Wilmer, Our Press Gang; or, A Complete Exposition of the Corruption and Crimes of the American Newspapers (Philadelphia: J. T. Lloyd, 1859), 79.
20. Papke, Framing the Criminal, 38; George Payne, History of Journalism in the United States (1920; Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), 258–59.
21. New York Aurora, April 18, 1842; Daniel Stashower, The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), 94.
22. Catherine Mitchell, Margaret Fuller’s New York Journalism: A Biographical Essay and Key Writings (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 9.
23. Hone, Diary 1:195, January 20, 1836.
24. P. T. Barnum, The Struggles and Triumphs of P.T. Barnum, by Himself, ed. John G. O’Leary (1882; London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967), 668; Fermer, James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald, 22–23.
25. Fermer, James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald, 83; James Buchanan to James Henry, May 17, 1861, in ibid., 104; Frederick Moore Binder, James Buchanan and the American Empire (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1994), 216, 219; Elbert Smith, The Presidency of James Buchanan (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1975), 120, 146.
26. George Wilkes, Mysteries of the Tombs: A Journal of Thirty Days Imprisonment in the New York City Prison for Libel (New York, George Wilkes, 1844), 55; Natchez Trader, July 3, 1841.
27. William H. Seward, The Works of William H. Seward, ed. George Baker, vol. 2 (New York: Redfield Press, 1853), 38–39.
28. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 215; New York Herald, October 31, 1835.
29. Ibid., August 2, 1841.
30. Caldwell, New York Night, 90; Foster, New York in “Slices,” 68–69.
31. Papke, Framing the Criminal, 48–49.
32. Brooklyn Daily Times, December 2, 1858.
33. Walt Whitman, “Advice to Strangers,” Life Illustrated, August 23, 1856, available online at the Walt Whitman Archive, http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/periodical/journalism/tei/per.00274.html.
Chapter Four
1. Augustin Costello, Our Police Protectors: A History of the New York Police (1885; Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972), vii.
2. George William Curtis, “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1862, 409.
3. Ramon de la Sagra, “From Five Months in the United States of North America,” in Empire City: New York Through the Centuries, ed. Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 172.
4. Archibald Prentice, A Tour in the United States (London, 1848), 10.
5. Carolyn Karcher, Lydia Maria Child Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 312.
6. Walt Whitman, Prose Works: 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall, 2 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1963–64), 1:16.
7. Ibid., 172.
8. New York Aurora, March 8, 1842.
9. George Foster, New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches, ed. Stuart Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 8–9; Alan Pred, Urban Growth and City-Systems in the United States, 1840–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), A43, A45, A50.
10. Isabella Bird Bishop, “New York Panorama: 1854,” in Bayrd Still, Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from the Dutch Days to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 155.
11. J. North Conway, The Big Policeman: The Rise and Fall of America’s First, Most Ruthless, and Greatest Detective (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2010), 164–81.
12. Brooklyn Eagle, September 30, 1846.
13. The Stranger’s Hand Book for the City of New York; or, What to See and How to See It (New York: C. S. Francis & Co., 1853).
14. Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New-York: Lydia Maria Child, ed. Bruce Mills (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 55.
15. Foster, New York by Gas-Light, 132–33.
16. Susan Elizabeth Lyman, The Story of New York: An Informal History of the City from the First Settlement to the Present Day (New York: Crown Publishers, 1975), 119, 122.
17. Hone, Diary 1:11–12, March 25, 1829.
18. Bishop, “New York Panorama: 1854,” 158.
19. New York Herald, January 2, 1842.
20. Basil Hall, “From Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828,” in Empire City: New York Through the Centuries, ed. Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 154.
21. Whitman, Prose Works, 1892 1:17.
22. New York Aurora, March 14, 1842.
23. Whitman, Prose Works, 1892 1:166–67.
24. Child, Letters, 9.
25. Robert Ernst, “Immigrants and Tenements in New York City, 1825–1863,” in Urban America in Historical Perspective, ed. Raymond A. Mohl and Neil Betten (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970), 114–16.
26. “Selected Writings of African-Americans in Brooklyn (1849 to 1928),” in Empire City: New York Through the Centuries, ed. Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 262–63.
27. Oscar Handlin, The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans i
n a Changing Metropolis, New York Metropolitan Region Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 12–16; McNeur, Taming Manhattan, 98–99; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 476, 378; Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation and Urban Order (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), 761.
28. Ernst, “Immigrants and Tenements in New York City, 1825–1863,” 117.
29. Rayond A. Mohl and Neil Betten, eds., Introduction, Pre-Industrial City, Urban America in Historical Perspective (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970), 94.
30. New York Times, May 16, 1856; McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life, 63; Foster, New York in “Slices,” 86.
31. Thomas Jefferson to anonymous [William Short], The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 15 (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907), 469.
32. William Bell, The Diary of William Bell, Policeman, New York City, 1850–51, microfilm, New-York Historical Society.
33. Charles Dickens, “American Notes for General Circulation,” in Jackson and Dunbar, 193.
34. McNeur, Taming of Manhattan, 190; Bell, Diary, October 7, 11, 1850.
35. New York Daily Times, January 12, 1853.
36. New York Times, July 15, 1867; Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 109.
37. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 108; New York Sun, December 1, 1842.
