Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  At night, the lamps were lit and the Bowery erupted in a carnival of dance and music. There were a dozen theaters lining the streets, concert saloons, huge, two-story-high beer gardens, bar after bar after bar, brothels, bright lights, gambling casinos, lottery parlors, and what would pass today for “dollar stores.” Anywhere you went you encountered a small street-corner “Bowery band” sending its slightly off-key, tinny music drifting through the loud night air. It seemed that every street corner had its female fortune-teller, palm reader, or clairvoyant. Moving along with the crowds were tiny street urchins who had become the slickest pickpockets in America and found the pickings easy at night as unsuspecting men with women on their arms surged through the crowded streets and shopped at the overcrowded stores. Members of burglary rings followed well-dressed couples home to case their apartments or townhouses. Prostitutes of every kind and every price approached men in the streets, many talking to them right past their wives on their arm. When confronted by an angry wife, the hooker would often give her a price, too, or a two-for-one sex package.67

  The sporting man and the Bowery B’hoy and G’hal were separate specimens of New Yorkers. They were equal legends but did not hang out with each other. They lived in separate universes, but together, the men and women gave New York a colorful carnival look, its own human circus, the look of which no other city or town in the world could boast.68

  Some of the women in New York in the pre–Civil War era were almost as criminally minded as the men. They ran counterfeit rings and burglary rings, populated houses of prostitution, worked in illegal casinos, and served as barmaids. They stole as much as the men. One woman was caught stealing enough carpet to cover all the floors of a house and put in jail for thirty days. Another woman was jailed for stealing a single floor rug. Another was put behind bars for beating up her husband. Many midwives were arrested when the mother or baby they attended died. The charges against them were light, and that enraged Bennett at the Herald. “It should have been bloody murder,” he wrote. Mary Dunn, eighteen, was sent to jail for passing small counterfeit bills at a neighborhood grocery.69 Mrs. A. E. Brown ran a huge jewelry-theft operation with her husband. It ended when he put $2,000 in stolen jewelry in a trunk and mailed it to her in Baltimore. She did not know that before he mailed it Brown was arrested. She was arrested the moment she walked into the shipping office to claim the trunk.70

  And then there were the “rascals,” as Walt Whitman called them, the wealthy, well-dressed, well-connected men who committed white-collar crimes that nobody seemed to notice but that undercut the foundation of New York life. “New York swarms with rascals of rank,” said Whitman in the winter of 1842. “The law, instead of punishing, encourages them. Society’s choice circles give them a free pass. They are received pleasantly wherever they go.”71

  And then there were the “butcher boys,” gangs of thieves who stole meat from butcher shops. They arrived in front of the store with a wagon pulled by fast horses. One drove the wagon, and the others grabbed huge carcasses of beef from racks in front of the store and tossed them into the open back of the wagon. The boys then leaped on board and sped off into the crowds, dozens of slabs of valuable beef bouncing up and down between their feet. “These robberies opened up to thieves a new field for men of nerve,” said Walling. “A few years later watches and other valuables were [similarly] snatched from citizens by men who escaped in wagons.”72

  There was yet another reason for escalating crime by 1842, and that was crime fiction. Many blamed crime writers such as Edgar Allan Poe (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget”) and others who wrote books, magazine stories, crime journal tales, and newspaper crime fiction for creating a world of romantic criminals that encouraged young and old to become lawbreakers in real life. Others believed that New Yorkers had become so used to crime, and so disgusted with the police, that in real life, as in crime novels, they had even started to cheer for the burglars and killers. It was “a morbid sympathy for offenders,” wrote one editor.73

