Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  Still others eked out an existence in the streets and slept on park benches at night, often clearing off snow from the wooden seat. Thousands of “bummers” spent their day panhandling for money in city streets and in parks, begging for food scraps near restaurants, and telling visitors to the city that they could develop a business if they only had money—from them. They were badly dressed, depressed, and a nuisance to all.

  Hundreds of poverty-stricken people became ragpickers. They walked through city streets early in the morning as the sun rose with large bags slung over their shoulders and picked up jars, vases, string, boards, pieces of garbage, and anything else they could find, all left on the streets the night before. The ragpickers made a living out of selling the debris they gathered to middlemen who then sold the materials to early-day “recyclers” who used them to create utensils, plates, and other things that they could market. One thirteen-year-old girl earned ten cents a day picking up and selling animal bones that were later turned into combs by manufacturers. The ragpickers helped to create a whole cottage industry of junk shops, pawnshops, secondhand stores, and a version of today’s “dollar stores.” Ragpickers were usually paid two cents a pound for the rags they collected that were recycled into clothes by small factories. The ragpickers earned only a half dollar or so a week, but it helped them to get by. Other street people made a living by collecting as much old rope as they could find and selling it to stores or to new or refurbished ships. Many women searched the streets for old nails, or stole them, put them into kegs, and sold the kegs to stores for their subsistence. Others prowled neighborhoods where restaurants and bars were located to scavenge for old bottles that they sold to junk shops.34

  The ragpickers were admired by many New Yorkers who felt they were at least trying to make a living, even if it was on the edge of squalor. “The little muddy, dripping girl, with her rough hair and torn dress, who is sweeping the walk and flying about with her broom in the storm, like an ugly little sprite, may be just keeping herself and an old mother from the alms-house,” wrote Reverend Charles Loring Brace in a newspaper column.35

  Other poor people were taken in by homes founded by several moral reform societies to house the needy. Thousands of squatters took over abandoned buildings, making small fires to keep warm and stretching sheets over doors and windows to ward off cold winter winds that blew in off the harbor with regularity in winter. Smelly slums abounded. A reporter for The New York Times later said of the squatters that they “prefer dwelling rent free amid filth and squalor to paying a landlord’s agent monthly dues for the enjoyment of similar privileges conferred upon the lodgers in a tenement house.” New York City was “one of the most crime-haunted and dangerous cities in all of Christendom,” railed Whitman.36

  The city was a mess. Whitman said of it in 1842, “Imagine all the accumulations of filth in a great city—not merely the slops and rottenness thrown in the streets and byways (and never thoroughly carried away)—but the numberless privies, cesspools, sinks and gulches of abomination … the unmeasurable dirt that is filtered into the earth through its myriad pores” and added that the city’s drinking water was practically “poisoned” by the unsanitary conditions he found just about everywhere.

  He wailed even more about crime. In the winter of 1842 he became so despondent about it that he warned young men from the country not to move to New York. “Every kind of wickedness that can be festered into life by the crowding together by a huge mass of people is here to be found,” he said.37

  Race was a growing problem in that era. New Yorkers may not have realized that their hatred of African Americans in a slave-free city was far more virulent than the hatred of southerners for blacks in a region where there was slavery. It was noticed immediately by Tocqueville and Beaumont on their visit to New York. They said it was one of the main causes of problems in the northern states and cities. This odd social contempt in the slave-free North drove the animosity toward all antislavery supporters, especially the abolitionists.38

  Nativists despised African Americans. Black men were murdered in cities by nativists because they landed jobs that white men believed they themselves should have been given. Black men who married or courted white women were badly beaten. Blacks who committed crimes, or were merely suspected of committing crimes, were beaten or even lynched. In parts of New York and other cities, the homicide rates for blacks crept far past those for whites.

  The city government was corrupt, too. The Tammany Hall political machine controlled the city, and bribery was a way of life. Tammany Hall appointed the judges, who were often as corrupt as the men who gave them their jobs. Just about anything could be bought for a few hundred dollars. One briber was so bold that he knocked on the front door of the sheriff’s office and, when it was opened, handed the sheriff an envelope with $1,000 in cash in it.39 Tammany Hall candidates were usually elected, though, because its leaders hired street gang toughs to disrupt the political rallies of opposing candidates and to prevent opposition supporters from voting on Election Day, sometimes using baseball bats and chains to do so.

  And if all of those woes were not enough to demoralize New Yorkers, they were, in the early 1840s, face-to-face with the greatest crime wave in the history of the United States. All of the triumphs of New York in business and culture were endangered by a crime epidemic perpetuated by an army of sordid criminals that threatened to topple the magnificent metropolis. Newspaper stories, Board of Aldermen reports, and state investigations showed that crime had been climbing at an alarming rate from the end of the War of 1812 into the early 1840s and that the city remained very badly policed. An 1843 Board of Aldermen report charged that “the criminal department was designed exclusively and only for arrest, trial and punishment of offenders and was not calculated efficiently to prevent crime or to suppress the licentiousness and vices which lead to it.” The crime wave seemed unstoppable, and New York City was completely unprepared for it.40

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Crime Everywhere

  The Devil’s work is done here on a gigantic scale.

