He spent several years as a schoolteacher on Long Island before moving to Manhattan in 1841 to work as a reporter. Whitman wrote for the Democratic Review (he was a rock-hard Democrat) and the journal Brother Jonathan in 1841 and 1842 and then in the spring of 1842 became the editor/writer of the penny sheet the New York Aurora, where he really established himself as an observer of the city—and of its crime and constables. His bosses there said he was a bold and original writer.
Fired from the Aurora in a dispute with the owners, he went to New Orleans and spent two years as a crime reporter for the Crescent and then returned to New York. He moved back to Brooklyn in 1846 and worked for several years as editor/writer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He toiled as a journalist by day and as a poet and fiction writer at night. Whitman churned out four pieces of fiction, including the novel Franklin Evans, and nineteen poems, plus keeping a near-daily journal of his life. His hardscrabble, authentic journalism helped him become the original poet he was always praised as being, and many of his newspaper stories became part of his poetry later, as did his journal notes. Sometimes he reprinted his newspaper work word for word, or paraphrased it, in his poems. As an example, his newspaper stories of fires and firemen turned up in the lines beginning “I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken.…” Another penny press story about how butchers’ helpers in the city celebrated at night after a hard day at work was rewritten into a poetic stanza.74 “If it had not been for his journalism years, Whitman would not have become the Whitman of Leaves of Grass,” said one scholar.75
Whitman contended that nothing was as beautiful as New York’s new tree-filled parks that were sprinkled throughout the city. “It is a pleasant thing to see well-dressed crowds of men and women with smiling faces, promenading our streets or pubic grounds. And the little children! The fat, fresh, clean little children—it is better than splendor to look at them and their gambols.… A man may look a few rods about him and his gaze not be intercepted by brick walls and chimneys and fences,” he wrote.76
New Yorkers made it a point to spend as much time as possible in the city’s parks, such as the Battery and City Hall Park, to get away from the overbearing stench of city life. The streets were teeming with people and horses, crushing into each other. Hundreds of food vendors filled avenues such as Broadway and the Bowery, peddling their exotic-smelling foods to anyone with enough money to buy them. The air smelled of the foul breath of drunks who had just been thrown out of crowded saloons, of thick, wet horse manure dropped here and there, of the black, cloudy pollution spewed forth from the new steamships, of the garbage stacked up high in bags in front of stores and in alleys, its decaying food smells wafting through the air, nearly poisoning it. The parks, with thick forests of green trees, gently rolling hills, deep ponds, streams and walkways, and long and lovely gardens, was an escape from all of that, a paradise of fresh air and fresh feelings. They were, many said, the “lungs of the city,” and through them people could breathe God’s clean air. “More than a million lungs are hard at work day and night,” wrote someone for the New York Daily Times, “respiring the city’s air, many of them in lanes crowded to excess and buildings bursting with repletion. We have no competent breathing place.” The triumph of these parks over congested city life led to the planning of Central Park in the 1850s and its opening in 1873.77
And what was the very first problem city planners and officials encountered in Central Park lands, and then within the park when it opened? Crime. Ruffians and thieves accosted park visitors, day and night, and became such an ugly presence and danger that when the park was officially opened it employed a security force of trained “policemen” entirely separate from the New York City police force, which the park’s managers did not trust.
* * *
Moral reform leaders argued that it was not enough to continually help the victims of crime and sin—the drunkards and card players—but that the city had to build a new world in which they would not fall prey to temptation. Reformers were sick of funding almshouses and wanted a world in which there simply were no poor who needed them. Thomas Eddy was one reformer who embraced that feeling. He said of the poor that he was “tired seeing them in their distress, and it appears to me more wise to fix upon every profitable plan to prevent their poverty and misery.”78
To achieve that goal, and to wipe out sin and crime, churches and civic organizations, old and new, flooded New York. The city was home to dozens of churches and synagogues and a number of new missionary groups funded by the established ministers of the “New Light” evangelical churches. Reform groups included the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, the American Bible Society, the New York and American Religious Tract Societies, the Female Moral Reform Society, the Hebrew Benevolent Society, the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum, the American Sisters of Charity, the Episcopalian New York Mission Council, the American Home Mission Society, the New York City Temperance Society, the New York Magdalen Society, and others.