  * * *

  A third major cause of crime in the city in the period 1834 to 1860 was drinking. New Yorkers, like most other Americans, had fallen in love with imbibing during the colonial era. New Yorkers began to drink beer, excessive amounts of it, in the 1750s because water from streams and wells was badly tainted. There was bacteria that caused illnesses in the fabled mountain streams that were the centerpieces of so many paintings that touted the natural beauty of America. Colonists had brought formulas for beer with them from England but soon discovered that they could make the brew from corn, oats, barley, and other ingredients grown outside the villages of early America. People began to drink beer all day long; many imbibed at breakfast. Beer was the main drink at all social functions, from weddings to funerals. Thousands of colonists set up home distilleries. Many soon built large breweries that served their villages. The production of moonshine liquor became a profitable industry, so profitable that Pennsylvania moonshiners decided not to pay taxes on their liquor. An angry President George Washington led an army to put down the “Whiskey Rebellion,” and the “moonshine men” surrendered and paid their taxes. City entrepreneurs paid their taxes, too, and rather shortly cities like New York had dozens, and then hundreds, of breweries and taverns.

  Prior to the Revolution, almost all liquor came from the West Indies, but in the 1790s and early 1800s the West Indies dramatically raised prices, thinking that in America they had a captive market. They did not. American farmers began producing millions of gallons of liquor and stocked warehouses full of it. They overproduced, and that drove the price down to just a nickel a gallon, cheaper than tea or coffee. American taverns were soon flooded with the liquor and the equally cheap beer. At the same time, the number of bars increased in cities as the population increased. In 1827, New York had 160 taverns; in 1835, it was home to over 3,000. That number, some speculated, climbed to 15,000 by the mid-1850s. You could drink, and drink a lot, anywhere you chose in New York.74

  The tavern quickly became the community center of small villages in the outer reaches of the colonies and the center of activity in dozens of cities. It was the place to go for drinking, dart games, billiards, food, card playing, gossip mongering, dancing, and all social life. People gathered together and drank. Getting drunk was more American than apple pie.

  Beer was popular to wash down food and cool off people on a hot day. Americans drank between six and ten beers a day. By the 1840s, the city was cluttered with bars and drinkers—and drunks. City officials said that by that time New York had one bar for each fifty men and women over the age of fifteen.75

  Many of the crimes in New York, major as well as minor, were committed by men and women who had been drinking. Men who had too many drinks argued and stumbled into bar fights with each other. Someone pulled a knife and stabbed someone else. Men under the influence of alcohol committed robberies, beat their wives, and raped women. Drunks accidentally knocked over candles and started fires that destroyed homes. Dozens of crimes emanated from drinking. Whitman wrote of a drunk he saw steal a loaf of bread from the top of a barrel in front of a grocery store on a crowded street in lower Manhattan. The store owner chased him, shouting for him to halt, and caught him, summoned a constable, and watched as the man was taken to jail. “So the thief was taken off to prison and, being arraigned, a few hours afterward, was summarily convicted and sentenced to the customary place just out of the city, there to remain for many days at hard labor and confinement,” Whitman wrote.76

  Later, in 1858, Whitman again lamented about alcoholics, who he said had become an army that surged through saloons in New York and ended up badly as the hours drained out of the day. “At the station houses, they are pretty busy providing accommodations for inebriated Johns, intoxicated Pats and unfortunate Bridgets. A motley set they are—the debris of the North side, wretched, sodden, degraded, but all occupying the same dead level. Rum, like poverty, makes strange bedfellows,” he wrote, adding th
at the drunks were not just from the lower classes but from the higher classes, too. In the spring of 1841, a drunken John Haggerty broke into an apartment where four women lived, snuggled up next to them in their bed, and was promptly arrested and jailed. All of the inebriates were ashamed of their midnight marauding in the morning when, sober, they had to face a judge and perhaps be carted off to jail. An informal study showed that 67 percent of all suicides in New York City were committed by men who were drunk.77

  Whitman might have added about saloons, too, that many joked that if you were looking for a cop, that was where to look. One man quipped that police officers “spent most of their time leaning on bars in corner saloons.”78

  Many men who became drunk added to their lunacy by taking drugs. The combination of drinks and drugs often killed them. That’s what happened to Barnard Shannery, a grade school teacher in Port Chester, a suburb of New York. He became very drunk and then took laudanum. He had been drinking in so many places that day that no one could name the exact place where he became inebriated.79

