New York had become a grim place to live. Critics said the growing city was too crowded and that its hundreds of buildings were blotting out the sun and creating a perfect dark, sinister setting for crime and public disturbances. “Commerce is devouring inch by inch the coast of the island, and if we would rescue any part of it for health and recreation it must be done now,” argued William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Post.35
Public events often drew huge crowds in which people pressed against each other, argued, engaged in fistfights, shoved others, and constantly threatened riots. In 1830, tens of thousands of New Yorkers participated in a memorial parade following the death of President James Monroe. Military guards protected the speakers’ platform, but those in the front line of the parade pushed them away and threatened to overrun the stage. The main speaker at the event, pleading and waving his arms, had to calm down the entire group to prevent what all thought was going to be a riot. This pressure was continual.36
A decade earlier, observant novelist James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans) had predicted problems because of the rapid and uncontrolled growth of the city, which was not anticipated by anyone. It was a growing city with no plan.37
Many New Yorkers used the Boston Tea Party of 1773 as an example of the need for good, noble citizens to use violence to achieve a deserved goal denied them by the system. The Tea Party riot had worked for the colonists, so why not continue the practice? Many city residents argued that no one in the system would acknowledge their presence in it, that they (for “they,” choose any ethnic group) were invisible in public life. Excluded, they felt that staging riots would bring attention to them and give them a place in the world. Dissidents suggested that rioting expressed “people power” and that it was the truest way to define Americanism.
The extremists, the vigilantes of the era, cited that idea often. “We are the believers in the doctrine of popular sovereignty, that the people of this country are the real sovereigns, and that whenever the laws, made by those to whom they have delegated their authority, are found inadequate, to their protection, it is the right of the people to take the protection of their property into their own hands, and to deal with these villains according to their just deserts,” wrote one vigilante leader.38
Huge waves of immigrants had arrived in New York, trudging down the gangplanks of a thousand ships, eyes wide open, intent on populating a new world. Their dreams died fast, and they were forced to live in overcrowded buildings in run-down, congested neighborhoods. Unable to get jobs that paid well, or any jobs at all, they took to the streets to protest their conditions. On the streets marching and shouting amid hordes of people and vendor carts, too, were native New Yorkers who resented the new immigrant arrivals. Americans had a fear of anybody who spoke a foreign language or still had a foreign accent. “The day must come, and, we fear, is not too far distant, when most of our offices will be held by foreigners—men who have no sympathy with the spirit of our institutions, who have done aught to secure the blessings they enjoy, and instead of governing ourselves, we shall be governed by men, many of whom, but a few short years previously, scarcely knew of our existence,” said one city dweller in the 1840s.39
By the 1830s, the Protestants and Catholics living in New York had begun to hate each other. These antagonisms erupted into religious riots and the wholesale burning of churches and neighborhoods where large percentages of religious groups lived. Many New Yorkers trembled as they saw the Irish Catholics, who arrived in droves, taking over jobs, schools, and political clubs; they feared that the Irish would take over the entire city and the country. In a few short years, they assumed, Washington, D.C., would be replaced by an Irish Catholic city as the nation’s capital. They had to be driven out.40
An example of that intense dislike of Catholics took place April 12, 1842. A Roman Catholic church had its windows broken when a mob attacked it. Later that evening, Bishop John Hughes’s home was partially destroyed in an attack. “They were like the no-popery riots of old,” said George Templeton Strong.41
Rioters were not warned to curb their actions, but encouraged in their work by important members of the community. Several prominent Bostonians led an anti-Irish riot in Massachusetts. Rioters were urged on by ethnic newspapers, dozens of them, which were read by tens of thousands in New York. “The bloody hand of the Pope has stretched forth for our destruction,” roared the Native American in 1844.42 In Utica, New York, in 1835, a grand jury ruled that the upcoming antislavery convention there was not only wrong, but criminal sedition, and implored locals to “put it down.” A Utica newspaper said locals had to use the law of the land or the “law of Judge Lynch” to stop it. One Utica newspaper editor, Augustine Dauby, said that he would stop the convention “peacefully if I can, forcibly if I must,” to the roar of a crowd. A riot followed.43
There was unbridled anger in the hearts of tens of thousands of disenfranchised and frustrated people. That resentment grew deeper each year in the 1830s and ’40s. “We have evidence too strong to be either doubted or denied that if the great among us are growing better, the bad are growing worse,” wrote one newspaper editor then.44
