A City in Terror

by Rosalind Russell

  All able-bodied males from the age of sixteen, subject to certain property qualifications, were made liable to keep “watch and ward,” watching at night to prevent any danger of fire and to see that good order was maintained, and warding on the Lord’s Day. As the village grew to a town, the burden of staying up all night proved too onerous for the more well-to-do citizens, and a paid watch was substituted under the charge and command of a “sober, discreet, able-bodied householder,” whose badge of office was a “quarter pike with spire on the top therof.” Ordinary watchmen carried a “staff with a bill fastened theron.” By the end of the seventeenth century watchmen were being paid forty shillings a month and watching became a kind of public welfare. In 1733 Mathew Young was appointed watchman “that he and his children do not become a town charge.”

  In the winter the watchmen with their billhooks went on duty at nine in the evening, in summer at ten. They were instructed to walk their rounds “slowly and silently, and now and then stand and listen.” After midnight, however, they were “to cry the time of night and state of the weather, in a moderate tone—One o’clock, clear, and all’s well.”

  In 1703 a John Barnard built two watchhouses with sentry boxes for the town, one next to the Town House, the other near the powderhouse on the Common. A decade later the first watchhouse was moved to Queen Street by the school house with “a cage and whipping post to be added.” The watch was then increased by two men, and the number continued to grow with the town. By 1723 there were five divisions of the watch; Old North, New North, Dock Watch, Townhouse Watch, and South Watch, with four watchmen and a captain at each house. By 1748, able-bodied watchmen were being paid in inflated paper currency at the rate of seven pounds ten shillings a month, but fined a pound whenever caught “getting asleep” on duty, a perennial weakness. As a countermeasure to dormancy, watchmen were ordered to patrol by twos. Among their duties was that of arresting “all negroes found out after dark without a lantern.”

  In the turbid years before the Revolution, when the mob ruled the Boston streets, the watch kept itself discreetly apart. There is no record of any watchmen caught up in the annual Pope’s Day brawls, the sack of the house of the stamp distributor-designate Andrew Oliver, the gutting of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion, the Boston Tea Party, or the Boston Massacre. In 1765 Captain Seemes of the South Watch reported that “Negro Dick came to the watchhouse and reported rowdies under his window. Watchmen were sent, and met a gang of rowdies, one of which drew a sword. The watch cried murder and fled to the watchhouse, and the rowdies escaped.”

  Then and after the Revolution watchmen were not held in very high esteem. In August 1789 a group of citizens, angered by a succession of burglaries, complained that the watchmen “have been asleep since New Year’s. The Captains are generally men in their prime, aged from ninety to one hundred years, and the crew only average about fourscore, and so we have the advantage of their age and experience, at least the robbers do.” Whether the watch had anything to do with it or not, two men and a woman were hanged that October on Boston Common for highway robbery.

  The first mention of police as such occurred in 1785 when John Ballard, William Billings, Christopher Clarke, and a Mr. Webb were appointed inspectors of police. In 1796 the legislature passed a law recognizing the Boston Watch. To the city’s twenty-four constables fell the duty of supervising the “jaded stevedore, journeyman and mechanic” who made up the watch and whose own orders were “to walk their round once an hour, to prevent damage by fire and to preserve order … taking particular observation and inspection of all houses and families of evil fame.” The constables—coeval with local government—were the embodiment of authority, acting for the courts and sheriffs as arresting officers. By the early nineteenth century Boston had twenty-four of them. Besides their various legal and court fees they received an additional sixty cents for night watch duty. The watchmen received fifty cents. The five watchhouses were each manned by one constable and six watchmen. Watchmen, in addition to their billhooks, now wore badges of office and carried slatted wooden rattles that could be heard for a quarter of a mile. They continued on their rounds every other night at the same hours as in the previous century; nine o’clock in winter, ten o’clock in summer. Most of the watchmen had daylight jobs as well.

