The Gangs of New York

by Herbert Asbury

  This time Morrissey accepted the challenge, against the advice of his friends, who warned him that he was venturing into dangerous territory. Accompanied by a dozen men, Morrissey drove to the dock in a carriage, and was promptly attacked by a mob of some two hundred of Poole’s thugs. He fought vigorously, but they dragged him about the pier and gave him a sound beating before he was rescued by a crowd of Tammany gangsters who had been informed of the sorry plight of their hero. Poole did not appear on the scene at all, but a few days later, on the night of February 24,1855, he and Morrissey met in Stanwix Hall, a newly opened bar-room in Broadway near Prince street across from the old Metropolitan Hotel, then a center of the city’s night life. Morrissey and Mark Maguire, King of the Newsboys, were playing cards in a back room when Poole came in, but Morrissey walked into the bar-room when he heard the boastful voice of Bill the Butcher proclaiming his prowess. Approaching Poole, Morrissey spat in his face and then drew an ancient pistol, which he pointed at Poole’s head and snapped three times. But the cartridge missed fire, and Morrissey begged some one in the crowd to lend him another weapon. No one complied, and Poole drew his own pistol.

  He was about to shoot when Maguire clutched his sleeve and said, reproachfully:

  “You wouldn’t kill a helpless man in cold blood, would you?”

  Poole swore fiercely and flung his pistol to the floor. He then seized two huge carving knives from the free lunch counter, and hurled them onto the bar, inviting Maguire to take his choice and fight it out. But Maguire politely declined, as did Morrissey when Poole pressed the Tammany gladiator to take advantage of the offer. Poole, a professional butcher, knew all about knives, and it was common knowledge that he could throw a butcher knife through an inch of pine at twenty feet. During the altercation Baker came in, and when Morrissey saw his friend he pressed forward and would have attacked Poole with his fists and feet. But several policemen were close upon Baker’s heels, and Morrissey and Poole were placed under arrest and led out of the building. Neither protested at the indignity, for apparently they had no stomach for the conflict. In the vernacular of the period, “one was afraid and the other dasn’t.” Once outside the bar-room, both Poole and Morrissey were released when they agreed to go home and remain there until the following morning.

  Morrissey, who had been married only a few days, went at once to the house at No. 55 Hudson street, where he lived with his father-in-law, and was seen no more about the streets that evening. But half an hour after he had been discharged from the custody of the police, Poole returned to Stanwix Hall, accompanied by his brother-in-law, Charley Lozier, and a boon companion and adviser, Charley Shay. Ostensibly he came to apologize to the owner of the resort, but in reality he was looking for further trouble. Meanwhile Baker had conferred with Turner, Paudeen, and half a dozen other Tammany fighters, and they determined to do something about Bill Poole immediately. They went to the saloon about midnight, and found Poole standing at the bar with Lozier, Shay, and other friends and supporters. Paudeen, the last of the group to enter, locked the door.

  Turner called for drinks, and Paudeen, moving along the bar, jostled Poole’s elbow, and when Bill the Butcher glared at him Paudeen snarled:

  “What are you looking at, you black-muzzled bastard?”

  Clutching Poole’s coat lapels, Paudeen spat three times in his face and dared him to fight. Poole calmly drew five golden eagles from his pockets and slapped them on the bar, offering to fight any man of the Tammany group who would cover his money, but remarking that Paudeen was not worth fighting. For a moment no one moved, and then Turner cried in great excitement:

  “Sail in!”

  He quickly flung aside his Talma, displaying a huge Colt’s revolver, with a long barrel, strapped about his waist. He drew the weapon, levelled it in the hollow of his elbow and pulled the trigger. But his aim was poor and he shot himself in the arm, whereupon he screeched and fell to the floor. There he fired again, striking Poole in the leg. Bill the Butcher staggered forward under the impact of the bullet, clutching at Baker with outstretched arms. But the latter dodged, and as Poole fell heavily to the floor Baker drew a pistol and placed it against his chest.

