Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  At about the same time the story was published, the case took a new turn when a dying woman was reported to have told the true story of the murder of Rogers, to which she had been an eyewitness, to a judge. The true story was never fully revealed, though. The lingering story, and Poe’s tale, and what seemed to be never-ending news accounts of the case for more than a year stoked the public’s anger, not just about the murder but about their incompetent and money-hungry constable force. Nothing symbolized the weakness of the constable system more than the Rogers case.21

  Then, less than a year later, New Yorkers were stunned by another bizarre murder, followed by a heavily publicized trial, and more gross ineptitude on the part of the police.

  In late 1841, John C. Colt, the younger brother of the fabled gun maker Samuel Colt, was charged with murdering Samuel Adams, a man who refused to pay him rent money. Colt chopped the man’s body into small pieces, stuffed them into a trunk, and tried to have the trunk sent to New Orleans on an oceangoing ship. The vessel’s departure was delayed a week, though, and the dreadful smell from the trunk caused seamen to open it and make a grisly discovery.

  The Colt case was a wild one, including the digging up of Sam Adams’s body and the showing of its cracked skull to the trial jury. The trial also included a shooting demonstration by Samuel Colt himself, half in testimony and half in publicity.

  The city newspapers went into overdrive in Colt trial coverage. The Herald, as an example, filled its entire first page and several subsequent pages with the daily transcript of the proceedings. Bennett printed special 4:00 P.M. “Colt Trial” special editions every day and had his army of early-morning newsboys work all day to sell them. He startled readers with a huge front-page drawing of the building in which Adams was murdered and then shocked them two days later with an artist’s rendition of what Adams’s naked body must have looked like after the autopsy, with huge stitched-up cuts on its face.

  The Herald wrote about everybody involved in the trial and gave graphic descriptions of the crowds of thousands of well-dressed New Yorkers jamming all of the streets leading to the courthouse in an effort to somehow squeeze their way into the tiny courtroom. Every day, Herald reporters reminded readers that the trial was unbelievably exciting, a New York City historical event, something they absolutely had to read about.22

  The trial ran more than a week, with many witnesses. Jurors, tired of public charges of leniency and not intimidated by the defendant’s famous brother, sentenced Colt to death by hanging, and the court turned him over to the police who ran the Tombs prison.

  In a bizarre finish to the tale, Colt married his lover in his jail cell on the day of his hanging. Suddenly a fire broke out at the Tombs. Guards released all of the prisoners, who scrambled to safety. Colt was found on the floor of his cell, dead by his own hand, a knife plunged into his heart and then twisted for effect. City residents had wanted a hanging. “The tidings were received with … fierce mutterings of disappointed rage,” wrote Lydia Child. “Those assembled as performers and spectators growled like a hungry bulldog when a bloody bone is plucked from him.”23

  Many people in New York, including public officials and law enforcement leaders, did not believe the suicide story. They argued that Colt’s brother and others had visited him, as had his wife, on the day of the fire. Amid all that socializing and all of those visitors, critics argued, someone sneaked in a dead body, perhaps with the knowledge of several police in the prison, and that was the one identified as Colt. “I hear it declared over and over again, by those in a position to know, that Colt did not commit suicide, that the body found in the cell when the Tombs caught fire was only a corpse prepared for the purpose, and that he escaped in the confusion,” said officer George Walling, whose sources in the Tombs were well informed. Thousands of New Yorkers believed he escaped, too, but Colt was never heard from again. The mystery remains in the shadows of the Tombs’ ruins.24

  The public, still reeling from the Rogers police debacle, was further angered by the incompetency of the jail guards and the incredible escape, if there was one, of Colt. The public naturally added the Tombs prison police together with the city’s constable force and was furious with the one monolithic law enforcement brigade.25

