Because of Johnny’s success, his father stopped feeding him breakfast and lunch, insisting that he beg for meals from charitable customers. Soon his older brothers James and Robert, aged seventeen and fifteen, arrived from Dublin. They tried to make it on their own, but shortly moved into the one-room apartment with the rest of the family. Eventually they fought with their father over his drinking, moved out, and were never heard from again. Johnny continued to peddle matches, though he branched out into children’s “picture-books” as well. Willie and Jane entered the profession too. Johnny would work one side of the street, Willie and Jane the other. But their father and mother continued to beat them if they did not come home with enough money to satisfy their addiction.
“My own position was now fast becoming unendurable,” Johnny wrote. “I was liable at any time to be knocked about the room and beaten by my parents, and we children had to work very hard to earn money while they stayed in idleness at home, and drank away a large portion of our earnings.” Johnny and Willie ran away, but three days later, their father found them and beat them “with a piece of clothes-line till the blood came trickling down.” They ran away a second time a few weeks later, but a neighbor told their father where they were and he again dragged them home. When a kind man gave Johnny a $2.50 gold piece, he gave it to his father, hoping their sudden windfall would win his approval. The next morning, his father used it to buy a gallon of brandy. His father and stepmother spent the entire day in bed drunk.6
Johnny and Willie ran away once more, this time for good. To ensure that they would not be caught, they headed downtown to the Sixth Ward and its Newsboys’ Lodging House. The lodging house had been set up in the early 1850s by Charles Loring Brace’s Children’s Aid Society as a refuge for the hundreds of homeless newsboys, bootblacks, and child peddlers who lived on New York’s streets. Before the house opened, these children generally slept in doorways and coal bins; now they could find shelter in a warm, spacious dormitory for just six cents a night.
When Willie and Johnny checked in, they told the superintendent that they were orphans. Johnny felt guilty, though, and the next day told their true story. He was shocked that the society did not inform his parents or try to convince them to return home. But there were dozens of boys in the lodging house who could have told virtually identical stories. The superintendent did mention Johnny’s tale to a reporter, who published it in a religious newspaper, the Independent, under the title “The Boy Who Confessed His Sin.” When Johnny’s Sunday school teacher read the article and recognized his pupil, he insisted that Johnny come live with him in his rooms at the Union Theological Seminary on University Place. Johnny went back to school and supported himself by peddling to the seminarians and on the streets after class. Willie remained at the lodging house.
Remained there, that is, until about a month later when the police picked him up on the street late one night and took him to the House of Refuge, the city’s orphan asylum on Randall’s Island. Johnny begged the authorities to release Willie, but was told that he would stay until someone found him a proper home. Johnny’s Sunday school teacher suggested that they find him one out west through the adoption program run jointly by the Children’s Aid Society and the Five Points House of Industry. About three weeks later, in 1856, Willie boarded a train for Iowa.7
While Willie was at the House of Refuge, their father died and was buried in an unmarked grave in the city’s Potter’s Field. Not long afterward, after Willie had left for Iowa, Johnny’s sister Annie came to the seminary, complaining that her stepmother was mistreating her. Johnny brought her to Rev. W. C. Van Meter, who managed the adoption program run by the Five Points Mission. He sent her to an adoptive family in Iowa City. Johnny tried to help his half sister Jane by setting her up once again as a peddler, but when he saw his stepmother beat her one day because she could not account for all of her merchandise, he decided to have her adopted as well. On the pretense of taking her to get new shoes, he brought her to the Five Points Mission to meet Reverend Van Meter. She told him she would like a new home, and a few weeks later she was adopted by a family in Canton, Illinois. Her mother went to court to try to regain custody of the child, but was rebuffed.