The leaders of the moral reform societies, such as Lydia Finney, argued that the foundation of crime in New York was drunkenness. Men became inebriated and engaged in rowdy bar brawls or went home, stumbling all the way, and beat up their wives and children. Drunkenness was a persistent problem. The study mentioned earlier that tracked crime in New York from 1845 to 1853 showed that of 257,738 arrests, 63,944, or one-quarter, were on charges of intoxication. Another 18,217 charges were filed for men and women who were intoxicated and were also guilty of disorderly conduct. Altogether, arrests for being drunk totaled 82,161, or 31 percent of all the arraignments in town. (The drinking deluge was not endemic to New York; in 1858, two-thirds of Philadelphia arrests were for drunkenness and disorderly conduct.) If men did not drink, then these crimes would not take place. It was a strong argument, and it fueled the various temperance societies in the city. Reverend Leonard Bacon, of the New York Temperance Society, said that “more than 10,000 men will be made drunkards in one year.”79
Drunks were everywhere. Unruly, lawless crowds full of them surged through the city every day, paying no attention to the constables and roaming wherever they pleased. Dozens of men arrived at the traditional New Year’s Day public reception at the home of Mayor Cornelius Lawrence in 1837 intent on stirring up trouble. “The rabble … use his house as a Five Points Tavern,” complained Philip Hone, who was there. “Every scamp who has bawled out ‘Huzza for Lawrence!’ or ‘Down with the Whigs!’ considers himself authorized to use him and his house and furniture at his pleasure; to wear his hat in his presence; to smoke and spit upon his carpet; to devour his beef and turkey and to wipe his greasy fingers upon the curtains and get drunk with his liquor.” Indeed, the men rushed the tables and liquor cabinets as soon as they swept into the home. They shoved each other and argued loudly. A furious Mayor Lawrence had to summon constables to help him chase the brigands out of his home and lock all the doors and windows so they could not return.80
Mayor Lawrence was popular. When he was elected, he rode into the city across New York Harbor from Perth Amboy on a large steamboat festooned with flags and red, white, and blue bunting. An exuberant band played for him when his ships docked. Lawrence led a parade of hundreds of well-dressed followers through the streets of New York past large and cheering throngs. It was a glorious day.81
Everybody had a solution for drunkenness. Close all the bars. Enforce the drinking age limits. Attach surcharges to drinks. Get ministers, priests, and rabbis to give more sermons denouncing drinking because it leads to crime. One popular proposal was to make sure all bars were licensed (one-sixth were not) and to indict any bartender who served alcohol to men who were already obviously drunk. None of these worked, though.82
Later, a disgruntled Hone said that the city government of his friend the mayor and the entire electoral process had no future because of the decline of the city. “Scenes of violence, disorder and riot have taught us in this city that universal suffrage will not do for large communities,” he wrote, telling frie
nds that in country villages a “black sheep” is easily spotted, but in huge metropolises they never are—and are not stopped.83
Hone told people, too, that the night constables not only seemed powerless but were. For years, a law prevented night watchmen from conducting investigations or making arrests for any crime except one that they saw committed right in front of them. The day watchmen, however, could make arrests and conduct investigations. The irony of it was that the only exception to the rule was that a night watchman could make an arrest if he could get a day watchman to make the arrest with him.84
Outside, as the dark night deepened around ex-mayor Hone’s neighborhood, all was quiet. A few blocks away on the Bowery, the bars were full, and people drank everything in sight.
CHAPTER SIX
Lydia Child, Crime, and Chaos
There arrived at this port, during the month of May, 15,825 passengers. All Europe is coming across the ocean; all that part at least who cannot make a living at home; and what shall we do with them? They increase our taxes, eat our bread, and encumber our streets, and not one in twenty is competent to keep himself.
—Former mayor Philip Hone, June 1836
One of the most fervent crusaders against crime was Lydia Child. The reformer was thirty-eight when she joined many other new arrivals in New York City. She was a plain-looking, conservatively dressed lady with an angular face and square chin. She wore her hair in a tight bun, as did most of the female reformers, and had thin eyes. She came from Boston, where she had become one of the most revered women writers in the country and a leader of both the antislavery and the women’s movements.
The National Anti-Slavery Standard, based in New York, was looking for a new editor, and Child, a prolific writer of essays and novels and familiar to all, came highly recommended. She became the first woman to serve as editor of a national antislavery publication.
* * *
Child was just one of dozens of hardworking reformers who had moved to New York.
Another was John McDowall, a Princeton divinity student who became a missionary. He and his followers formed the New York Moral Reform Society and attacked the depravity in the city in an organized way, day by day, week by week, month by month.
Reformers like McDowall said that hookers paid off police officers with sex or money not to arrest them, and johns paid them off, too. The constables, he charged, were just as guilty as the hookers and johns in committing so many crimes due to prostitution. In one of his columns, McDowall even suggested that the brothels and their madams were responsible for murders in the city and that they “ought to be executed” themselves.1
He was later backed up by Police Commissioner Joel Erhardt, who wrote in 1879, speaking of the 1840s and 1850s, that police captains had received many “contributions” from the heads of brothels, and that in 1879 it was still an ongoing practice. Officials on a police corruption panel that sat in 1894 and 1895, the Lexow Commission, agreed. Speaking of the pre–Civil War era, Clarence Lexow wrote that prostitution was “fostered and protected by the police of the city” and that the police had “a partnership … in the traffic [of prostitutes] resulting in the largest part of the resulting profit.” Reformer Frank Moss told the Lexow Commission that the police knew everything about prostitution and gambling and simply, for a bribe, looked the other way. “It knows every prostitute, it knows every house, and no prostitute, no gambler, can live for a moment in any place in the city without being known and his haunt being known. The police are just as competent to put their hands on a disorderly person in a flat as they are in a whorehouse,” said Moss, adding that police were paid off to protect whorehouses. Around the turn of the twentieth century, many reformers testified and wrote that the corruption of the police in the 1880s and 1890s followed a long pattern that extended back to the pre–Civil War era.2
Madams who ran houses of prostitution in the 1880s and 1890s testified that they had to pay an initiation fee of several hundred dollars for each brothel to a police captain or patrolman, then begin monthly fee payments of from twenty-five to fifty dollars. They did this, they said, because their predecessors going back to the 1840s had done the same thing. The managers of lottery shops and gambling casinos gave the same testimony and said it had been the cost of doing business since the early decades of the nineteenth century.3
Reformers had support in the press, where editors believed not only that prostitutes were victims of society but that prostitution caused significant crime in the city. “If the object of the New York authorities were to increase prostitution and depravity, they could not better accomplish it than by their present policy towards the unfortunate class that everybody endeavors to ignore, but who suffer and cause more guilt, crime and misery than even bad rum can justly be held accountable for,” wrote Walt Whitman, who added that the police arrested whores and then tossed them into the Tombs with the thieves they serviced.4
One of those women sent to the Tombs, and then transferred to a different jail, was Amelia Norman, an attractive young working girl arrested for the attempted murder of a wealthy man who had seduced her, promised marriage, and then abandoned her. She stabbed him in a rage. She seemed to be just like all the city’s other prostitutes, everyone said.
