Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  Many New Yorkers felt that the endless wave of immigrants from Europe caused the crime wave, that European states bundled up their most notorious criminals and sent all of them to New York, just as the British had done back in the early years of the eighteenth century. In the 1840s, people often stumbled upon dead bodies, sometimes dismembered, near the docks or in lower New York alleys. Men were murdered for pocket change by cliques of robbers. One German immigrant was killed by robbers as he walked through Battery Park late one winter night. The murderers then went through his pockets and collected a total of twelve cents. Angry at their paltry haul, they threw the man’s dead body into the river, where it did not sink but landed on the ice. “It remained upon the ice, and those who passed along the battery wall early the next morning saw glaring at them the fixed eyes of a frozen corpse,” said Officer George Walling.14

  The press called the corpses “raw heads and bloody bones” and used the expression to underscore the violence of crime. Many of the dead were immigrants. Many of the people who killed them were immigrants, too. One study showed that nearly 65 percent of all of the men arrested for crimes in the 1840s were immigrants, and that shocked people, as did the previous criminal history of many in their home countries. The fever to stop the importation of immigrants who had any kind of criminal record was so high that Whig congressman Henry Seaman introduced a bill in Congress to give city officials the right to scrutinize the record of all new arrivals and to deport them back to their homeland if they appeared to be a security risk.

  No other immigrant group was despised as much as the Irish Catholics. Protestants hated them, and the Catholics returned the favor. New York was ripped apart by a general anti-Catholic feeling, spurred by Bishop John Hughes’s endless speeches insisting that the Catholics would soon take over the city, and the rough, tough, and dirt-poor Catholics newly arrived from Ireland, driven to America by the potato famine in the 1840s, would be the army to do it. Hughes and his cadre had a flood of new arrivals—angry Irish arrivals—to join their ranks.

  Most native New Yorkers hated the Irish, who seemed to arrive in never-ending boatloads. Between 1845 and 1881, three million Irish fled to America following the potato famine. One million Irish who remained home died during that period of time. To establish the size of that migration, consider that there were three times as many Irish as all of the immigrants that came to America from every other country in the world between 1830 and 1845. Their numbers grew each year. In 1850 alone, 117,000 of them arrived in Gotham. That number grew to 204,000 by the end of the 1850s.15 City dwellers did not simply fear the Irish but were afraid that as their numbers grew, to about 40 percent of the city population by the late 1850s, they would take over the city government and run the social world. The police saw them as a crime problem. Close to half the prisoners in New York—city and state—were Irish. They would get out of jail and return to their criminal lives, city officials worried. So many Irish were being arrested and tossed into police wagons that the cops soon started calling the vehicles “paddy wagons.” Few wanted to help them, either. In the late 1850s, help-wanted signs in store windows and ads in newspapers began to specify “No Irish Need Apply.” One job that Irish women did get was that of the domestic maid in homes and apartments. The job was considered lowly and well beneath native women, so they let the Irish do it. The women they worked for, and their husbands, all disdained the Irish. “Thieving rascals … who have never done a day’s work in their lives,” snorted one New Yorker about them.16

  Hughes and his parish priests did not help matters by telling everyone within earshot that the Catholics wanted state and city taxes to pay for their private parochial schools, but did not want to pay taxes themselves because they chose not to use the public schools. They wanted the lands that churches sat upon given to Holy Mother Church in Rome.

  Protestants who believed the preachings of Bishop Hughes genuinely feared the Irish and created as many roadblocks as they could to deter their success in America. Protestant ire was easy to ignite. They attacked and desecrated Catholic churches, beat up parishioners, burned rectories and convents. The Catholics, of course, then retaliated. The constables stood by and did little.17

  The African Americans in New York detested the Irish because the newly arrived residents from the Emerald Isle worked cheaper than they did. The Irish laborers eventually drove the blacks out of New York. The number of African Americans living in the city dropped from 16,358 in 1840 to 12,472 in 1865.18

  City fathers did not know how to handle the varied ethnic groups, just as they did not know how to manage growth or control law enforcement. They should have. Cities in Europe had dealt with those same problems, especially newly arrived ethnic people who spoke a different language, for hundreds of years, back to ancient Rome and Athens. New York paid no attention to how those urban areas confronted their problems. They had few studies or histories to read, but they still could have interviewed hundreds of new arrivals about how life was in their former cities; they never did so.19

  The feelings of those who hated the Irish Catholics, or any ethnic group, were scorned by Whitman and others who saw immigrants as the strength, not the weakness, of America. “Let them come and welcome!” Whitman said of the new arrivals, noting that the city was already full of poor immigrants. “The more the better.… [New York] wants the wealth of stout poor men who will work.”20

  By the 1840s, too, there was a growing resentment toward the rich of the city among the working-class laborers and the poor. The rich glided through town in their lavish horse-drawn carriages, dressed in the best suits and dresses money could buy, and were often seen in public with some of their many servants, as the wretched poor on the streets watched them with resentment in their eyes. That class war continued into the courts, where the people of New York felt that they could not get a fair hearing in any dispute with the wealthy or powerful. The judges there not only sided with the rich but were corrupt to the core as well.