Having lived at the seminary for some time, Johnny developed an ambition to go to college, Yale in particular. He moved to New Haven, where he lived at the Divinity School while supporting himself peddling to the students. In the summer of 1858, after about a year in New Haven, Johnny decided to go out west and find Willie, whom he had not heard from in almost a year. He traveled with Van Meter as far as Chicago, and then continued to Iowa City, where he found Annie living in a comfortable home. On a farm near “Fort Desmoines” he found Willie, who had been passed around to many families in the two years since he left New York. Johnny decided to bring him back to New Haven. On their way back they stopped in Illinois to visit Jane, who, like Annie, had found a good home.8
Willie eventually went back to the West with Van Meter, “to try his fortune again in some kind of family.” The last he and Johnny saw of their stepmother, she was asleep on the bare floor of her apartment on West 17th Street with five-year-old Jonathan. Her only furniture was a pair of chairs. They took the little boy to New Haven, where they eventually put him up for adoption at the New Haven Orphan Asylum. Johnny remained in New Haven, still aspiring one day to study at Yale. With the help of some friends there, while only sixteen, he published his memoir in the hope that the proceeds might someday fund his college education.9
Johnny Morrow’s story may seem extraordinary. Yet at any one time in Five Points there were dozens of boys who could tell similar tales. Over the course of the nineteenth century, thousands of neighborhood children went hungry, were abused by alcoholic parents, and were forced to work on the streets to support themselves or their families. Johnny Morrow’s first sixteen years had been especially harrowing. But in the context of Five Points, what was unusual about his childhood was not his life on the streets but simply that he was given the opportunity to record it for posterity.
Johnny never did enroll at Yale. Just a year after he published A Voice from the Newsboys, he was dead. The cause was “[em]pyema,” an accumulation of pus in the lungs probably associated with a bronchial infection. He was buried on May 26, 1861, in Evergreen Cemetery, Brooklyn.10
CHAPTER FOUR
How They Worked
PEDDLER. RAGPICKER. Junk dealer. Seamstress. Teamster. The New World offered a much wider array of jobs than had the Old. Yet most immigrants heading for Five Points would have disembarked from the emigrant vessel with little savings. They needed work desperately and could not be choosy. Some newcomers simply continued with the same vocation they had followed in Europe.11 Others arrived in North America brimming with ambition and a determination to improve their occupational status. Owen Healy was one of the first starving tenants sent by Lord Palmerston to America in 1847. Upon his arrival in New York, the twenty-eight-year-old worked as a laborer, but was soon selling fruit. In 1853, when Healy opened an account at the Emigrant Savings Bank, he described himself as a “dealer in bottles.” By 1855, the Five Pointer had reached what many Irish immigrants considered the pinnacle of success—the opening of his very own saloon. Healy must have possessed some business acumen, for in a few years he amassed in his bank account more than $700 (equivalent to about $11,000 today),12 a princely sum to one who had been on the verge of starvation just eight years earlier. Few Five Pointers soared to financial success this quickly. Many found themselves locked in the lowest-paying occupations, such as laborer, tailor, shoemaker, or seamstress. But despite the hardships of such work and frequent unemployment, most Five Pointers found better work, higher pay, and more consistent employment than they had had before they came to America.13
“IN SUMMER THE MEN HAVE MOST WORK”
Five Pointers worked at an extraordinary variety of jobs, from actor to xylographic printer. There were few New York occupations that were not followed by at least one or two of
the neighborhood’s inhabitants. An analysis of their occupations in 1855, however, reveals certain distinct patterns:
Employment by Occupational Category, 185514
A Five Pointer was much less likely than the average New Yorker to work in a profession or own a business and far more likely to toil as an unskilled worker. There was an underrepresentation of Five Points men in lower-status white-collar work (mostly clerks), which is understandable, given that many immigrants lacked the reading, writing, and math skills necessary for such employment. Among women, there were fewer servants (who generally lived where they worked) because few Five Points families could afford live-in help. Instead, Five Points women concentrated in the needle trades (the lowest-paying work for women), primarily as seamstresses sewing shirts, but also as dress, cap, and vest makers as well.
