Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  At that rally at 4:00 P.M. on a chilly day in February 1837, amid controversy over rising flour prices, Hone wrote, firebrands told the crowd that the owners of the Eli and Hart store had fifty thousand barrels of flour that they would sell to enrich themselves and keep from the hungry poor. They got rich “while the city was starving,” one of the speakers said. Hone listened to it all. Then he wrote that “away went the mob to Hart’s store near Washington and Cortlandt Street, which they forced open and threw 500 barrels and large quantities of wheat into the street, and committed all the extravagant acts which usually flow from the unlicensed fury of a mob.”17

  People even rioted over dogs. One summer in the 1830s, city fathers ordered the constables to round up and slaughter fifteen hundred dogs. The summer-long killing of dogs inflamed citizens, who protested often. “The poor creatures are knocked down on the street and beaten to death. It is exceedingly cruel and demoralizing,”18 wrote Lydia Maria Child, the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard newspaper and author of several books (she wrote the famous poem “Over the River and Through the Wood”) who left her troublesome husband at home in Massachusetts and moved to New York in the early 1840s, and followed city events closely. Child had spent her life deploring violence against African Americans and saw New York as the capital of that practice; she kept a close eye on racial riots, women’s issues, and other civil controversies. One of her favorite pastimes in the city was to walk the streets on routes that carried her through all kinds of neighborhoods. She remembered everything that she could to include in her well-written and well-read columns in the newspapers. She also wrote about what she saw, the bad as well as the good, in her numerous and lengthy letters to friends. Her friends back in Boston, especially, were fascinated by the view they had of New York and its savagery. She arrived at the height of the rising crime wave and the debate over the inept constable force.

  Anything and everything seemed to cause a riot, because aggravated crowds realized that they could create a ruckus and wreak havoc and not suffer any dire consequences from the badly trained police force of constables. Commenting on a local stevedore strike, Philip Hone wrote that “an immense body of the malcontents paraded the wharves all yesterday and attacked the men who refused to join them … several officers were attacked by the rioters, one of whom named Brink, had his skull fractured by the rioters.”19

  No one believed that the constables could halt anything. The early cops “were subject to very little discipline, and were anything but imposing or athletic. Should one attempt to make an arrest, he was either very roughly handled, or led [on] a long and fruitless chase, in the course of which he was sure to meet with many and ludicrous mishaps. He was, in fact, unable to protect himself, let alone guarding and protecting citizens and property,” said George Washington Walling, who would become the city’s police chief in 1874.20

  During the nation’s first two hundred years, the small urban areas and little villages that dotted the countryside relied on a trained militia and lowly paid, or volunteer, watchmen and constables for protection. The lawmen considered it a service to their city. Residents of New York did not think much of the puny constable force, but with little crime it sufficed. The New York militia units stationed in the city backed up the constables in times of trouble and worked for free. New Yorkers liked that idea because it kept down the cost of protection while the city was battered by financial crises, such as the depressions of 1819 and 1837 and the recessions of the early 1780s and 1833. As the city grew, though, problems arose.

  The early New York constables had little supervision. They reported to police headquarters and then went out into their assigned neighborhoods to conduct patrols, alone. There were no rules against drinking, and many spent the night imbibing to pass time. They often slept on park benches. Many worked as constables as a second job and were already exhausted when they reported to their posts. Almost all just carried a “billy club,” or thick wooden nightstick, for protection. Few used them. They had a charge to arrest criminals they literally saw committing a crime and to provide some sort of police presence to deter crime. They rarely did this. They avoided street patrols in high-crime areas for fear of being a victim themselves. They all avoided working in the slums because that was where many of the criminals lived, and they did not want to encounter them. Consequently, crime in the high-crime areas such as Five Points and in the slums increased.21

  The cops spent most of their time trying to recover stolen goods for citizens. In order to employ them without pay or at low wages, New York’s Common Council gave them rewards for collecting both private and public debts, collecting rents, foreclosing on mortgages, and serving court orders. Constables refused to investigate cases of stolen property unless they were given a bonus. To get property back, victims often gave one reward for the apprehension of the criminal and a larger reward for the return of the property (leading police and thieves into a profitable arrangement). The constables supervised no one, and no one supervised them.22

  Many crimes were never solved. Constables, working with a coroner, were asked to appoint a street crowd to help them investigate a crime, usually an assault or a murder. These public investigations, by randomly selected amateurs who had not seen the crime, usually turned up no suspects and resulted in no arrests. These ad hoc investigations usually lasted only a few hours.

  The city courts were one place where the constables were used often. Judges had them quiet down unruly crowds at trials. The constables, handfuls of them, would at first plead for quiet, then scream at courtgoers, and then, exhausted from all that, take out their billy clubs and pound them against the tables in the courtroom. Few paid any attention to them.