38. Richardson, Urban Police in the United States, 21.
39. New York Tribune, December 21, 1842.
40. Costello, Our Police Protectors, vii; Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 297–98.
Chapter Five
1. Wilbur Miller, ed., The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2012), 17.
2. New York Times, January 9, 1862, February 15, 1855; Gerald Astor, The New York Cops (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), 7; Costello, Our Police Protectors, 131; McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life, 178. An article about the annual New York prison numbers in the year 1855 (published in The New York Times on February 21, 1856) showed that the crime totals had climbed to nearly thirty-seven thousand a year already.
3. New York Secretary of State study of murders over twenty years, submitted by the Board of Aldermen of New York City, 1905. The Board of Alderman Documents (these are reports put together by the New York City Board of Aldermen, usually papers with statistics, and then submitted to the state as part of the annual record of New York City governmental and law enforcement activity), 22 (1855), 6–8, shows 86 murders in 1854, National Science Foundation report, February 26, 2015. Statistics were not kept very well in the mid-nineteenth century, and that is why the number of murders, and crimes, varies. In his book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 17), William Stuntz puts the 1840s murder rate at 4.4 per 100,000 residents and states that it more than doubled, to 10.2, by 1859. Eric Monkkonen, in his book Crime, Justice, History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002, 64–66), states that the rate was about 5.0 per 100,000 in the 1840s, 7.5 in the 1850s, and just over 10.0 in 1859, or twice the 1840s rate. In another of Monkkonen’s books, Murder in New York City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001, 16), he puts the 1859 and 1860 numbers higher, close to 110 per year. A study of murders in 1843 written about in the Herald, which probably did not record all of them, showed 43 slayings, or a rate of 10.0 per year. A study Randolph Roth did in his American Homicide showed the murder rate between 1840 and 1860 steady at that the murder rate tripled to about 13.0 by 1860, or Monkkonen’s numbers were from an investigation of over 1,700 cases documented by the New York City Coroner’s Office as well as newspapers. The Board of Aldermen numbers, reported by that same Coroner’s Office to the city, were the most official available at that time. So, in general, the murder rate of somewhere from 86 to 110 a year in the late 1850s is the most accurate one can put together. It stayed high through the Civil War. In 1864, there were 80 murders in the city, according to a city report to the state legislature written about in The New York Times on January 5, 1865; Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld, 127.
4. John C. Van Dyke, The New New York: A Commentary on the Place and the People (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 175–76.
5. New York Sun, October 16, 1841.
6. James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto, NYPD: A City and Its Police (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 7.
7. New York Herald, April 20, 1841.
8. Ibid., various issues, January 1842.
9. Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld, 58; New York Herald, January 5, 1842.
10. McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life, 354.
11. Edward Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 251.
12. Roth, American Homicide, 302; McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life, 818, 839–42; Robert Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 123–33, 291–93.
13. McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life, 56.
14. New York American, May 4, 1841.
15. Brooklyn Daily Times, December 2, 1858.
16. Ibid., July 21, 1857.
17. Roger Lane, Murder in America: A History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), 114–15, 117; New York Herald, March 13, 1841.
18. Walling, Recollections of a New York City Chief of Police, 432.
19. Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld, 53–54; New York Herald, January 3, 1842.
20. Walling, Recollections of a New York City Chief of Police, 461.
21. Ernst, “Immigrants and Tenements in New York City, 1825–1863,” 124.
22. Lane, Murder in America, 129–30; Stuntz, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, 30.
23. New York Tribune, April 10, 1857; Lawrence Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 150: Brooklyn Evening Star, January 12, 1846.
24. Spann, The New Metropolis, 249–50.
25. McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life, 525–26.
26. New York Aurora, July 20, 1857.
27. Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, 22–23.
28. Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld, 4–6; Philadelphia mayor Matthew Clarkson, “An Address to the Citizens of Philadelphia Concerning the Better Government of Youth,” Philadelphia Gazette, June 6, 1795.
29. J. C. Myers, Sketches on a Tour Through the Northern and Eastern States, the Canadas and Nova Scotia (Harrisburg, VA: J. H. Wartmann and Brothers, 1849), 50–51.
30. New York Spectator, April 30, 1835.
31. Conway, The Big Policeman, 40; Astor, The New York Cops, 18; Child, Letters, 44.
32. McNeur, Taming Manhattan, 231.
33. Strong, Diary 2:149, January 14, 1854.
34. Foster, New York in “Slices,” 20.
35. Dickens, American Notes, 125.
36. Seward, Works 2:301.
37. New York Tribune, April 11, January 8, 1857.
38. Child, Letters, 18.
39. New York Herald, April 20, 1841.
40. Foster, New York in “Slices,” 22.
41. Proceedings, Board of Aldermen, Minutes, 1789–1859, June 28, 1841, 21:114.
42. McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life, 242–43.
43. O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, 29.
44. Lane, Murder in America, 102.
45. Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat, September 2, 1846; New York Sun, March 27, 1843.
46. New York Tribune, March 1846.
47. Richardson, The New York Police, 76; New York Herald, January 12, 1842, February 4, 1852.
48. New York Herald, January 8, 12, 1842.
49. Ibid., January 12, 1842.
50. Ibid., April 25, March 13, May 17, 1841, January 8, 1842; David Rothman, “Perfecting the Prison: United States, 1789–1865,” in The Oxford History of t
he Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, ed. Norval Morris and David Rothman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 113.
51. New York Herald, March 25, 1841.
52. Ibid., January 3, 1842.
53. David Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 151.
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