  All of the city’s newspapers lumped the Adams and Rogers deaths together as a one-two combination to show that crime in the city was out of control.26 Horace Greeley, in an editorial in the Tribune later that year, charged that carefully kept and detailed records showed that there was much more crime, and more murder, in 1841 than in previous years. “Murder and assassination are marked by singular atrocity,” he complained. Who was responsible? The police.27

  That Rogers/Colt doubleheader of crime, and the poor performance and galling nerve of the overly greedy police, turned the public’s stomach. People were fed up with the police. Something had to be done about them. The public had been alarmed at the death of prostitute Helen Jewett in 1836. Now, five years later, the slayings of Sam Adams and Mary Rogers again rattled the city population. The Jewett murder had been a tragedy, but the Colt and Rogers killings were mileposts of crime. If nothing was done to revolutionize law enforcement, so weak in the hands of the constables, crimes of the magnitude of the double murders would go on and on. Criminals would know that the constables who toiled in the incredibly inefficient police force could not stop them. Beginning in 1842, and over the next few years, the New York City population realized that it was at a critical juncture, not just in law enforcement but in the sprawling metropolis’s overall history. The bumbling, corrupt constables with their silly hats and billy clubs had to go, cried politicians from all over the city and the editors of the city’s newspapers, especially the leaders of the penny press. A new, professional police force was needed right away.

  It was time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Out with the Old, In with the New

  The prevention of crime being the most important object in view, your exertions must be constantly used to accomplish that end. The absence of crime will be considered the best proof of the efficiency of the police.

  —Judge Robert Taylor, Rules and Regulations for Day and Night Police of the City of New-York, 1848

  New York City finally got its professional police force in 1845. That was the same year that a seaman on the Spencer, George Walling, with his mates, left the ship to help the New York City fire department and Brooklyn Navy Yard marines, and hundreds of New York residents, battle the Great Fire of 1845, the second worst in city history, which leveled dozens of blocks of stores and offices and destroyed hundreds of homes. Walling liked the city. A few months later, he ended his sailing career and moved to New York to work at a city produce market. In 1847, a friend of his retired from the police force and asked Walling if he would like to take his place. The ex-sailor did and, after an alderman approved, started walking a beat in the Third Ward a few months later. “I certainly never had the slightest idea of becoming a policeman,” he said, “but the proposition did not displease me. I had no particular business at the time and decided that I might as well carry a club until something better turned up.”1

  Walling was there at the start, in a cold winter, as the brand-new, professional police force began. He would be a policeman for nearly forty years. He did everything from beating criminals with his nightstick to breaking up robbery rings to battling street gangs, river pirates, and the “butcher boys.” He worked as a patrolman, then a captain, then the chief of police. His memories make for a wonderful insider’s view of the crime wave that threatened to overwhelm New York City and the efforts of the first police force to maintain law and order in the teeming metropolis.

  * * *

  Many editors and civic reformers wanted the police force replaced with a professional squad not just because of the rising crime wave, but also because some members of the police force did really stupid things and were continually laughed at by the public. A perfect example is the midnight ride of Officer Thomas Doyle on July
24, 1843. The cop was riding his horse down Chatham Street, not paying any attention to where he was going. When he reached the intersection of Tryon Row, he and his steed tumbled down into an open construction pit. There were ropes and signs all around it to warn riders of its existence; Doyle said nothing was there. A disgruntled Doyle said his horse was worth eighty dollars and produced a witness, a friend, who said oh, no, it was worth a good hundred. Because the horse was injured, he had to sell it for just fifteen. Doyle said he lost a twenty-dollar harness in the tumble, too. He wanted a hundred dollars from the city for his losses. The Board of Aldermen, after a few chuckles, gave him eighty.2

  The Board of Aldermen that compensated the inept Doyle realized that he was not an exception to the watch force; he was a good example of it. The watch department was held in such low regard by the city that in 1843 the Board of Aldermen even had to buy saddles for police horses. One alderman, furious with the police, noted that city had to put up with the watch force “until a more efficient police system shall be adopted.”3

  Right after Mary Rogers’s death, Mayor Robert Morris, elected in 1841 as a Democrat, tried to reform the police. “Our system of police is lamentably defective,” he told the Board of Aldermen, with no structure within it to prevent crime. He argued, too, that the current system fostered corruption. “Those persons attached to the police department who are honest and vigilant, and there are many such, are seriously injured by the general bad reputation which the system inflicts upon the department.”