  Many of those who died from drinking were proud of their alcoholic addiction. One man in his twenties simply fell dead in the street one autumn afternoon. The coroner said he died of a combination of lengthy drinking and a case of epilepsy. His love of drinking was attested to by the large tattoo on his arm that read I LOVE RUM.80

  Patrick Ludwig celebrated one Fourth of July standing in front of a judge as his wife told of how he had come home drunk and beat her. He pulled her hair, then pushed her down to the ground and kicked her repeatedly. It was a common tale, and he was sent off to jail.

  Alcoholics had become a part of the city landscape and could be found everywhere, especially at night. One man walking through the Broadway theater district in 1850 wrote that “here and there a lamp-post is embellished with a human swine who leans, a statue of drunkenness, against it for support and consigns his undigested supper to his fellow pigs who rise early o’mornings.”81

  Drunks were such a problem in New York that in 1833 the Board of Aldermen asked the city’s constables to arrest all of the drunks they could find. Those that had committed a crime could be sent to an almshouse, where, under confinement, they would spend up to six months at hard labor. Repeated drunk offenders could be sent to the penitentiary. The police courts, started in the mid-1820s just to handle crime cases, were filled with drunks and beggars under the new law.82

  Some of the beggars won police sympathy, but others did not. The police were certain that many of the destitute with their hands held out, whom the cops saw as common criminals, were frauds. “A favorite excuse is that the applicant only needs a nickel or a dime to make up a sufficient amount to pay for his night’s lodging, but the chances are that he has more ready cash in his pocket than the person addressed,” snorted Captain George Walling.83

  Hundreds of drunks died when, hopelessly inebriated, they fell and cracked their heads. Lydia Child was walking home late one night and turned a corner onto her street. “Something lay across my path. It was a woman, apparently dead, with garments all draggled in New York gutters, blacker than waves of the infernal rivers. Those who gathered around said she had fallen in intoxication and was rendered senseless by the force of the blow,” she told a friend.84

  Alcoholism was such a problem that in his annual report for 1852, the New York chief of police said it was the number one reason why the crime rate climbed each year and was the highest in the country. He assured the state legislature that if drinking declined, crime would decline with it. Drinking, though, did not decline.85

  The antidrinking temperance societies arrived in the 1830s and conducted long and loud crusades against the abuse of alcohol and the criminal activity it brought about. They had some effect, but it was minor. These societies had thousands of members in New York, and they held colorful and crowded parades down Broadway and other streets, but they made minimal impact on drinking and had almost no effect in shutting down the strings of bars that they targeted. Drinking was a problem for tens of thousands of men in New York, a problem that often resulted in crime.

  * * *

  New York City was also a town populated by pickpockets who thought nothing of lingering at the most expensive stores on Broadway in order to target wealthy prey. “Look out for the contents of your pockets,” wrote Whitman. “It is quite possible that you may be otherwise relieved of your cash.”86

  Many of the pickpockets were ten- and eleven-year-old boys and girls. City fathers had hoped that the establishment of the New York public school system in the 1830s would keep youths off the streets and in the classroom, but the schools did not become popular right away, and by the 1850s only half the children in New York under eighteen went to school; the rest idled their time away on the streets. Many of them turned to crime.87

  Pickpockets worked alone or in teams of three and four. They roved the streets and squares but found most of their targets in large public halls or on transport vehicles. The hundreds of ferries that provided transportation to Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey (the fare in 1844 was two cents) were fruitful, as were theaters, omnibuses, hospital lobbies, and crowds at baseball games. The pickpockets easily made off with diamond stickpins from men’s shirts, rolled-up wads of paper money, and expensive bracelets slid around ladies’ wrists. Some groups of them were so brazen that they went to church and then, mingling with the crowd when it left, preyed on as many religious parishioners as they could. Even bolder pickpockets worked funerals, wearing black suits and moving about teary-eyed as they looted the forlorn members of the family and the dead man’s friends and neighbors, pretending to be a relation of the deceased.88