Perhaps the most surprising of the employment figures is that for skilled male workers. The stereotypical image of the Five Points immigrant is of a menial laborer digging ditches with his pickax. Yet in Irish-dominated Five Points, a majority of men worked in higher-status occupations, albeit the lowest-paying ones. Five Points’ skilled workers were disproportionately represented in such low-paying crafts as tailoring, shoemaking, and glass repair, and significantly underrepresented in the highest-paying ones, such as shipbuilding, woodworking, food preparation, and the construction trades. The same pattern is evident in the unskilled labor category. Eighty percent of Five Points’ unskilled workers were menial manual laborers, compared with only 59 percent in the entire city. The remainder of the city’s unskilled workers held jobs as carters, drivers, hostlers, sailors, waiters, and watchmen, occupations with better working conditions, superior pay, and less seasonal unemployment.15
There were ethnic differences among Five Points workers as well. More than half the Irish were unskilled workers, compared to only one in twenty-five Germans. Most of the unskilled workers among the American-born population were African Americans or the children of Irish immigrants. Many of the skilled workers among the American-born, however, held relatively prestigious and high-paying jobs. Five Points butchers tended to be American natives. A disproportionate number of the printers and building tradesmen were also native-born. In contrast, skilled Jews toiled overwhelmingly as tailors and glaziers, the latter mostly wandering repairmen rather than highly paid construction workers.16
It is hardly surprising that Irish immigrants held lower-paying, lower-status jobs than their native- or German-born counterparts. Yet the Five Points Irish were even more likely to work as menial day laborers than other Irish New Yorkers. Five Points Irish male workers were almost twice as likely to toil as laborers, but only half as likely to hold positions in the high-paying construction and food-service trades. Similarly, Five Points Irishwomen were three times more likely to work as miserably paid seamstresses than Irishwomen throughout the city. The same pattern held for other ethnic groups. Five Points German men were twice as likely to be tailors as Germans citywide, and significantly less likely to work in the lucrative building and food-service industries.
So many clothing workers lived in Five Points because the cheap retail clothing business centered upon Baxter and Chatham Streets. Five Points was also the home of a large proportion of the city’s Jews, particularly Polish Jews, who were especially likely to work in the garment trade. The German and Polish Jewish immigrants who settled in New York tended to come from cities or towns where they had plied urban trades and saved significant sums of money before leaving for America. Most of the Irish, in contrast, had toiled as rural agricultural workers and thus brought no job skills with them to the United States.
The need for expensive tools also contributed to Five Pointers’ inability to work in better-paying trades. Tailoring, in contrast, required very little equipment before the widespread use of the sewing machine, and may have therefore attracted many Five Pointers. Immigrants also had trouble breaking into some trades because native-born workers conspired to keep foreigners out. Butchering and shipbuilding, for example, were generally closed to the Irish. Such discrimination cost the Irish dearly, for a day laborer generally earned about a dollar a day in the 1850s, and Five Points’ tailors and shoemakers made little more. In comparison, a carpenter could command eight to nine dollars a week, a baker nine to ten dollars, a cabinetmaker as much as ten dollars, and a ship’s carpenter twelve to fifteen dollars per week.17
Five Pointers must have found this pay disparity especially galling because many higher-paying industries were located right in their neighborhood. Manufacturing of almost every variety flourished in the Sixth Ward, especially on Chatham Square and Chatham Street. Many small-scale manufacturers were also located on Doyer, Bayard, and Elizabeth Streets in the 1850s. Small factories produced silverware, jewelry, billiard tables, umbrellas, lightning rods, false teeth, patent medicines, and firearms. There were even four piano factories. Carriage and inexpensive furniture manufactories abounded as well on Chatham Square. Yet relatively few Five Pointers worked for these businesses.18
Five Pointers’ jobs were especially prone to seasonal layoffs. A day laborer could expect to work no more than four days in a typical six-day workweek. Employment was usually scarce in the winter and especially brisk in the spring and summer, but a spell of cold or rain could bring unemployment at any moment. Employment in the garment trade also varied seasonally. In the dressmaking business, for example, jobs for women fell 75 percent after the autumn rush each year. This was probably an extreme case, but observers agreed that needleworkers suffered significant under- or unemployment in the slack winter months.19