Many of Amelia’s fellow hookers were furious about the arrest, and so was reformer Lydia Child. To the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Amelia was symbolic of the sexual plague that had attacked New York and all of the United States. She saw this as a typical case of men being able to do anything and women having no chance to protect themselves. Any woman who struck out against a man who sexually abused her was not comforted but bounced off the streets into a cold, dank prison. Child visited Norman often in jail, got her friend John Hopper to find her a good lawyer, started a committee to raise money for her legal defense, and covered her trial in the pages of the Standard. In all of her writing about the case, Child explained what the prosecution always did in trials like Norman’s—paint the woman defendant as a whore in order to deprive her of any sympathy from the jury. Ergo, Child said, all women who ever had sex with a man, for love or money, had to be whores, which was not so. It was Amelia who was the victim in this case, not the man she stabbed.5
“I had no doubt that if all deeply injured women were to undertake to redress their wrongs in this bad way, there would be a huge pile of dead citizens. I even thought it not impossible that some of the honorable court themselves might be among the missing,” she wrote in one of her several incendiary “Letters from New-York” columns.6
Thanks to the hard work of the lawyer Child obtained (she gave him themes to use in the case, too), her public writing about the case, and her defense of oppressed women, the jury ruled in favor of Amelia and freed her. The editor did not stop there, though. She took Amelia home with her, nursed her, fed her, gave her some new clothes, and let her stay for a few months. Then she found her a job in New England and paid for her transportation there. Later, she wrote letters of recommendation for her to obtain other jobs.
Amelia was an example, Child told friends, of how badly “criminals” were treated by the law enforcement and justice system. The rich go free, and the indigent, no matter how innocent they might be, go to jail. “When I look at this poor, misguided girl, now so useful, and improving daily in her view of things,” she wrote later of Norman, “and think what she would have been, had they sent her to Sing Sing, my feelings with regard to society’s treatment of criminals grow stronger and stronger.”7
Child and many other reformers, especially anticrime advocates, did not believe that the city government of New York was committed to their goals, and so they went to Albany to lobby for changes in New York City laws through the state legislature. This well-intentioned campaign backfired because the new state laws often conflicted with city laws, and city fathers resented both the reformers and state legislators for meddling with city business.8
“The world would be in a happier condition if legislators spent half a
s much time and labor to prevent crime as they do to punish it,” a frustrated Child wrote after one of her many prison visits.9
* * *
Amelia Norman was freed in the middle of yet another tidal wave of immigrants that arrived on ship transports in New York and stayed in the city. The surge of immigrants arriving daily scared most New Yorkers. Hone, who had watched them walk down the gangways of hundreds of ships during his lifetime, was angry with the relentless hordes. As an example, in the 1830s, four times as many immigrants arrived in the port of New York as had arrived during the previous decade. By the early 1850s, more than 300,000 immigrants a year would arrive in New York City. The increases in immigrants in other seaports and river ports, such as Philadelphia and Richmond, Virginia, were the same. “There arrived at this port, during the month of May, 15,825 passengers. All Europe is coming across the ocean; all that part at least who cannot make a living at home; and what shall we do with them? They increase our taxes, eat our bread, and encumber our streets, and not one in twenty is competent to keep himself,” New Yorker Hone complained in June 1836.10
Added a French visitor, Jean Ampère, “The flood arrives without interruption.”11
The new arrivals were of all shapes and sizes. “The pavements present men of every land and color, red, black, yellow, and white, in every variety of costume and beard, and ladies, beautiful and ugly, richly dressed,” noted a woman.12
Hone and Ampère were angry not only at the arrival of so many immigrants but at their attitude. “They are scarcely a year in the country before they pretend to be equal to our born citizens. I should have no objections to their coming here, provided they would remain content to become servants—the only condition, by the by, they are fit for: but when they come without a cent in their pockets, pretending to enjoy the same privileges as our oldest and most respectable citizens, my blood boils with rage,” one man said.13
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