  Pickpockets were just one of many problems in the city and many residents pointed their fingers at incompetent politicians. Walt Whitman was one. He wrote of one state senator, Judge Scott, that to compare him to Judas would insult the memory of Judas. “We have, in our years, seen examples of slippery, cowardly, sordid politicians,” he went on, “but this Scott out Herods Herod. Not one iota of manliness, of honesty, or of patriotism, appears to reside in his character.… He sinks below the regard even of his kindred rascals.”89

  The complete moral collapse of New York through prostitution, gambling, and drinking and the subsequent increase of crime because of them was symbolically uncovered in a single visit to the Delevan Temperance Institute by reformer Child. She met a drunken woman in one of the rooms in the as yet unfinished, chilly building. The woman “wept like the rain,” said Child, as she told her that her small boy had become a criminal. “He was as good a child as ever lived,” she cried, and told her that he had fallen in with a gang of young thieves and they had been arrested and tossed into the house of correction. “He would not have been in their company, ma’am … if…,” she said, and then began to cry and had to stop speaking. Child, tears in her eyes, nodded in agreement.

  He would not have been in the company of the rowdies if he had not been living in the “Sodom and Gomorrah” of the New World and if crime did not wash through the city streets like a thunderstorm, the woman sobbed.90

  * * *

  There was race, too. Nothing sparked trouble in New York City like disputes over it. Antislavery advocate Child was struck by the way that scenes of New York always reminded her of the conditions of slaves—the secret slave trade being conducted on ships that plied the waters in and out of New York Harbor, and the slave catchers that roamed the city looking for runaways. One night she was standing on a lawn at the Battery, her favorite location in the city, watching “the retreating king of day,” as she referred to nightfall, when a barge sailed slowly past her. She looked past it and then up to the starlit sky. “I think … of the poor fugitive slave, hunted out by mercenary agents, chained on ship-board and perchance looking up, desolate and heartbroken, to the same stars on which I fix my free and happy gaze. Alas, how fearfully solemn must their light be to him, in his hopeless sorrow,” she wrote in the autumn of 1841.91

  Child co
mplained bitterly to all that society made the criminal, that no one was born a thief or murderer. She once wrote that there was no difference between the white-collar and blue-collar thief—they both stole—except that only the blue-collar thief was jailed. “Society made both these men thieves, but punished the one, while she rewarded the other. That criminals so universally feel themselves as victims of injustice, is one strong proof that it is true.” She added that if society could create so much crime with its injustices, society could cure crime, too, with justice. “The superintendent at Blackwell [Blackwell’s Island housed a mental hospital/prison] told me, unasked, that ten years’ experience convinced him that the whole system tended to increase crime,” she wrote.92

  What annoyed Child, and others, about societal crime was that the city permitted Blackwell’s to hire out its mental patients to work in city stores. Hospital officials pocketed the money their patients were paid. They got the jobs because they worked cheaper than the general laborer.93

  By the winter of 1843, many New Yorkers were fed up with the city, its crime, and its pathetic police force. “The English papers do abuse us shamefully for swindling, repudiation, cheating, and other trifling departures from rectitude, which abuse is all the harder to be borne for the difficulty we have in many of the cases of contradicting the truth of the charges,” ex-mayor Hone complained.94

  The crime rate did not go down in the early 1840s, as people hoped; it went up. The crime wave became so intense that the city was forced to establish extra police courts and assign additional judges to hear crime cases there. Newspapers, especially the penny press, began to send more police reporters to cover all of the courts. Boarders were arrested for robbing fellow boarders. Counterfeit rings succeeded. A man abandoned his pregnant fiancée at the marriage altar and was chased across town by her brother. Respectable middle-class people stayed at New York’s swankier hotels for a week or more and then vanished, never paying their bills. Men distributed fake three-dollar bills. A man was stabbed over a hundred times in a bar fight as the others in the bar stood by and watched, not interfering.