  By 1810 the town of Boston, with 33,234 inhabitants, was consolidated into three watch divisions staffed by a police inspector, two assistant police officers, seventeen constables, and thirty watchmen. Two years later a captain of the watch was appointed, and the pay of constables raised to seventy-five cents. Watchmen on duty were instructed “not to talk loud, or make any noise, nor suffer any one to enter a watchhouse without a certificate from a Selectman.” Besides the regular watch, a hundred special watchmen were now employed to patrol the town. Yet, in spite of badges and billhooks and rattles, all was not well with the watch, as many citizens were prone to observe. A committee of selectmen making a surprise night visit to the various watchhouses found too many watchmen doing duty inside, and at the South Watch “two constables asleep.” An inspector of police on his rounds found a constable asleep at the South Watch at one in the morning and at “one and one-half o’clock at Centre Watch found constable and doorman asleep, and a drunken man kicking at the door to get in.” A group of indignant citizens complained that the watchmen “care for nothing but their pay, and are sure to get that; give us a private watch.”

  In 1822, by an act of the legislature, the expanding town became the City of Boston, governed by a mayor, an executive board of seven aldermen, and a common council of forty-eight councilors, four from each of the twelve wards. Under the new government the watch still remained the old watch, and it was found necessary to post an order that all watchmen found asleep on duty would be discharged. As the self-contained town expanded into an amorphous city “dangerous riots, routs and tumultuous assemblies” made the lack of adequate protection all too apparent. The burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown in 1834 by a mob was followed a year later by the assault on the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Constables stood by helplessly as an inflamed crowd roped and dragged the editor of the Liberator through the streets. Even the mayor himself was roughly handled. In 1837 it took a cavalry regiment of militia—called out for the first time in its history—to restore order after volunteer firemen returning from an alarm had clashed with an Irish funeral procession on Broad Street. Finally in 1838 the exasperated legislature passed a law allowing the mayor and board of aldermen to appoint daytime police officers with all the powers of constables except that of executing a civil process. The Boston Police Department as such came into being on the twenty-first of May when the board organized a police force under the direction of the city marshal. Six officers were appointed. The new department had no connection with the watch.

  In 1846, under Mayor Josiah Quincy, Jr., the police department was reorganized under the flamboyant, tough-minded city marshal, Francis Tukey, a police official of the French school with “a thorough knowledge of the weaknesses of human nature.” There were now twenty-two day and eight night police officers. The day officers remained on duty from eight in the morning till nine in the evening, reporting to the marshal at eight and at two. They were paid $2.00 a day, whereas the night force, whose function was chiefly to keep an eye out for burglars, received only $1.25. Watchmen’s pay had risen by degrees from $.60 to $1.00. They continued on their independent and somnolent way, for it was noticed that after a round or two at the beginning of their watch they had a habit of wrapping themselves in their long coats and sleeping in the watch boxes until relieved. In 1848 Marshal Tukey issued a general order to cite all persons smoking in the street. As a demonstration that no one, not even the marshal, was above the law, Tukey himself was fined for fast driving.

  The watch and the police continued side by side. Gradually the balance swung in favor of the police. By midcentury, with Boston’s population at one hundred forty thousand, Mayor John Presc
ott Bigelow could announce that “there are 50 Police Officers, 225 Watchmen, the beat of each man averaging over a mile. The expenses of Police and Watch, $113,000 per year.” Police officers had their appointment renewed each year.

  Eighteen fifty-one was the year of the Great Descent, when police and watch combined to raid the disorderly houses of Ann Street. Some 165 persons “of all ages, sexes, nations and colors” were taken into custody for “piping, fiddling, dancing, drinking and all their attendant vices,” receiving three to six months in various reformatories. The aftermath of the Great Descent proved unfortunate, for with the breaking up of Ann Street its inhabitants scattered all over the city to form new and expanding centers of criminal activity. Marshal Tukey’s reformist zeal had more success in forcing theaters to abolish their “third row,” a section traditionally set apart for the special accommodation of prostitutes. In 1852 the marshal found his office abolished and himself appointed chief of police, a position he held only briefly, for the newly elected mayor, Benjamin Seaver, discharged Tukey and all the night force as well as most of the day force and replaced them with those politically more amenable. At about the time of Mayor Seaver’s purge, a harbor police detachment of a captain and ten men was formed. For some years police officers had been identified by leather hat bands bearing a number and the lettering POLICE in silver. Now a six-pointed oblong brass star, worn on the left lapel, was substituted for the leather band. About as large as one’s hand, the badge was much ridiculed as looking more like a sculpin’s head.

