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Law & Disorder Page 13

by Bruce Chadwick


  Saddened by her barren love life, and despite the close friendship with reform writer and fellow intellectual Margaret Fuller, Child turned more and more of her energy to fighting law enforcement in New York. She was certainly not alone. At the end of 1842, the Common Council voted to form a special committee to study a reorganization of the police force and to solicit suggestions from the city police magistrates in connection with the idea. That came just a few weeks after the council restored patrolmen pay cuts that had been voted a year before.12

  In 1843, a special report turned in to the Board of Aldermen by a board subcommittee mentioned the new criminal class, “a large number of persons who are wicked and debased,” but put the blame for chaos in the city squarely on the police force. It said that the police were inefficient, commanders were ill-prepared for their posts, the justice system was almost inoperable, and the entire force, appointed by city officials, was loaded with untrained and ineffectual men who merely knew the right people. The police in New York, the report concluded, were an absolute disaster, and had been for many years.13

  One large problem in New York City law enforcement was leadership. High Constable (Chief) Jacob Hays was a big, burly man always dressed in black pants and a frock coat. He wore a black hat and tied a white kerchief around his neck. Hays was partially bald and had the dress and look of a wealthy patrician. He joined the force at the end of the previous century and continued leading it almost until his death in 1850. He plunged into daily police work with a passion. Hays not only solved bank robberies but personally arrested the robbers. He walked the streets of the city looking for criminals and arrested them wherever he found them. He once charged off a platform where the mayor was giving a speech and arrested someone in the crowd whom the police had sought for months. Hays outdetected the detectives, outfought the good fighters, outsmarted the smartest constables. He was a diligent administrator, and he held his job for decades during the administrations of several mayors from different political parties. The men who ran Tammany Hall loved him, and so did the people.

  The drawback, though, was that Hays was all legend. He was a lawman in the East like Bat Masterson was in the West—famous, mercurial, brilliant, and known throughout the land. He was no reformer, though. He was so venerated by officials and the people that no one pushed him to improve the force. Hays was just Hays, hailed by all. He could have done a lot to change the nature of the police force as he saw the crime rate soar, but did not. No one asked him to lead a reform of the department, either, and so he rested on his law-and-order laurels. As far as High Constable Hays was concerned, all was well. All was not.

  * * *

  Work was often hard to find in big cities, especially New York. Huge factories and stores hired large labor forces, but most jobs were menial and low paying.14 In addition to that, many jobs in the mid-nineteenth century, such as shipping, were seasonal. Much work was outdoors, despite the growth of factories and large stores. When winter set in, outdoor jobs were cut back and unemployment in New York rose. The thousands of men who had no jobs had little to do and, with idle time on their hands, became involved in petty crime or, hanging out in the streets, fell prey to crime.15

  Workers in New York felt a great sense of emptiness, too, because few worked for themselves anymore. Self-employment, whether running a farm or a city store, had been a marked part of American tradition. That historic feeling of making your own way in the world and providing for your family or relying on yourself had been lost, and people resented it. They felt that the ambiguous “city” had snatched something precious from them, and they were angry. As employees of someone else, the people felt their strength being drained away, and that gave them a sense of insecurity and made them feel like they were victims. Chaos and crime were a result.16

  Everything seemed to bring out the worst in New Yorkers. Men engaged in fights over lost card games, dogfights, and bets. If there was a fight to start, New Yorkers would be there to start it.

  In New York City in the early 1840s, too, there was a general feeling of the loss of self-respect that brought about alienation. Men fought with anybody who disrespected them. Many men felt exiled from all of society, in an emotional corner, and knew of no other way to get out of that corner than with their fists. It was an era of manliness, and many men strutted around town, challenging others to a fight. Some walked brazenly down city streets with swords at their sides, or revolvers tucked into their belts. Some dressed as pirates and tied colorful bandanas around their heads. They looked for confrontations and enjoyed them, knowing that the constables with no weapons and no desire for a fistfight were not going to stop them. Some brawlers forgot about each other and lay in wait for constables. Two young men beat up a watchman in front of a public house on Grand Street just for fun one night in 1840. Sometimes people were killed in these brawls, and at other times they escaped with just a bad beating. These midnight marauders were feared by the populace.17

  Although there were not a lot of murders of wives by their husbands, those that did occur scared everybody. Men in a rage over something picked up any weapon they could find and assaulted their spouse. On New Year’s Day 1842, Thomas Tappan became angry at his wife. There was no gun or wooden club in his house, so he ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife and fork from a drawer near the sink. Tappan rushed back into the bedroom, held his wife down on her back, and stabbed her to death with the utensils.18

  People were afraid, tense, and anxious about everything in New York City and were unable to get help from the town’s government, which they believed to be both inept and corrupt. They felt that they had no other way to obtain fairness, justice, and a chance at a good life than through violence. Brawls took place on the streets, and in some of them people were killed. Robbers ransacked houses, street urchins seemed to pick everybody’s pocket, and twelve-year-old girls sold their bodies for pocket change. The preteen whores, twelve-year-old pickpockets, and kids who worked for the street gangs lived on the streets or in old vacant warehouses and were called “street Arabs.” They were rarely arrested because the police and city magistrates felt sorry for them, never quite understanding how they were carving out a small criminal empire for themselves. By 1845 there were just over ten thousand of them, and they scared all. New Yorkers lived, many of them said, on the edge of an earthquake of political, social, cultural, racial, and emotional pressure that appeared ready to erupt and ruin them and their city.19