  “I guess I’ll take you, anyhow,” said Baker.

  He fired twice, but Bill the Butcher, although one of the bullets had penetrated his heart and the other had ripped into his abdomen, slowly scrambled to his feet. For a moment he stood

  The Murder of Bill the Butcher

  swaying before the bar, and then he seized a huge carving knife and staggered toward Baker, screaming that he would cut his assailant’s heart out. But he had gone but a few feet when he collapsed into Shay’s arms, and Baker, Turner, and the others escaped through the front door, which Paudeen had unlocked. As Poole fell he flung the knife, and the blade quivered in the door jamb as Baker fled. Everyone who had been in the Hall, except

  Baker, surrendered to the police within two hours, but Baker crossed the Hudson river to Jersey City, where he remained in hiding until March 10, when he boarded the brig Isabella Jewett, bound for the Canary Islands. George Law, a wealthy leader of the Native American party, put his clipper yacht Grapeshot at the disposal of the authorities, and the swift vessel was dispatched in pursuit of the brig. The Isabella Jewett was overhauled two hours out of Teneriffe, and New York policemen took Baker off and brought him in irons back to New York. He was promptly indicted, together with Turner, Morrissey, Paudeen and several others, and was thrice brought to trial. But each time the jury disagreed, and finally the authorities abandoned the prosecution and Baker was released.

  Despite his wounds, Poole lived for fourteen days after the shooting, to the vast amazement of his doctors, who declared vehemently that it was unnatural for a man to linger so long with a bullet in his heart. But at last, while Tom Hyer and other Native American gladiators watched anxiously by his bedside and relayed bulletins to a sorrowful crowd in the street, Bill the Butcher died, gasping with his last breath:

  “Good-bye, boys: I die a true American!”

  The Native Americans gave Poole one of the most remarkable funerals ever seen in New York. More than five thousand men rode in carriages or trudged afoot behind the hearse, and half a dozen brass bands played dirges as the solemn procession passed slowly down Broadway to Whitehall street, where boats awaited to carry the cortege to Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. From Bleecker street southward to the Battery, Broadway was packed solidly with thousands of silent spectators. For weeks little was discussed throughout the city but the murder of Butcher Bill and the magnificence of his funeral, and the last words of the famous gangster were widely quoted. New plays were hurriedly written for the cheaper theaters which specialized in melodrama, and the endings of current productions were changed, so that as the final curtain fell the hero could drape himself in an American flag and gasp hoarsely, “Good-bye, boys; I die a true American!” while the audience expressed its emotion in thunderous applause.

  JOHN Morrissey retired from the professional prize ring in 1857, after he had defeated Heenan, and thereafter devoted his attention to politics and to the development of his gambling enterprises. The house which he had opened with his first earnings as a gangster was very prosperous, and by 1860 had given way to one of the most magnificent establishments in the city. It was on Broadway near Tenth street, not far north of the present Grace Protestant Episcopal Church and Wanamaker’s store. “His table, attendants, cooking and company,” wrote a contemporary author, “are exceeded by nothing on this side of the Atlantic.” In 1867 Morrissey established a luxurious gambling house and restaurant at Saratoga Springs, which after his death came eventually into the hands of Richard Canfield, perhaps the most celebrated gambling-house owner America has ever produced. It was John Morrissey’s boast that he had “never struck a foul blow or turned a card,” but he does not appear to have been so particular in his poUtical activities, for in William M. Tweed’s confession, in 1877, Morrissey is mentioned as having introduced a system of repeat
ing from Philadelphia, and as having been the paymaster of a fund of $65,000 which was distributed among the Aldermen to secure the confirmation of a Tweed henchman as City Chamberlain. Morrissey became co-leader of Tammany Hall with Honest John Kelly in the early seventies, but dropped out of sight within a few years. His active connection with the gangs ceased soon after his fight with Tom Heenan.