  In 1853 the legislature authorized the city council to combine the watch and the police, and on May 26, 1854, the 229-year-old Boston Watch and Police ceased to exist and the Boston Police Department came into being. The new department, with headquarters at City Hall, had a chief, two deputies, a superintendent of hacks, a superintendent of teams, and five detectives. Eight police stations divided up the whole territory of the city, each with a captain, two lieutenants, and anywhere from nineteen to forty-four patrolmen. A station had three divisions or shifts, one for day and two for night duty. Day patrolmen went on their beats at 8:00 a.m. and remained out until 6:00 p.m., when, after being relieved by the night division, they reported back to the station house. Often they found themselves detailed for special duty at places of amusement, for which they received extra pay. The first night division was on duty from 6:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m., the second until relieved by the day patrolmen. Every other night the divisions alternated. Each night man had to do day house duty once every six days. Captains now received three dollars a day, patrolmen two dollars. But although the pay was the same, the night division remained essentially the old watch, and day duty was much more sought after. Police officers, night or day, were now required to devote their full time to their work and to have no other employment.

  The basic structure of the Boston Police Department was now fixed. As the city grew, the police force expanded. Each year brought innovations to the department: a sailboat for the harbor police, telegraph lines linking the stations, a photographer for the rogues’ gallery. New duties fell to the police as well. Each station provided nightly “lodgings” to homeless strangers. In 1854 the city was stricken with cholera so severely that one person in twenty died. When the epidemic was at its height, it fell to the Boston police to do what all others refused: to remove bodies from tenements and “smoke” the rooms, to bring those who were stricken in the street to the station houses, and to care for the sick and the dying.

  In 1858, under Mayor Frederick W. Lincoln, the police were at last given uniforms—a blue frock coat with brass police buttons, blue trousers, and black vests; a dress coat for the chief and his captains. The ridiculed sculpin badge was at last replaced by a smaller silver one, and the old billhook after 154 years gave way to a fourteen-inch club, carried in a leather waist-belt. The night men still retained their wooden rattles. Some ardent democrats and libertarians objected to a uniformed police force and accused the mayor of copying the “liveried servants” of the Old World. The new uniforms coincided with the first open scandal in Boston police history when in 1860 six night patrolmen were found guilty of stealing cigars and similar items from shops along their beats.

  During the first year of the Civil War, 136 police details were required for the various military processions, parades, receptions, and reviews. Police were kept equally busy keeping an eye out for deserters. A military man, Colonel John Kurtz, having been appointed chief of police, ordered his men to assemble at Faneuil Hall for drill under his command. Such drill was afterward continued at each station house. The annual renewal of appointments to the force was now abolished, police being kept on during good behavior and usefulness, subject to removal only by the mayor.

  When in June 1863 President Lincoln issued his draft call for three hundred thousand men, Boston’s quota was set at thirty-three hundred. But in July, as the provost marshals began distributing their call-up notices, a riot broke out near the gas works close to Prince Street after a woman screamed that the soldiers were coming to take away her husband. At once the streets and alleys filled with infuriated men and women. When a detachment of police arrived, the officers were overpowered and two almost lynched. Others were knocked to the ground, beaten and trampled. A threatening crowd of some two thousand then gathered in front of the Hanover Street station as alarm bells sounded throughout the city—eleven strokes, three times repeated—calling out the whole police force. The riot proved too much for the police, and not until troops arrived from Fort Warren in the harbor was it finally put down. Pillaging was general. No policemen were killed, but seven were badly injured. Boston would not see such turbulence and disorder again for fifty-six years, not until the Boston Police Strike of 1919. One effect of the riot was to arm the police for the first time. From then on patrolmen took to carrying revolvers.