Rioters had no respect for the law. “There is an awful tendency towards insubordination and contempt for the law and there is reason to apprehend that good order and morality will ere long be overcome by intemperance and violence,” argued Hone, who added sadly, “My poor country.”45
Riots were also seen as a way to celebrate something via destruction. Many said that riots were summer parties. One man wrote after a race riot in Cincinnati in 1843, “The mob in Cincinnati must have their annual festival—their carnival—just as at stated periods the ancient Romans enjoyed the Saturnalia.”46
All of America’s cities found that they had the same problems in the 1830s and ’40s. None were immune. In Philadelphia in 1838, the evening session of an abolitionist society meeting at Pennsylvania Hall was attacked by weapons-toting whites in a crowd of some twenty thousand angry city residents. Much of the hall was destroyed and the abolitionists were forced out of the building as hundreds of constables stood by and did nothing. Several people were seriously wounded in the melee. White women and black men walking arm in arm in an earlier protest march ignited the fury of the whites in the attacking crowd. In Baltimore, large mobs of depositors inflamed over the collapse of a bank attacked the bank and wrecked it. Then they went on a lawless spree, burning down the homes of several bank employees and marching on the home of the city’s mayor. They forced him to resign his office. The city’s replacement mayor, who hurried from his home to the scene of the disturbance, promptly called up a posse of three thousand volunteers, all armed, who attacked the rioters and put down the rebellion.
In Charlestown, Massachusetts, now a part of Boston, a mob of over two thousand anti-Catholic men insisted that a novice Ursuline nun be released from a convent. They had heard a rumor that she had been physically abused there. This followed a series of newspaper articles by a former novice who had left the convent and claimed the nuns tried to make her accept strident religious views that were against her wishes. When the novice was not turned over to the men, they stormed the building, injuring several nuns and burning it to the ground, the flames lighting up the night sky. Bostonians were horrified. “If the wishes of the lowest class that suffer in these long [Boston] streets should execute themselves, who can doubt that the city would topple in ruins?” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.47
These riots targeted specific groups. There were few riots in New York in which a general melee erupted. Riot organizers selected groups to victimize, such as blacks, Irish, a street gang, or a political party.48
Many believed that rioting would destroy the foundation of American democracy. Writing after yet another riot in Philadelphia in the late 1860s, Philadelphia resident Sidney George Fisher said that the United States was “destined to be destroyed by the dark masses of ignorance and brutality which lie beneath it, like the first of a volcano.”49
All New Yorkers trembled at the thought of a riot. “Every fresh event should remind our citizens that we are in the city over the crust of a volcano.… There is in every large city, and especially this one, a powerful, ‘dangerous class’ who care nothing for our liberty or civilization … who burrow at the roots of society … and only come forth in times of disturbances, to plunder and prey,” said one New Yorker of an 1830s riot.50
New Yorkers always seemed ready to riot, though, especially in situations involving large crowds. At an opera performance in New York in 1848 the audience began to boo singer Sesto Benedetti as soon as he walked onstage. The hissing and booing was so loud (“a hurricane of sibilation,” said a man in the theater) that he could not sing and walked offstage. That brought on more boos. An opera official took the stage to calm the crowd and Benedetti returned, to quietude. It was typical of crowd responses in New York and how heated feelings became in a large theater filled with people. Back in 1830, the crowd booed lustily at a British actor, Anderson, who everybody thought had insulted America in a newspaper article. He was hissed off the stage several times and then a riot broke out. Philip Hone, who was there, said that “apples, eggs and other missiles were showered upon the stage.” To quiet the mob, the theater manager announced that a different play would be held the next night, and it was. Two nights later the play with Anderson was brought back again and another riot ensued and lasted through morning with damage to the theater, neighborhood windows broken, and a shabby police force failing to control the protestors.51
All had different views of who the rioters were. Hezekiah Niles, publisher of Niles’ Weekly Register, wrote that “sober and peaceable individuals are called upon to defend their own personal rights, or those of their neighbors, by force … instead of relying upon … the law.” Philip Hone was more to the point. He said the rioters were all “a set of fanatics.”52
Each riot built on the last, and there was little law enforcement to stop them. There seemed to be only one villain. Everyone in the public and the press blamed the spineless constable force for the riots and predicted more, and worse, public disturbances if the force was not discontinued and a new police department installed—and quickly.