  The poor were disliked, too. The downtrodden, many insisted, were responsible for the epidemics of cholera and other diseases that swept through New York in the pre–Civil War period. “Cases are confined as yet to our disgraceful tenement houses and foul side streets,” wrote George Templeton Strong. “We are letting [the poor] perish and … they will prove their … common humanity by killing us with the same disease.”21

  Many blamed the collapse of the churches for crime. People had lost faith, no longer relied on God, and turned to killing and stealing. Others blamed the diminished role of the previously stern father in family life. Dads were no longer just farmers, either. The “new” father of the 1840s and ’50s had to work outside the home, in factories and shops, usually six days a week, and was no longer home to discipline his children, who, unsupervised and lured by the temptations of the big city, turned to crime.22

  What would happen to all of these different classes of criminals? To the people? Where was the future? Where were the tough police that the city needed to combat these multiple crises that all cascaded through the town at the same time?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Faith in the Constables Frays as the City Implodes

  The undeniable imbecility and inefficiency of the police is creating great alarm in the decent and orderly portion of our inhabitants.

  —New York Tribune, July 10, 1852

  The New York police force was a mess. The entire chain of command of politically appointed, untrained, and lazy watchmen was overseen by politicians, who also paid them low wages, making a fee system for chores accomplished necessary. Watchmen, day and night, worked for about 90 cents a day or about $300 a year (that pay would rise to about $1,200 a year twenty years later); captains earned $1.87 per day (this fell to $1.75 for constables and rose to $2.25 for captains). The watchmen were then paid fees on top of their salary. The fees were so high that one group of watchmen signed a petition that stated they did not want a pay increase; they made their money on fees. Fees could mount up, to
o. The constables were given 25 cents for every warrant they served, 19 cents for each summons, 12 cents for taking a defendant into custody, 25 cents for questioning someone on unpaid bills, 12½ cents for summoning a jury, 12½ cents for each mile traveled for work, 12 cents for notifying a defendant of a trial date, 37 cents for arranging a bail bond, and 12½ cents for each subpoena issued.1

  The fees amounted to so much extra cash that when the watchmen finally did lobby for a basic daily salary increase in 1831 the Common Council promptly turned them down.

  Daytime constables could function like modern policemen, but nighttime constables could not. They could arrest someone for a crime only if they saw him or her commit it. They could conduct an investigation to make an arrest, but only if they did so with a daytime constable; the difficulty was getting one of them to work without a reward or work at night or assume some physical risk. That limited all police work.

  The state legislature created another hurdle. It had control over just about all New York City operations and the budget and had retained that power since 1811. Under that authority, it controlled the size of the New York force and, to save money, continually kept it small. No matter what the city wanted to do, it required the approval of a state legislature that met nearly two hundred miles away. At the time that system was put in place, the federal government was just forty years old and still trying to bolster its strength in determining national policies while leaving other powers to the states. The states, in turn, wanted to control government within their borders, and that included control of the cities. That left little control of local government to cities. Control of the cities also increased the power of the political party that was dominant in the state legislature and enabled it to institute more taxes to use for state programs, not city purposes. That lack of home rule made it difficult for cities to function properly. The New York legislature kept power over New York City. Most other state legislatures in that pre–Civil War era gradually gave power to the cities, though, making the governing of them, especially in law enforcement, easier. New York lawmakers did not, and held out against power sharing until it was too late.2

  Another problem in law enforcement was the public’s continued bizarre reluctance to obey orders from the police. A police magistrate, Charles Christian, wrote an anonymous pamphlet on police reform in 1812 in which he told readers that the residents of New York saw themselves as good Republicans who could supervise themselves and did not need any brutish policemen to tell them what to do.

  The city grew to 123,000 inhabitants by 1820, but the numbers of murders and robberies were low. That was because the great invasion of immigrants had not yet started, the street toughs had not risen, poverty had not washed through city streets, the revolver had not been invented, religious and racial hatreds were still at a low boil, the factories had not opened in large numbers, and tenement slums had not yet developed.

  By the 1830s, the constables remained an organization of mostly unarmed law enforcers who had no professional training and were physically weak and unable to grapple with criminals. They were unwilling to put down disturbances, too. One watchman tried to do just that in an anti-Catholic riot in 1806, and the rioters killed him. It was a lesson for all.

  Everyone made fun of the constables. They wore long, dark coats and leather helmets for protection that looked foolish. The press soon started calling them “leatherheads” or “leather skulls.” They were advised to varnish their helmet brims, which were on the back, and the hats became hard and heavy and difficult to wear. Public officials wrung their hands over the constables, the press laughed at them, and the residents of the city feared for their lives because they had such weak protection from the forces that lurked in the night.

  They were correct. In the early 1830s, a mob of thieves targeted the police for some late-night mischief. A city council Watch Committee report in that era stated that “the lower part of the city is infested with a gang of robbers who have recently entered at night several watchhouses, committed depredations on the property of the occupants, and succeeded for some time in eluding the vigilance of the police and watch departments.”