  Mayor Morris’s friend William Twell said not only that the officers were corrupt but that their parallel “could not be found in this country.” He wanted six hundred new patrolmen, a superintendent of police, and three unsalaried police commissioners. Another plan called for paying police based on the drop in the crime rate—decrease in crime meant more pay for officers, but an increase meant less pay. That was defeated. Yet another proposal calling for a special “super” police magistrate was turned down. A civic leader insisted that the new chief of police and all captains had to be elected by the people; that was ignored. Several aldermen threw up their hands and insisted that all that was needed was another look at the current system. A year dragged by, and the crime rate continued to climb. During this time, Mayor Morris led a statewide campaign to reform the New York police, wrote dozens of letters, gave numerous speeches, and even traveled to Albany to lobby for his ideas in the state legislature. His efforts failed.4

  Then, to everyone’s surprise, a new political party, the American Republicans, also known as the Native Americans, an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, conservative group, just a year old, swept the city elections, winning 48.6 percent of the vote in the three-party race, taking two-thirds of all the Board of Aldermen and Board of Assistant Aldermen seats, and getting the publishing scion James Harper elected mayor.5 They had considerable power and told the people that their number one priority was law enforcement reform, and right away. Working with state representatives from their party, they rammed through a new state bill giving New York City the power to reform its police. The Native Americans wanted a chief of police, eight hundred officers, a streamlined structure of command, higher law enforcement salaries, and the abolishment of all fees and rewards.

  The men who ran Tammany Hall were stunned by the election results, they said, because the American Republicans had bested them at their own game. “Every means of the most disreputable and corrupt character has been resorted to by our opponents. Money has been lavished on the dissolute and indigent without stint, and where intrigue, gold and calumny could not affect the object, threats have been resorted to but without avail,” wrote up-and-coming Tammany star Fernando Wood to President James K. Polk.6

  The Native Americans, new and disorganized, then started squabbling among themselves, and the reform never took place, although Harper did appoint two hundred more policemen. Mayor Harper was besieged no matter which way he turned. He was criticized by the people who wanted more and better police and, at his publishing house, lambasted over his editorial stand on slavery. Harper Brothers would not publish any book that raised the slavery issue in a controversial way in the 1840s and even reedited and reprinted books that offended white southerners. They often publicly apologized for doing so, as they did in an 1841 letter to the Charleston, South Carolina, Mercury.7

  Law enforcement reform had to wait until May of 1845, when the Democrats, bitterly unhappy working with the Native Americans, stormed back into power. The Democrats, led by new mayor William Havemeyer, pushed through a new reform bill that contained many elements of Mayor Harper’s plan and Morris’s, too.

  Under the 1845 law, written in the spring of 1844, pushed hard by Havemeyer, and passed by the Democratic Common Council and the state legislature, a force of over one thousand police officers was named to replace all of the old constables (the state legislature cut the size back to nine hundred). A new chain of command was put in place with a police chief, several assistant chiefs, and captains who ran each precinct. Eight new precinct houses were established. The city was broken up into three police districts that covered all seventeen wards. Each of the wards was given its own police court, and extra police judges were hired.