The bank accounts of Five Pointers clearly reflect these seasonal highs and lows. Aside from a spike in January (the result perhaps of New Year’s savings resolutions or the bank’s dividend payment schedule), deposits during the summer and early fall ran far ahead of those in the rest of the year. Five Pointers made almost three times as many deposits per month in July and August as they did in February, March, and April. Although the “transportation revolution” of the 1830s and 1840s ended New York’s reliance on potentially frozen waterways for the importation of raw materials and the distribution of finished products, seasonal employment swings continued to define the economic lives of Five Pointers throughout the nineteenth century.20
These seasonal fluctuations rippled throughout the economy. A survey of the “china business” (the selling of earthenware cups and plates) found that citywide, trade was most brisk in the spring “when people go to housekeeping” and at Christmas when they bought presents. But a Five Points china dealer sold the most in the summer, said the report, “because her patrons are poor people, and in summer the men have most work, and their expenses are lighter—consequently the women have more money.” Merchants usually had savings to fall back on when business dried up, but the most poorly paid manual workers often had none. “Mechanics and laborers lived awhile on scanty savings of the preceding Summer and Autumn,” recalled New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley in his memoirs, “then on such credit as they could wring from grocers and landlords, till milder weather brought them work.” The unemployed might look for work at the “Labor Exchange” run by the New York Commissioners of Emigration, located first at the northern edge of Five Points on Canal Street and later at its western fringe on Worth Street, but few workers other than domestic servants found employment there. There were also commercial employment agencies, but immigrants balked at paying their fees. Consequently, despite improvements in the nation’s transportation network that helped mitigate some of the ups and downs of the seasonal economy, Five Points’ charitable workers reported well into the 1850s that chronic unemployment made winter the “annual season of sorrow and dread.”21
During the lean winter months, the entire family often pitched in to help make ends meet. “If [the husband is] discharged from labor, and in actual want,” reported the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, “the wife can wash and scrub, [while] the children pick up
fuel, and beg cast-off clothing and broken victuals.” Struggling Five Points families could also secure loans from pawnshops. There were no more pawnshops in Five Points than in other portions of the city, perhaps due to the strict and expensive licensing involved. Yet the neighborhood’s dozens of “second-hand” and junk shops located on Baxter Street served as informal pawnshops, buying whatever objects of value (such as empty bottles or scrap metal) area residents might find or steal. With the whole family helping out, most Five Pointers managed to scrape by each winter, though many suffered terribly until employment picked up in the spring.22
When they could find work, Five Pointers generally labored for ten hours each day, six days per week. The antebellum workday typically began at 7:00 a.m., was suspended for a one-hour “dinner” break at noon, and then continued until 6:00 p.m. Because seasonal unemployment was so common, scheduled days off were rare. Other than Sundays, work ceased only on New Year’s Day, the Fourth of July, and Christmas (and for only some, Thanksgiving as well).
Long work days were nothing new to European immigrants, but they were startled by the productivity Americans expected. A British mechanic exaggerated only slightly when he commented that “there is no allowable cessation from labour during any part of this time—no lunching or watering time, or interval of any description; nothing but one round of work without the slightest intermission.” Another English immigrant agreed that “‘hurry up’ is a phrase in the mouth of every person in the United States.” German bricklayers found that while laying 1,000 to 1,200 bricks was an acceptable day’s work in their native land, contractors expected 1,500 bricks per day in New York. When an English visitor, John White, told a New York Irish American that he should be happy earning “three times the Irish wages,” the laborer complained that “he did six times the Irish work.”23
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