  THE POLICE AND DEAD RABBIT RIOTS

  IN COMMON with the remainder of the country, New York City seethed with the clamors and excitements of the impending conflict during the ten years which preceded the Civil War. There were frequent clashes, both verbal and physical, between the Abolitionist and pro-Slavery elements of the population, while from his pulpit in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher added fuel to the flame of unrest by his thundering excoriations of the Southern owners of human flesh and souls. Many of the most prominent ministers followed Beecher’s example and added their voices to the rising tide of protest, but others professed to see a more imminent source of damnation in the current theater, and trained their heaviest guns upon the celebrated dancer Sontag, who had set the town by the ears with her short skirts and the abandoned fling of her gifted feet—she is said to have been the first woman in America who, in pubhc at least, kicked higher than her head. Enthusiastic crowds packed the playhouse wherein she appeared and followed her about the streets, while the young bloods toasted her in the taverns and serenaded her beneath the windows of her lodgings.

  Pleasure seekers who were not enchanted by the ravishing Sontag flocked in great throngs to Niblo’s Garden, where Adelina Patti, not yet in her teens, astounded the critics with the beauty of her voice; or to the National Theater, where a remarkable new play, called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, opened in the early fifties and began its record-breaking run of two hundred consecutive nights. But there was scant appreciation of the elder Southern, who trod the creaking boards of Barnum’s Museum and struggled painfully to develop the art which in later years was to bring him fame as Lord Dundreary and establish him as one of the foremost actors of the American stage. Nor did the unobtrusive arrival of Dr. James Littlefield early in 1854 bring out the brass bands and cause dancing in the streets, although he immeasurably enhanced the dignity of a barbershop at No. 413 Broadway, and was the forerunner of a profession which now counts its clients by the millions. He was the first chiropodist to practise in New York.

  It was during this period, and perhaps a little earlier, that the Tammany politicians began the systematic looting of the city treasury which continued almost unchecked until the collapse of the Tweed Ring in 1870. So rapacious were the members of the Common Council of 1850 that they were aptly called the Forty Thieves, thus dragging in the muck and mire of politics the honorable name of the earliest of the great gangs of the Five Points. The Council of 1856 was similarly described, and the gangsters, obviously ashamed of the depths to which their appellation had fallen, dissolved their organization and enlisted in the ranks of the Dead Rabbits. Disclosures made by reform elements during the early fifties showed that every department of the city government was corrupt. Officials who were presumably poor men laboring in the public cause for meager salaries suddenly retired with vast fortunes in real estate, secured to them in the names of their wives, and their pockets bulging with gold, all amassed by the sale of permits, grants, franchises and leases, collections from crime centers and houses of prostitution, and the judicious awarding of contracts. In his History of Tammany Hall, documented by official records of the Board of Aldermen and various investigations, Gustavus Myers cites such choice morsels of graft as the deeding of 368 conveyances in one year to the Superintendent of Police, George W. Matsell, and his partner. Captain Norris; and the payment of tribute by more than a hundred men who regularly patronized the establishment operated in Greenwich street by Madame Restall, also known as Madame Killer, the notorious abortionist who committed suicide in her bathtub when Anthony Comstock raided her place. Madame Restall’s house and occupation became so well known that during the last years of her life, whenever she ventured abroad in her carriage, street boys followed her and shouted “Yah! Your house is built on babies’ skulls!”

  The power of appointing members of the police force remained in the hands of the Aldermen and the Assistant Aldermen from 1844, when the Municipal Police force was organized, until 1853, when the Legislature intervened, and in an effort to check the rising tide of corruption formed a Board of Police Commissioners consisting of the Mayor, the Recorder and the City Judge. But the practical result was the same, whoever made the appointments; the graft was merely transferred from one group of politicians to another. It was customary for a patrolman to pay $40 to the captain in whose precinct he desired to enroll, and two or three times that amount to the statesman who appointed him. Police captains paid a minimum of $200 to their political masters, and policemen of all ranks were regularly employed as collectors of graft, and as go-betweens in arranging the questionable deals of the politicians. The entire force was bewildered and demoralized, and the few honest officials of the department could do little toward enforcing the laws and ridding the city oi its swarming criminal population, for the arrest of a notorious thug was quickly followed by the appearance of an indignant ward-heeler who demanded and procured his release.