There were many reasons why riots started and could not be controlled in New York City, but without a doubt the greatest was the lack of professional police. The city was defended by a small six-hundred-man force of inept constables, who were little more than security guards, in a huge city. They were spread woefully thin. Broken down into three daily shifts, there were roughly two constables for every 2,500 residents (today there is one cop for every 150 people).
The stumbling constables, political party appointees, often were not paid a salary. They were paid for services rendered or received bonuses for work well done, but not for arrests. As an example, they were given fees for the delivery of legal papers on behalf of the city. They were also given bonuses for finding stolen property. Consequently, the constables had little interest in maintaining law and order and putting themselves at risk without any reward. Constables in New York usually flinched when asked to make an arrest or break up a fight. Many declined to do so. If they were reluctant to do that, how could they possibly handle a mass riot?53
They were often made fun of by New Yorkers; in his diary, Hone always added, after an entry about their arrival somewhere, that they’d come “tardily.” Newspapers ran cartoons of them sleeping on the job and running from a confrontation. Constables and watchmen were the worst possible choices to defend a city and its residents in the middle of a ferocious riot filled with fires, explosions, hails of musket balls and bullets, and fistfights along the streets.
There was universal disapproval of the constables. Hone wrote after a riot that “the police came after some time, but they have no energy and want courage to resist an army like this. They are appointed as a reward for party services performed at the polls, not to quell riots created by the very fellows who assisted to place the men in office from whom they derive their support.”54
Rioters knew that and had no fear of the constables. Hence, one riot followed the other, each longer than the last, with little chance that the constables could stop any of them. An example was a fracas started by thug Yankee Sullivan and his mob in the spring of 1842. Sullivan and his men beat up a dozen or so Irishmen in the bar of the Sixth Ward Hotel, fearing interference from the constables, and getting none. The bloodied Irish retreated to their neighborhood, recruited more than a hundred men, all armed, and went looking for Sullivan and his men. They found them and launched an all-out attack, clubs bashing heads, fists flying, and blood flowing. The Sullivan men fled, recruited their own small army, and descended on the Irish neighborhood, beating up anybody they could find, with no one arrested.
New York newspapers reflected the citizenry’s attitude toward the force. James Gordon Bennett had arrived in New York from Scotland ten years earlier and in the mid-1830s had become the editor of the Herald, one of the first truly sensationalist newspapers in New York, which routinely covered riots and crime. He disdained the constables, often referring to them as the “corps of leather skulls,”55 and said that they were cops who had no right being cops. His newspaper rival, the oddly dressed Horace Greeley, was so involved in riot and crime coverage that by the early 1850s he was running a complete column of murder stories from across the United States along with lengthy riot stories and frequent complaints about the constables.