  —James McCabe Jr.

  New York was a city of immediate danger and a city of intoxicating, sordid sin and crime in the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s. The metropolis boasted 4,567 bars, 769 of them unlicensed (the Five Points/Paradise Square neighborhood alone had 270 saloons), and several hundred houses of prostitution (some said as many as 600) that were home to anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 hookers (depending on who was counting). There were nearly 600 legal gambling emporiums where fistfights over gaming debts and cheating were routine. It was the era in which the numbers racket was born, and many in the city bragged that it was home to over 1,000 numbers shops and 3,000 numbers operators, who took in over $2.5 million a year (about $500 million in today’s currency) in the two-a-day numbers lotteries.

  Crime ruled in pre–Civil War New York City. More than 30,000 people were arrested each year, most for drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and assault. Three times as many people were arrested in New York each day as the number arrested in London and Paris combined. New York had the highest crime and murder rate in the country. Lawbreaking continued to rise, too. In the 1830s, there had been more than 10,000 arrests in New York each year. In the 1840s, the number climbed even higher, and in the late 1850s, nearly 50,000 people a year were being charged and incarcerated in the notorious Tombs prison and other city jails.1

  There was always someone stealing or someone beating up someone else in every neighborhood. From 1845 to 1853, one study showed, there were 257,738 arrests made, or some 32,000 per year. Some of the biggest arrest totals were for drunkenness (82,000), assault and battery (27,000), disorderly conduct (34,735), fighting in the streets (4,131), insanity (2,873), petit larceny (24,298), vagrancy (21,155), grand larceny (4,190), and pickpocketing (670). There were 270 people arrested for insulting females and 344 arrests of “runaway apprentices.” There were also a number of arrests for carrying a slingshot, which men used to wound their enemies in stre
et fights, and detentions for staging dogfights and cockfights. Men were even arrested for talking badly about their girlfriends in public. Within just eight more years, that 32,000-per-year arrest total would soar to 87,682. That would mean that given today’s New York population, the number of arrests would be about 911,000, and about 1.1 million including Brooklyn, or nearly quadruple actual current totals (the 2012 arrest total in New York City was approximately 338,000). There were so many people arraigned that it was estimated that by 1860 one in every ten New Yorkers had a criminal record. The crime rate kept climbing, too. As an example, it jumped nearly 25 percent in just one year, from 1852 to 1853. New York led the nation in murders, robberies, and assaults, and no other city came close to its criminality. In 1858, for instance, there were 22,634 arrests, 20 of them for murder, in Philadelphia. Comparatively, that would mean 47 murders per 700,000 or so people, New York’s population, but New York had 88 homicides that year, nearly double Philadelphia’s projected total. The total number of people charged with crimes in Philadelphia in 1858, extrapolated to 700,000 people, would be 52,000, but New York had 81,000, or 60 percent more.2

  Statistics in that era were not well kept. There were 86 murders in the city in the year 1857, according to the Board of Aldermen. Another study, published by the National Science Foundation in 2015, showed that New York City murders in that same year totaled 98. A third study, by police historian Eric Monkkonen, showed about 110 murders in 1860. Those numbers, given the population differences between the 1850s and the contemporary era, translate to a contemporary number of murders of about 1,400, or nearly five times today’s actual New York City homicide rate (328 murders in 2014).3 The number of murders had risen exponentially from the early 1830s to the 1850s, too. In the 1830s, the murder rate was about 4 per 100,000 residents of New York, but by the 1850s, it had climbed to 13 or 14 per 100,000, extraordinary rates rarely seen again in U.S. history. In addition to all of the slain New Yorkers, there were several hundred men and women who simply were “lost” and never found each year, many believed to have been killed. Some were executed and then buried or thrown into a river with weights tied to their bodies. There were so many “missing” city dwellers that by the late 1850s the New York police even formed an official Bureau for the Recovery of Lost Persons. Many of the missing eventually turned up at the city morgue in Bellevue Hospital, where autopsies by the city coroner showed that many of the 200 “missing” persons delivered there each year had signs of violence on their bodies, indicating that they had been murdered. So many dead were discovered that later the police set up a Bureau of Information to help them find the families of the missing dead.4 Bodies were found everywhere. A little girl playing in a wooded area in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn stumbled upon the completely nude body of an attractive twenty-five-year-old woman who had been slain and left to the elements and animals.5 One unknown man whose well-dressed, purplish body had been fished out of the East River was discovered to have been stabbed in the side by a wide-bladed knife and killed.

  Hundreds of abortions were performed each year in New York City, all of them illegal in that era. They were never included in the murder or crime rates, either. One estimate was that there was one abortion for every four live births. The doctors who performed them and women who underwent them did not say a word to anyone about the operations. Many married women, as well as single women, had them, and police hinted that many of those married women were wealthy wives.