  By 1869 traffic had so increased in the central city that police had to be stationed on the chief street crossings. Three hundred police were called out on special duty that year for the National Peace Jubilee, a stupendous occasion climaxed by a rendering of the “Anvil Chorus” from Il Trovatore by 10,000 choral singers, an orchestra of 84 trombones, 83 tubas, 83 cornets, 75 drums, 330 strings, and 119 woodwinds, while members of the Boston Fire Department in red shirts, blue trousers, and white hats pounded a hundred anvils. The next year the police department’s first grand ball was held at Faneuil Hall, with police and public dancing together under a great banner reading: CHARITY—BOSTON POLICE—FRATERNITY. By this time the force numbered five hundred, and with a new sense of cohesiveness the men formed a Police Relief Association.

  In the years following the Civil War, Boston’s Fourth of July celebrations had grown into a carnival of misrule that took fifty-five separate police details and 275 special police appointed for the day to control. By 1873 the Fourth had become so riotous that Mayor Henry L. Pierce abolished the usual fireworks, the annual balloon ascension, and other festivities on the Common. In the more “quite and rational” Fourth that followed, he was able to dispense with the special policemen. On November 9 and 10 of that same year, Boston was devastated by the Great Fire that in two windy days destroyed most of the commercial and mercantile sections of the city. All 524 police remained on constant duty. As the fire swept toward the stores near and on Sumner Street, merchants, seeing that their stocks were doomed, invited all present to help themselves to anything they could carry away. Many of the poor used the occasion to obtain a free pair of boots, a shawl, a hat, garments, and bolts of cloth. A number of thrifty-minded citizens of the better class also accepted the invitation, retreating from the oncoming blaze with their arms full of merchandise. The police, however, insisted on regarding them as thieves, and the lockups and jails were soon full not only of city rabble but of solid citizens, including several aldermen, councilors, and at least one clergyman. Finally the police gave up arresting anyone, merely confiscating the goods while letting the takers go. In the end the police department collected four hundred tho
usand dollars’ worth of assorted merchandise, though no one could determine afterward to whom it belonged.

  After the independent towns of Roxbury and Dorchester voted to annex themselves to Boston, new police stations were set up in these semi-suburbs. The growth of the police department continued to parallel that of the city. Departmental changes were minor, confined to periodic reorganizations and amendments to the rules and regulations, and occasional alterations in buttons and badges. Since the powers of the mayor, the aldermen, and the chief of police over the department were not clearly defined, the result, Mayor Pierce complained, was lax discipline. In 1878 he was authorized by the legislature to appoint three commissioners to supervise and direct the police department. Each was to serve for three years.

  Meanwhile in 1885, with the cooperation of dissident Yankee Democrats, Boston elected its first non-Yankee mayor, Alderman Hugh O’Brien, a man of great dignity and integrity but nevertheless foreign-born. A generation after the beaten survivors of the famine years had overrun the brick complacency of Boston, the Irish were emerging to political power. To the more astute Republicans who controlled the State House on Beacon Hill, it was clear that the days of the Boston Yankee mayors with their English-derived, New England-acclimated names were numbered. Phillips, Quincy, Otis, Eliot, Chapman, Brimmer, Bigelow, Seaver, Lincoln, Wightman, and Pierce would in a decade or so give way to Fitzgerald and Curley. The newcomers were already waiting in the wings. To put at least the strategic police department beyond the reach of the Celtic intruders, the Massachusetts legislature in 1885 passed an act creating a State Board of Police. This board consisted of three citizens of Boston appointed by the governor and the governor’s council to administer the Boston Police Department. Boston was required to supply the funds to run the department, but the only powers retained by the city were the right of the mayor to increase the size and the pay of the force and to assume control in case of emergency. The reason given for the Commonwealth’s takeover was that the police department had been too lax in enforcing regulations governing liquor licenses. But the real reason, as every politician knew, was the election of Hugh O’Brien.