  Havemeyer asked Judge Robert Taylor to write a police manual, and in it Taylor, on behalf of the mayor, instructed officers to engage in crime prevention as much as continue the arrest of lawbreakers. “The prevention of crime being the most important object in view, your exertions must be constantly used to accomplish that end. The absence of crime will be considered the best proof of the efficiency of the police,” Taylor wrote in the manual.8

  A point of contention was the one-year term that the police held. Havemeyer argued that it was too short, that it would become political, and that “there is danger that the whole system will be involved in the incessant strifes and annual changes of parties, and its agents precluded from the experience and independence which are indispensable to their usefulness.”9

  The old system of one-year terms was then abolished, and each officer was hired for four years. The state legislature cut that term down to two. The officers were given stars to wear on their jackets to identify them as police. The new officers took over all of the old categories, such as dock police, Sunday police, health wardens, fire wardens, poll watchers, lamplighters, and court police. The hundred or so marshals, who had been around for decades, were downsized and worked administrative jobs or helped maintain courthouse order. The law enforcement squad was asked to wear blue frock coats with the initials M. P. on them (for Municipal Police). They all carried nightsticks. The officers, irritated at the M. P. nickname and a coat that would make them targets of criminals, soon dropped everything except the single copper star-shaped badge and were soon called the “star police.” This was soon changed to “coppers” and then to simply “cops.”

  Most important, the old fee system was eliminated, as the Native Americans had insisted, and the pay of all officers, from chief down to patrolman, was significantly increased to make up for moneys lost in fees. Captain were now paid seven hundred dollars a year and patrolmen five hundred.10

  The only part of the system that remained intact, criticized by many, was political patronage. Under the new reform law, the Board of Aldermen still hired all of the police officers and named their replacements when they left the force or died. Tammany Hall still controlled the Board of Aldermen. The mayor still had the power to remove any officer without the consent of any police official or the Board of Aldermen. Tammany Hall still controlled the mayor. One writer, looking back on the 1850s, wrote in 1871 that “the better classes of society need that the ultimate control of the police should be out of the reach of municipal politics, as much as if not more than they need that the city budget should be safe from the same influences.”11

  Political patronage was the first order of business when the bill was proposed in March of 1844. In its language, a board consisting of the mayor, three aldermen, and three assistant alderm
en would hire and fire all the police. This was amended to give all the aldermen that power, led by the mayor. The legislation also stated that each patrolman appointed by an alderman had to live in that alderman’s district. Patrolmen had to have high moral character, be physically able to do the job, and be between the ages of twenty-one and sixty. The new patrolmen had to avoid immoral and licentious conduct. The Board of Aldermen amended the bill some more before, in April 1844, it was sent to Albany, where it was tinkered with by some committees and then passed and put into operation in the spring of 1845.12

  The new mayor, who would organize the radical new, reformed police department, was, in fact, not only the selection of Tammany Hall but one of the members of its general committee and a trusted man whom Tammany saw as a unifier between its radical and conservative factions. He was also a connection between two rival factions in the party and the Hall, the Hunkers and Barnburners, and was a favorite of former president and fellow New Yorker Martin Van Buren.

  At first, Havemeyer did not want the job. He worked hard to get a high-paying job with the federal government that year but was turned down by newly elected President Polk.13 Then he turned to City Hall. He won the Democratic Tammany nomination on the second ballot, defeating Peter Cooper, the philanthropist and alderman (Cooper’s son Edward was later elected mayor). The Tribune said that friends of Havemeyer claimed he was “a correct, honest, respectable man” and had, through his mercantile career, amassed “a handsome fortune.”14 The pro-Democratic papers all hailed Havemeyer as a skilled administrator from the private sector who could run the city well. Editors of Whig newspapers said he was a hopeless Tammany lackey.

  Havemeyer defeated Mayor Harper, who ran with little assistance from his disoriented Native American party, winning 50 percent of the vote to Harper’s 36 percent. Whig Dudley Selden, running as an independent, won 14 percent. More important, the Tammany Democratic ticket swept the Board of Aldermen elections. They won thirty seats, and the Whigs took four. The Natives had none. The new mayor had more clout than any previous chief executive.15