  Many crusaded against the unruly rabble that threatened to devour the town. James Gordon Bennett of the Herald conducted lengthy campaigns to reform not just the police but the magistrates, too. In 1841, his efforts resulted in the impeachment of one. It was charged, Bennett reported in the Herald, that the judge routinely took payoffs from pickpockets to give them probation and not jail terms. He was charged with exacting a $400 bribe from another man to give him a suspended sentence. Bennett was happy about the impeachment but would not stop, demanding a citywide probe of police magistrates and their rather lax attitude toward criminals. Many constables believed that judges threw out charges they brought against gamblers because the detainees contributed money to political clubs to which the judges belonged. After a few years of these practices, constables simply delivered their own justice, with a beating or crack on the back of the head with a nightstick, instead of bringing lawbreakers to court for a pointless appearance. Bennett wrote that the entire police magistrate system was corrupt. He was not alone. Mike Walsh, editor of the penny Subterranean, called another judge “one of the human stink weeds which are nurtured by the moral slime and putrefaction of that sink of inequity … the Halls of Justice.”20

  A much-cited joke of the era was that a man who was robbed of $1,000 could obtain $500 of it back easily by paying a judge to get it from the man who stole it.

  The crime wave seemed never ending to Bennett and others, as did the ineptitude of the constable force. At the beginning of each year, frustrated New Yorkers promised themselves that things would
get better. Philip Hone did that on New Year’s Day 1840. He refused to let the routine law enforcement breakdown in 1839 depress him. His finances had improved somewhat since the Panic of 1837 nearly ruined him. Revenues at his family’s auction house had increased. He woke up on New Year’s Day 1840 bright-eyed and determined to make it a good year for himself and hoped it would be a good year for the entire city. The day began well enough as Hone finished his breakfast and put on some of his finest clothes for required visits to his friends on the annual holiday.

  A recent snowfall still covered the city, and sheets of ice had formed on the streets. Long, clear icicles hung from the roofs of residences and stores. A northwest wind howled. New Year’s Day was a special event in New York City in the 1840s. Residents invited friends to receptions and parties at their homes that lasted from roughly 10:00 A.M. until midnight (receptions at the homes of the super-rich never began until noon). Invitations were sent out on elegant cards. People like Hone would receive dozens of them. The receptions were often lavish, so elegant that people hired bartenders just for the day, along with special waitstaffs. Receptions at the more elegant homes always had a three- or four-piece orchestra on hand to play music for the guests. All tried their best to keep out roving bands of young men with invitations of some kind, often stolen or counterfeited, who crashed parties and, inebriated, disgraced themselves. Partygoers on New Year’s Day enjoyed the best of food, such as pheasant and woodcock, along with the finest imported wines and liquors.21

  George Templeton Strong went to many of these parties. At times he enjoyed himself, and at other times he was angry at all of his friends who tried to play matchmaker and introduced him to various single women, all of whom he found either dull or manipulative. Some were “supernaturally ugly,” he said, and “wooden in their stupidity.” He loathed the gold diggers who were only interested in “an Elizabethan mansion, fifty feet by ninety-five, with furniture and establishment to match, on … Fifth Avenue.”22

  Guests at these nighttime receptions would drink the most expensive wines in the world and sample the carefully made appetizers. Dancing to music provided by the orchestras would begin around 11:00 P.M., and around midnight the dining rooms were opened and people would have dinner. That was followed by more dancing until the evening ended around 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. Soirees at these elegant ballrooms were expensive, up to $1 million a gala in today’s money. The reward was great, though. Partygoers enjoyed themselves, and, even more important, the party elevated the hosts in the esteem of the rich.23

  The grandest parties were on New Year’s Eve and the following day. If a New Year’s Day fell during a snowstorm, partygoers traveled the city streets in sleighs that slid noiselessly through the neighborhoods (every year, several people were killed when they were catapulted out of sleighs in fabled “sleigh races” in city neighborhoods). Hone walked out the door and down the stone steps of his stoop to the street. It was so chilly that he felt like he was at the “north pole,” but he paid the weather no mind as he walked, bundled up with a top hat and thick wool scarf tied around his neck, to visit friends and neighbors on his traditional parade through the city on New Year’s Day. The former mayor ignored what was left of the refuse left on the snow from the celebrants of New Year’s Eve parties in the streets, despite the cold, the night before. Thousands of revelers gathered near his home in the Broadway and Bowery area to celebrate every year, causing considerable noise and leaving garbage strewn over the street. This morning, because of the snow, everything looked better than usual on the first day of the year. Hone spent nearly five hours trudging through the ice and snow to the homes of those he loved. He was in good spirits, too, because he had hit a milestone; he had turned sixty on October 23. (“As to health and strength and preservation of my faculties, I have great reason to be thankful,” he wrote in his diary.)