Public figures and citizens all argued that the police had two jobs, not one. They not only had to put down riots when they started, but had to work to make certain that there was enough law enforcement in place, trained law enforcement, to prevent riots from happening at all. Police had to establish a preventative law enforcement framework that included informers, liaisons, and community contacts to prevent riots and ease the public’s fear of them. In the 1830s and ’40s, that was not in place.
Another reason why a police force made up of constables was ineffective was that the law enforcement agents were untrained and too few in number to establish any kind of intelligence-gathering ring to thwart a riot. It is hard to pick up intelligence on the activities of mob leaders in a small town, but much more difficult in a city. To do that in an extremely large city like New York with such a small force was nigh impossible.56 The constables did not have a network of contacts within the public realm to stop riots when they began, either. Today, all big-city police departments have dozens of local civilian leaders, men and women they can get in touch with immediately and work with to stop a riot. In the 1830s, constables did not know any local leaders; when public disturbances started, there was no one they could contact to quell the trouble. It put law enforcement at a distinct disadvantage.
The last resort, and the best at the time, was the heavily armed state militia. The problem there was that since they were not called until after the New York constables had put up a fierce battle and then fled, they were often quite late. A full day of rioting might have taken place before they rode into a town square and loaded their rifles and fired on demonstrators.57
Riot organizers traditionally planned activities in areas where they believed the police to be neutral and not predisposed to harass them. In New York, the police were simply missing from the riot neighborhood completely. This knowledge that there were very few police to put down their riot greatly encouraged the leaders of civil disturbances. Crowd organizers want to create havoc, but they do not want to get arrested. In New York City, with its bumbling police, that was easy to do.58
Why were New Yorkers so reluctant to hire a new, armed, trained, and professional police force to quell the city’s riots and patrol its streets?
The British army had occupied several American cities prior to the American Revolution and continued to do so during the conflict. The people hated the British for doing that. That sour feeling continued to be felt for generations, and the people saw the proposed police force as another occupying army, loyal to th
e mayor and not the residents. New Yorkers, and people throughout the country, also feared the enormous cost of a large and professional force. The country had just staggered through two recessions and the financially catastrophic Panic of 1837; citizens were careful with every penny of public expenditures, and a police force would cost a lot of money. Americans also believed that the troubles of the 1830s and ’40s would end and peace would be restored to the streets.
That restrictive attitude would soon change. For a number of reasons, not least the long chain of fatal and destructive riots, by the early 1840s the people of New York, fed up with chaos and havoc, finally would begin a strong push for the dismantling of the ragged force of constables and call for professional, trained police. The streets would be covered with rivers of blood by the time they did that, though.
CHAPTER TWO
The Gruesome Murder of Helen Jewett
Our city was disgraced on Sunday by one of the most foul and premeditated murders that ever fell to our lot to record.
—James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, April 11, 1836
It was clear and chilly on the night of April 9, 1836, in New York City in the middle of a spring that did not arrive until quite late on the calendar. It was so cold that in just a few days the city streets would be filled with six inches of snow from an unexpected storm. Men pulled their coat collars up tight around their necks as they trudged through the cold night air. It was too cold to think that on this night one of the most horrid murders in the history of New York City would take place.
Until the spring of 1836, crimes did not occupy a large amount of space, or editorial attention, in New York City newspapers. The editors did cover spectacles, such as the Great Fire of 1835, and the numerous riots that plagued the city for years, but they stayed away from crime, especially serious crimes like murder, rape, and robbery. The larger, five- and six-cent journals (they cost a hefty ten dollars a year on subscription) would never descend into the basement of journalism to write about street crimes, but neither did the scandal-tinged penny sheets that seemed to chase every sensational story they could find. Crime stories were taboo. “It is a fashion that does not meet with our approbation on the score of either propriety or taste,” wrote the editor of the Statesman. “To say nothing of the absolute indecency of some of the cases which are allowed occasionally to creep into print, we deem it of little benefit to the cause of morals thus to familiarize the community, and especially the younger parts of it, with the details of misdemeanor and crime.”1
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