  They were the descendants of an early constable force known as the “rattle watch.” These groups of watchmen, who worked the streets of New York in the mid-1600s, spent most of their time rattling a chain of keys as they walked down city streets, looking for mischief-makers and, from time to time, loudly announcing the time of the evening to residents of their neighborhood by shouting and pounding their billy clubs on the sides of houses or barns. The “rattle watch” constables also carried a green lantern on a pole as they walked so residents could identify them. When they returned to their watch house, they put the lantern outside it; this is why all old precinct houses in the city today have green lanterns beside their front entrances. The men were under strict orders not to fall asleep or engage in fistfights with each other. The New-York Gazette said of them in 1757 that they were a “parcel of idle, drinking, vigilant snorers, who never quelled any nocturnal tumult in their lives (nor as we can learn, were ever the discoverers of any fire breaking out), but would, perhaps, be as willing to join in a burglary as any thief in Christendom. A happy set, indeed, to defend the rich and populous city against the terrors of the night.”23

  That half-asleep, half-drunk, and completely inept persona of the constable, then, was set in stone by 1757. In 1788, the watch force was increased to include a captain and thirty men. Crime increased that year, though, so thirty additional men were hired. A year later, when crime ebbed, the thirty new constables were all let go. That level of watchmen was not to be reached again for years.

  The next generation of constables learned from them and behaved badly, too, as did the next generation, and the next and the next. By the time constables walked the beat in the 1840s, they were just the latest generation of slovenly law enforcers who really did not care how good a job they did.

  Constables had “sentinel boxes” where they could store goods and keep warm on frigid nights; they were assisted by a half dozen or so marshals, who mostly worked as court officers and helped collect debts for the city. One resident complained that it was dangerous “to walk the streets at night or be in a crowd in the day.”24

  The city’s pyramid of police authority was troubling, too. The mayor, not elected by the people but chosen by the aldermen, New York’s version of the city council, oversaw the police in riots. The d
ay-to-day operations of the force were run by High Constable Jacob Hays for nearly fifty years, but by the troubled 1830s and 1840s Hays was an old man. Like the mayor, all of the police were appointed by city aldermen. After Tammany Hall swept the Federalists out of office in 1816, that corrupt political organization helped pick all of the city’s watchmen and patrolmen because they controlled the aldermen. That was clear in an 1842 motion passed by the board to name new patrolmen for two wards. The language of the motion was that the new cops were “under the direction of the Aldermen and Assistant Aldermen of the above wards,” and they were all named by Tammany.25

  Civic disturbances could be brutal regardless of the presence of the constables. A reporter at one disturbance wrote that “the mob exhibited more than fiendish brutality, beating and mutilating some of the old, confiding and unoffending blacks, with a savageness surpassing anything we could have believed men capable of.”26

  New York riots that started out small always grew in size and intensity because onlookers joined any melee that lasted several days. Many New Yorkers watched a riot and joined the rabble-rousers. They could be entertained and punish people they did not like. They also knew that the chances they would be arrested by the beleaguered constables were small. Organizers of riots who planned on a thousand participants soon had two or three thousand, through no extra work of their own.27

  One of the most frequent riots in New York was the election riot, which took place just about every Election Day. You had an election? Someone had a riot for it. The Election Day riot was planned by one political party to ensure that its rival party did not collect votes and win offices. The goal was not destruction of a neighborhood, although that often occurred, or punishment of a group of people, although that often transpired, too. Rioters made the area around the polls so destructive, and harassed potential voters so badly, that they stayed home, fearful of venturing near the polling place. That meant that your party won its standard, say, forty thousand votes, but the other party, which might have won, say, forty-five thousand, received only thirty-eight thousand because of low voter turnout. The result—victory for your party.

  Election Day riots were a joint venture between a political party, especially New York’s massive and well-oiled political machine, Tammany Hall, and a street gang. The street gang would stage the daylong riot, and the political party would direct it. The street gang would not be paid for its work, but throughout the year the ruling party in office would restrain law enforcement from cracking down on the gang members as they engaged in their criminal activity. The Election Day riot consisted of tearing down broadside posters, destroying opposition party newspapers and literature, forcing speakers off their platforms, and haranguing people not to vote for the rival party. Polling places in that era were not secret voting booths such as those we enjoy today. Most were open-air tables on a sidewalk in a town square. People surged around them all day. Everybody surrounding the table would shout at you when you arrived to convince you to vote for a particular party. It was here, in the few yards around the polling-place table, where the election riots and their leaders created the most havoc, sending panicked potential voters scurrying home without casting a ballot. The neighborhood around each polling place was full of overturned tables and chairs, torn-down posters, and garbage.