  There was so much murder and violence in New York City that Davy Crockett, the legendary frontiersman, swore he would never return to the city after one frightening visit in 1835. “I thought I would rather risk myself in an Indian fight than venture among those creatures after night,” he said.6

  New York City not only led the nation in murders but was first in suicides, too. A man who took an informal survey of suicides nationally, using newspapers as his source, reported that there were 63 suicides in the first three months of 1841, and 32 of them took place in New York. The second-place city had only 8.7

  Some of the suicides were drab throat-slitters, but some were unusual. A downtown man put on his sleeping clothes, lay down in bed, pulled the covers up to his chin, and was still for two hours. Then he rose, opened the third-floor window, and leaped to his death. His body plummeted down into an alley at the side of the tenement house and was not discovered until the early-morning watchman saw it in a crumpled heap. Another man took a ride on one of the Hudson River ferries on a chilly January afternoon, climbed to the very top of the boat, looked left, looked right, and then jumped off, landing in the waterway and promptly drowning.8

  Crimes against property were a problem, too. Large, organized burglary rings thrived, and some perpetrators were so brazen that they took out newspaper advertisements to let residents know that their stolen property would be sold to the highest bidder at mid-nineteenth-century “Tupperware” parties at the homes of local women.

  By the early 1840s “fences,” men who would buy stolen goods and then sell them somewhere else at a profit, emerged. Gustavus Reed stole a number of items from a store one afternoon with the intention of selling them to a fence but was arrested at midnight at a grocery store before he could do so. There was so much stolen property to be had in New York, and in other cities, that globally minded fences set up offices to buy goods in one city and sell them in others. Joe Erich, as an example, became the number one fence in New York City by 1855 and set up an operation that dealt goods to other communities. Ephraim Snow set up shop in Philadelphia and sold goods that he had purchased from middle-level fences in Manhattan all over the country. In 1860, newspapers claimed that New York fences had put together a network in which they sold goods from the city to points as far west as New Orleans.9

  The overall crime rate of the 1840s and 1850s, as reported by the police and city officials, while staggering, was not even the true crime rate. Journalist Edward Crapsey, of The New York Times, said in the 1850s that there were far more crimes than the records showed. “The police commissioners of New York have never had the courage to inform the public of the number of burglaries and robberies annually committed in the metropolis,” he said, “but enough is known in a general way for us to be certain that there are hundreds of these crimes committed of which the public is not told. The rule is to keep secret all such affairs when an arrest does not follow the offense, and hardly any police official will venture to claim that the arrests occur in more than a [minority] of the cases. There are hundreds of such crimes every year in which the criminal is not detected.”10

  The criminals began to stop just stealing unprotected property, too, and started attacking people themselves. The New York Prison Association reported that during the 1840s, crimes against property increased about 50 percent over the 1830s but that there was an alarming 129 percent jump for crimes against people, with beatings and murders connected to robberies always on the rise. Thousands of New Yorkers began to carry the new Colt revolver, invented in 1839, for protection. In one New York Herald newspaper survey of readers, 80 percent admitted to carrying a gun when they left their home or apartment.11

  All of these various slayings might have swelled the murder rate to six or seven times the current level, or perhaps even higher. The crime rate was so high that historians later noted it was as bad as in the raucous cattle towns of the Wild West of the 1870s and 1880s, places such as Dodge City, Tombstone, Denver, and Deadwood. Those communities were so terrified of their criminals that many formed a “Law and Order” league to combat crime. That fear was not necessary, though. The murder rates in those Wild West communities were actually much lower than in New York City, an average of 1.5 murders per year for each of them, compared to New York’s 8.8 or so.12

  “The Devil’s work is done here on a gigantic scale,” moaned one New Yorker.13

  Every time reporter Crapsey or some other journalist would write a story about crime, others would denounce the sensational press for scaring the public. �
��The penny press is an unmixed evil,” complained the staid, six-cent New York American. “It panders to the worst passions and lives upon the fears, the credulity and the crimes of the community.”14

  Editors of the penny papers were enraged by those attacks and suggested that the problem was not the vicious crime stories that the penny sheets published. “The worst symptom of social disease would be manifested were the crimes and offenses of the day unheeded or passed by with trivial notices by the journalists,” Whitman countered.15

  Many crimes were never reported. There were undoubtedly more rapes committed than admitted in those years, since many victims of rape feared being socially ostracized if they reported the assault; hundreds of women on the thousands of immigrant ships additionally feared being prevented from disembarking and forced to return to Europe.16 Other crimes were often not counted in the criminal statistics, such as infanticides, the murder of infants by mothers who did not want them. Midwives who were clearly guilty of negligence in the deaths of women giving birth, usually in grimy boardinghouse rooms with dirty sheets and polluted water, were usually not charged. Coroner’s juries rarely did in-depth investigations of murder-suicides, and the two dead bodies were often not counted as homicides. Many bodies discovered washed up on a riverbank were dismissed as accidental drownings and not murders.17

  One glaring omission in crime reporting was the activity in the Five Points neighborhood. The area was so riddled with dangerous criminals and street gangs that the police refused to patrol there, so the hundreds of crimes committed in Five Points regularly, from prostitution to illegal gambling to pickpocketing to assault and murder, were never reported.