  The inability of the constables to protect themselves, or the town, was obvious to all and a reminder that during the past generations law enforcement had been lax. “Our city has been so long exempt from the horrors of midnight robbery that it is feared that the citizens have relaxed in those precautions necessary for the preservation of their property, and without which, any efforts made by this board must be ineffectual to correct the evil complained of,” the report that involved the watch houses concluded.3

  Yet, despite this overwhelming criticism of the constables, the mayor and his staff seemed quite pleased with them. “The persons so engaged,” said the mayor on June 18, 1832, “had always constituted a highly respectable class, with few exceptions, and under the judicious arrangement of their captains, the Watch were becoming constantly more useful, and were entitled to confidence and encouragement.” That view, of course, was a major part of the problem.4

  Constables were more comforters than law enforcers and reveled in caring for those whom they did not protect. A good example was an 1841 incident in which a very drunk old woman, dressed in rags, staggered down a street toward one of the city’s small watch houses, or one-man guardhouses, where watchmen sat rather than walking the streets. She fell into the watchman’s arms, and he held her tightly as he looked around the neighborhood for assistance. “Thank you kindly, sir, for I should like to go home,” she said. A woman who lived on the quiet residential street, her bedroom window open to catch evening breezes, heard the conversation. She saw “the dreary image of the watchhouse, which that poor wretch dreamed was her home. It proved too much for my overloaded sympathies. I hid my face in the pillow and wept,” she wrote.5

  The untrained and rarely supervised constables often acted in amateurish fashion. In an 1836 court case, a judge told a group of constables to go outside the courtroom, open a particular door, and admit six gentlemen who were witnesses for a trial. The constables opened the wrong door, and about sixty ragamuffins ran into the courtroom, shouting loudly, and began to jeer at the judge.

  One frustrated man said that “the undeniable imbecility and inefficiency of the police is creating great alarm in the decent and orderly portion of our inhabitants.”6

  In short, the New York constable was a joke.

  * * *

  New York in the late 1830s, after the Jewett murder and at the start of the great crime wave, was chaotic. It was a city still reeling from the economic distress of the Panic of 1837, the infusion of immigrants, and the antics of the roughnecks in the city’s street gangs. The setting was rife for an explosion of lawlessness. “The times are certainly hard. Money is scarce and provisions are dear. Goods won’t sell and customers don’t pay, the banks won’t discount, stocks are down to nothing and real estate unavailable,” wrote Philip Hone, who lost half his fortune, and real estate value in New York depreciated about $40 million in just six months.7

  Captain Frederick Marryat, a naval officer from England, was in New York at that time. He was a jovial visitor. “My appearance in New York was very much like bursting into a friend’s house with a merry face when there is a death in it,” he wrote of the fatalistic feelings of New Yorkers in 1837.8

  There were many killings in that era, but to many the saddest of all was the murder of the usually homeless and yet quite popular McDonald Clarke, who slept on the lawns of the city’s parks. He was an irate, rambunctious, garrulous, probably autistic man who had fallen in love, only to have his lover’s mother kidnap her and forbid her to ever see him again. It broke his heart. He roamed city street corners greeting all in an overly friendly way and, wherever he could, spouting his poetry. He did so happily, a big smile on his face, eyes wide, his hands always gesturing, inside the salons of the rich and in the alleys of the poorest neighborhoods. Everybody in New York City seemed to know him and love him, and pity him.


  “He was as innocent as a child,” said reformer Child, who met him twice on the streets, as did just about everybody else. “Often, when he had nothing to give, he would snatch up a ragged, shivering child on the street, carry it to the door of some princely mansion and demand to see the lady of the house. When she would appear, he would say ‘Madam, God has made you one of the trustees of his wealth. Take this poor child. Wash it, feed it, clothe it, comfort it—in God’s name.’”9

  Child, like all, was crushed when she learned that Clarke had been put in jail, a common event for the poet, and then killed under mysterious circumstances (the jailers said he drowned in a large puddle of water in his cell; friends said the jailers beat him to death). Even further angered was Walt Whitman, who as a poet knew Clarke well. He was moved to write a poem about Clarke after his strange death that was published in a newspaper. Whitman called him “the poor poet, the eccentric and unfortunate McDonald Clarke.”10

  The high numbers of crimes and the murders of hundreds in New York brought about depression in many residents. None was more morose about all the killings than reformer Child, who saw all the deaths as symbolic of the poisoning of life in New York City. She was especially frazzled after she walked with John Hopper past a pauper’s cemetery and a Catholic cemetery on the same afternoon, both across the street from busy neighborhoods. Her emotions were triggered by the rows of tombstones in them. “Bright lights shone through crimson, blue, and green, in the apothecaries’ windows, and were reflected in prismatic beauty from the dirty pools in the street. It was like poetic thoughts in the minds of the poor and ignorant; like the memory of pure aspirations in the vicious; like a rainbow of promise, that God’s spirit never leaves even the most degraded soul. I smiled as my spirit gratefully accepted this love-token from the outward; and I thanked our heavenly Father for a world beyond this.”11