  Some political parties staged their own riots on Election Day. One of the more infamous parties was the Know Nothings, who thrived in the 1850s, particularly in cities and especially in New York. They hated foreigners, Catholics, and blacks. Its members would surround polling places and hand out printed ballots with Know Nothing candidates’ names already checked off. Anyone who did not take, and use, his printed ballot was shoved, punched, or beaten up. “What we have here is the demon of democracy,” said one urban resident in that era.28

  Few of the rioters were caught, because they knew how to run and hide in the city’s landscape of myriad narrow, crooked streets, which were filled with tiny, dark, twisting alleys. There were a thousand places to hide, and the rioters knew all of them. The police who tried to chase them? Their skills were so low that in 1841 the New York City Common Council officially described them as men who were charged to “prevent the running of swine in the public street.” What could be expected of them?29

  * * *

  New York had been crippled by riots for years. In the 1830s, New York was plagued with laborer riots against employers; the biggest was the stonecutters riot of 1833. Marble contractors and stonecutters were scheduled to put all of the marble into a new New York University building, but the university learned that it could buy marble cheaply, and get free labor, at Sing Sing prison, in upstate New York. The university turned down the stonecutter members of the Manufacturers of Marble Mantels Association. After several fruitless meetings, 150 stonecutters stormed the store of the NYU marble works contractor, destroying much of it with rocks and brickbats in a daylong riot. The National Guard had to be called in to put down the disturbance. In 1835, constables failed to hold back a wave of looters who descended on lower Manhattan following a terrible fire that wiped out one-third of the area, and the militia had to be called in to curb the troublemakers. In the mid-1830s, constables were unable to contain crowds in antislavery riots, and again a militia unit was called in.30

  Many people laughed at the militia, too. “Neither the officers nor the men have got the necessary pluck for anything but marching round a puddle,” sneered George Templeton Strong as he watched them saddle up for an encounter in 1839.31

  Riots were not uncommon in other cities in the era either; in fact, they were the norm. Historian Richard Maxwell Brown counted thirty-five in Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia alone. According to historian John Schneider, “at least seventy per cent of American cities with a population of twenty thousand or more by 1850 experienced some degree of major disorder.” Abolitionist leaders, who kept close tabs on civil disturbances, counted 209 riots in the 1830s and 1840s. Abraham Lincoln, then a state legislator in Illinois, said that there were too many, and in every part of the country. They were, he said, “the everyday news of the times.”32

  Still, New York had become, by the mid-1830s, the largest city in America, with more than 400,000 residents. It was a bustling city that was a vision of beauty to the eye, an American Athens. The town was an expanding metropolis of thousands of buildings, businesses, warehouses, churches, tenements, and theaters, packed in tightly between Fourteenth Street and the Battery, with the Hudson and East Rivers on each side of it. Most buildings did not rise higher than four stories because of fire regulations, and a long, necklace-like string of bustling docks filled with tall oceangoing vessels stretched around the city to service the growing shipping industry.

  The city had become the banking, entertainment, and publishing capital of America. It was the nation’s chief manufacturing center and the heart of America’s shipbuilding industry. It was filled with fascinating museums, gorgeous mansions, and lovely parks. But beneath its glimmering exterior was a dark and sinister interior. New York had too many people and too few jobs, forcing thousands into poorhouses, and other thousands to live in poverty in rancid tenement hovels with little warmth in winter, oppressive heat in summer, and starvation all year long.

  In the 1830s, there was still no substantial running water in town, and people had to haul heavy wooden buckets of imported water up four or five flights of stairs in order to wash dishes or take a bath. Dozens of people, rich and poor, died in summer from heat exhaustion. Transportation, on congested dirt streets, was a mess. British author Charles Dickens, who toured the city in 1841, said of the city’s overcrowded neighborhoods that the buildings there “were hideous tenements which take their names from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.”33

  Thousands of street urchins, many of them pickpockets, roamed the town. Street gangs flourished, and the crime rates were far higher than they would be later, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, when the ci
ty was home to eight million souls. Prostitution, drinking, and gambling were causing the crime rate to soar. The city was home to over four thousand bars, seven thousand prostitutes, five hundred gambling casinos, and hundreds of daily and weekly lottery, or “numbers,” gambling parlors. Burglary was so common that newspaper editors called the coming of winter “the burglary season.” One distraught woman said that New York was “the criminal capital of the world.” More than thirty thousand arrests were made each year, more than the number in London and Paris combined. Among the city’s estimated seven thousand prostitutes were hundreds of eleven- and twelve-year old girls. “One cannot walk the length of Broadway without meeting some hideous troupe of ragged girls, from 12 years old down, brutalized beyond redemption by premature vice clad in the filthy refuse of the rag pickers, obscene of speech, the stamp of childhood gone from their faces,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary.

  * * *

  The riots that threatened to ruin city life had many causes. The city was jammed with young, headstrong men who had no work and nothing better to do than cause trouble. Most disturbances took place in the summer, when, in oppressive heat, tempers flared. One riot in mid-August was remembered by participants as taking place on “the hottest day of the year.”34

  The signs of trouble and riots were in the faces of the poor and those out of work. The population of downtown New York City was tired and angry. The economy of the mid-1830s was shaky, and the masses, uncertain why that was so, turned their anger on institutions and racial targets.