  His New Year’s joy ended quickly, though, when he read the newspapers that morning. Not one but two murders kicked off the New Year in New York. A Staten Island butcher had seduced a local girl, and one of her friends had caught him and killed him. In lower Manhattan, a gang of street toughs broke into the home of a German man and his friends who were celebrating on New Year’s Eve, assaulted them, and destroyed much of the house. The German and his friends drove them off, but the young men returned later, armed. The young people burst into his house, but the German, waiting for them, was armed with one of the new Colt revolvers. He started blasting. He killed the ringleader, a twenty-two-year-old man named John Armstrong, and badly wounded four others, who fled into the streets.24

  Happy New Year …

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Amateur Police Walk the Beat of a Raucous City

  Here are people of all classes … of every grade, every hue of ignorance and learning, morality and vice, wealth and want, fashion and coarseness, breeding and brutality, elevation and degradation.

  —Walt Whitman, Aurora, March 8, 1842

  Philip Hone woke up the following morning and looked out the window at a crisp and cold New York whose residents were growing angrier at the spurt of crime. From the Five Points to the docks, from saloons to brothels, the city seemed about to be swamped by crime—with no one there to save it except a bungling, comical force of mostly unarmed constables.

  Gotham was awash in problems. In addition to murders and robberies, many New Yorkers felt that the exploding population threatened to swallow them up in a tidal wave of filth, corruption, and crime. Reformer Lydia Child was one of them. She said that life in the city “has sometimes forced upon me, for a few moments, an appalling night-mare sensation of vanishing identity; as if I were but an unknown, unnoticed, and unseparated drop in the great ocean of human existence, as if the uncomfortable old theory were true, and we were but portions of a Great Mundane Soul, to which we ultimately return, to be swallowed up in its infinity.” She added that, like many others, she found herself “like the absent[-minded] man who put his clothes in bed, and hung himself over the chair.”1

  New York was by far the most populous city hit with a crime wave, but it was certainly not alone. Other urban areas suffered criminal epidemics just as Gotham did. Up and down the East Coast, and as far inland as Chicago and on the West Coast, too, crime was the number one problem for city dwellers. Its cure was their number one goal. Residents of other cities had been blind to the devastating effects of the crime wave and should be made aware of them, argued many reformers. “It is a fact against which we ought no longer to shut our eyes,” wrote one editor in Pittsburgh, “that we have in the very midst of us a population of the most abandoned kind.”2

  Philadelphians, too, were targets of the new urban crime wave. “The numerous acts of outrage upon the persons and property of our peaceable citizens and the boldness with which many of these acts are committed … are sure indications that we are infested at this time by an unusual number of villains, of the boldest and most daring character,” said Mayor William Milnor in the City of Brotherly Love.3

  The number of constables in New York remained quite small in the mid-1840s. The city only had about 850 constables, a ratio of 1 watchmen for every 805 residents, and they worked in shifts so that at any one time, the city of nearly half a million people was supervised by just 300 or so officers. It ranked only a sad sixth in the country in constables per population. Tiny Richmond, Virginia, with just 27,000 residents, had 123 watchmen (projected against New York, it means that New York should have employed 2,400 officers). London, as an example, had 1 per 455 people.4

  New York’s employment of law enforcement officers did not keep pace with the galloping increase in city population, either. While the population of the town increased by more than 100 percent from 1840 to 1860, the percentage of constables increased by only 34 percent.

  About 40 percent of all murders and assaults were committed in the streets of the city, and another 10 percent took place in saloons, usually connected to drinking. Constables were needed to prevent street crimes or arrest street criminal
s who murdered people, and yet they were hardly visible.5

  The wave of murders scared everyone, rich and poor, and dominated all conversations. Mrs. William Seward, the wife of the New York senator, was badly shaken when a murder was committed in their hometown of Auburn, New York, in 1846. She wrote her husband in Washington that the slaying terrified everybody. The residents of the community did not feel safe in their homes. “The occurrence of that fearful murder has made me feel very much alone with the little ones.… Nothing else has been thought or talked of here for a week,” she said.6

  An exasperated Walt Whitman wrote that the city had to have a paid, professional force. “The broad fact is so glaringly evident that Brooklyn has a most inefficient police system … that no excuse can stave off the argument for reform,” Whitman said. He complained bitterly about the unpaid watchmen who fell asleep on duty at night all over the borough. He asked “whether there should not be good watchmen, paid a good price; a man can’t take a mere pittance, and work as though he had reasonable wages.”7

  The editor of the New-York Commercial Advertiser was furious about law enforcement, or the lack of it. He wrote that “it is notorious that the New York police is wretchedly inadequate to the arrest of offenders and the punishment of crime; as to prevention of crime, we might almost as well be without the name of a police, as we are all but without the substance.… Destructive rascality stalks at large in our streets and public places, at all time of the day and night, with none [i.e., no police] to make it afraid.”8

 

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