  Except for the successful thrusts against the power of the river gangsters of the Fourth Ward, who were so far beyond the pale that not even the politicians dared protect them, the only important police campaign of the period was carried out against the Honeymoon gang, which in 1853 began to operate with great success in the Eighteenth Ward along the middle East Side, then a sparsely settled district inhabited principally by squatters. The police did not molest the thugs for several months, and they became extraordinarily bold. Every evening the chieftain of the Honeymooners stationed a gangster at each corner of Madison avenue and Twenty-ninth street, and these worthies maintained their positions until midnight, knocking down and robbing every well-dressed man who appeared. When George W. WaUing was appointed captain of police late in 1853 and assigned to the command of the district, he found the entire area terrorized by the Honeymoon gang. To suppress them he organized the first Strong Arm Squad and inaugurated a method of attack which was used very effectively in later years. Walling had always been impressed by the fact that the gangster would seldom stand up before a policeman armed with a heavy locust club, and that there was nothing a thug feared so much as a sound thumping. So he chose half a dozen of his bravest and huskiest patrolmen, and sent them forth in the guise of citizens. They simply walked up to the gangsters and knocked them senseless before the thugs could get into action with their slung-shots, bludgeons, and brass knuckles. After a few nights of this sort of warfare the gang leader withdrew his men from their accustomed posts, but Captain Walling gave them no rest. Every patrolman in the precinct was provided with the names of the Honeymooners, and whenever one was sighted he was attacked and beaten. Within two weeks the Honeymoon gang had been dispersed, and its members had fled southward into the Five Points and the Bowery, where the police were not so rough. Captain Walling also employed the strong arm method to stop the nightly brawls between the inhabitants of two rows of tenements, known as the English and the Irish, on opposite sides of Twenty-second street between Second and Third avenues. Before his advent the denizens of these slums swarmed into the street for as many as a dozen fights an evening, and when the police entered the block at all it was in parties of three or more. But Walling massed his entire force around a corner, and when the fighting began the policemen rushed in and clubbed English and Irish indiscriminately. The brawling soon ceased and the block became comparatively safe and peaceful.

  THE number of thugs who followed the great gang captains of the Five Points, the Bowery, and the Fourth Ward was enormously increased during the decade preceding the Civil War by the throngs of bruisers and bullies who swarmed into New York from other cities. By 1855 it was estimated that the metropolis contained at least t
hirty thousand men who owed allegiance to the gang leaders, and through them to the political leaders of Tammany Hall and the Know Nothing or Native American Party, who kept the political pot boiling furiously by their frantic and constant struggles for the privilege of plundering the public funds.

  At every election gangs employed by the rival factions rioted at the polling places, smashing ballot boxes, slugging honest citizens who attempted to exercise the right of franchise, themselves voting early and often, and incidentally acquiring a contempt for the police and for constituted authority which was to have appalling consequences during the Draft Riots. The climax of the purely political rioting was reached in 1856, when Fernando Wood was elected to a second term as Mayor. Wood was bitterly opposed, not only by the Native Americans, who accused him of favoring the Irish and other foreign elements, but by the reformers as well, for he had shown himself a reckless and unprincipled official, and had thrown the city treasury wide open to the looting fingers of his henchmen. But he had the staunch support of all the lower strata of society, especially the saloon and gambling-house keepers, whose loyalty he had assured by preventing the enforcement of a Sunday closing law passed in 1855. He compelled every man on the police force to contribute to his campaign fund, one patrolman who at first refused to do so being kept on duty twenty-four hours without rehef.