Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  More lovers became involved in disputes, too. William Gillian, “a good kind fellow” and former Herald newsboy, got into a fight with another young man over the affections of a woman and killed him.38

  Domestic disputes were not limited to the working class. Dozens of wealthy members of the city establishment beat their wives, too. One of the most severe cases was that of William Morgan. His wife had been confined to a hospital for a month in 1853, and upon her return home her husband began not only slapping her but kicking her. Terrified, she went to the police.39

  Other wives were ruined by a husband’s illegal financial activities. Man-about-town George Davenport embezzled thousands of dollars from friends and neighbors, and embezzled thousands more from his financial business, creating a scandal. His shaken wife left him and went home to her parents’ house in Connecticut. She was “thinking of her dirty, little swindling scamp of a husband,” wrote a friend of the family.40

  Domestic conflicts started appearing in numerous cities in the 1850s. A man in Baltimore came home early and caught his wife in bed with another man. He ran into the kitchen, got a large knife, and stabbed his wife to death by plunging the knife into her back several times. He stabbed the other man several times, too, but he did not die and escaped.41

  Racial crimes grew throughout the 1850s as tensions between blacks and whites mounted across the nation due to the enormous pressure being put on the slave states by those in the growing abolitionist movement and northern congressmen. One crime covered by nearly all of the New York papers was the racial dispute at the Elysian Fields Hotel in Hoboken, across the Hudson River, a town visited by thousands of New Yorkers for its parks and spectacular view of Manhattan. Mrs. McCarthy, the owner of the hotel, tired of her all-black waiter staff and fired them, replacing them with fellow Irish. The Irishmen turned out to be good countrymen but poor waiters, so she fired all of them and rehired the black staff. The Irishmen and the blacks clashed, and one of the black waiters was stabbed to death in the melee. This happened on the eve of one of the country’s largest abolitionist conventions, held in Worcester, Massachusetts. Racial discrimination was evident in press coverage of crime, too. All crimes committed by African Americans were noted as “colored” crimes. Blacks who robbed blacks were written of as “colored” criminals assaulting “colored” victims. There was no such labeling for any other minority in New York.42

  There were so many homicides committed in New York City by the middle of the 1850s that the Herald and other papers simply put a generic ANOTHER MURDER headline on most of the stories.

  One of the worst nights for murder in the city in the 1850s, and in the century, was August 2, 1855. A wealthy doctor visiting New York from New Orleans, staying at the St. Nicholas Hotel, became drunk in the hotel’s handsomely appointed bar. A cop tried to stop him from drinking. The doctor pulled out a knife and tried to stab the watchman but missed. The doctor was put in jail. Someone bailed him out in an hour, though, and he returned to the hotel bar and continued to drink. A few hours later he grabbed a bell in the lobby and walked through the hallways, ringing it. A Colonel Loring, visiting town from California with his sick wife, tried to stop the man but failed. Loring then scuffled with the man, who again pulled out a knife and stabbed him to death. At the same time, in a Brooklyn apartment, Patrick McMahon, who returned home drunk, killed his wife by stomping her to death with his boots. And within a few hours, a drunk man in New York returned home in a rage, pulled his three-year-old son out of bed, sat down on the floor with him, and, holding him tight, slashed him to death with a knife. While all of this was going on, another man, in Brooklyn, tried to murder his wife but only wounded her.43

  * * *

  By the middle of the 1850s, too, residents of New York, and all of the states, were psychologically torn because they did not really know to what country they belonged. It had been eighty years since the first shots of the American Revolution were fired, and what had been achieved, they asked. The northerners despised the southerners; half the nation was mired in the immoral mud of slavery; promised wonders of the machine age often blew up. Catholic fought Protestant, and Jews were ignored and/or detested by all. Less than 5 percent of Americans had much money, and most were desperately poor. Fewer than half went to school; epidemics such as yellow fever, smallpox, and cholera killed tens of thousands (in New York City, hundreds of residents kept disease-spreading pigs in their homes), and most doctors were quacks. Women had no rights; kids did not respect their elders. Americans kept stumbling into wars—the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War. The U.S. Army kept waging war on Indian tribes. Political parties were corrupt. People were murdered in their beds, and priests stole from their own poor boxes. Whenever they were in trouble, Europeans looked back at the history of their countries and found stability and purpose. New Yorkers, and Americans, could not. “We are so young a people that we feel the want of nationality.… We crave a history, instinctively,” lamented George Templeton Strong.44

  And, too, as the 1850s dragged on, North and South slowly divided. “South and North were by 1857 rapidly becoming separate peoples,” lamented historian Allan Nevins in one of his books about the Civil War.45

  Southerners’ fear of the big city was so great that in the early 1850s, Augustus Longstreet hesitated to become the president of the College of South Carolina because it was located in a big city, Columbia, which had only six thousand residents.46

  Despite all of this, Chief Matsell told all that 1853 had been a great success. In the first six months of the “new, new” police, he said, twenty-five thousand arrests were made, an impressive seven thousand over the first six months of the previous year. That success prompted Chief Matsell to ask the city to hire architects to design new and better precinct houses and to request city workers to clean out all existing precinct houses, plus make renovations. The world was beautiful, the chief said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Fabulous Fernando Wood

  I have made myself useful in the office of Mayor. My success in removing many evils, and in the introduction of reforms of great benefit, has exceeded my expectations.

  —Fernando Wood

  There is nothing to explain the complicated New York mayor Fernando Wood better than the biography published just fifteen months after he took office. The highly laudatory book, written by Donald MacLeod, presented Wood as the latest in a long line of distinguished Woods, hailing back to the 1600s. He was, MacLeod said, not only a highly successful mayor loved by all New Yorkers but a man who would soon be president. New Yorkers who loved Wood, and those who hated him, read the book to find out more about the fabulous Fernando, the man who had won the mayor’s race, consolidated the warring factions in Tammany Hall, pledged an end to crime and prostitution, and promised to reform the police and reconfigure the entire New York City government. The tall, thin, strikingly handsome new city leader, who had become a millionaire in the real estate market, seemed too good to be true.

  The Wood in the book was too good to be true. What New Yorkers did not know was that Wood had not only paid MacLeod to write the book but had paid a publishing house to print and distribute it. He might even have written chapters of it himself. It was typical Wood: If you can’t get people to love you, just say they do and hope that everybody believes you. If you can’t make history, just tell everybody that you did.1

  Mayor Wood barely won the election, garnering just 44.6 percent of the vote in a five-way race. Yet he believed that everybody in the city supported him and admired him. He was a man of enormous self-confidence who in 1840 had skyrocketed to fame at the young age of twenty-eight as a first-term congressman, fell back to earth when he lost reelection to the House, stumbled through several careers, and finally plunged into New York City real estate and moved his second wife and their children into a large mansion. The Woods would eventually have seven children, and Mrs. Wood spent most of her time raising them. She also served as her husband’s official mayoral hostess a
nd, as the years passed, became exhausted from her dual city and familial responsibilities.

  People loved him and loathed him, but always wanted to know what was going on in his headline-grabbing life and chaotic world of perpetual scandals. The scandals started when he discovered that his first wife cheated on him. Angry that he paid more attention to politics than to her, she fell into a series of sexual affairs, some with his aides, which brought about a first-class scandal and a well-publicized divorce. Her bedroom antics dogged him for years. It was the first of many scandals, political, cultural, and financial, that plagued his otherwise high-flying career.

  Mayor Wood’s enduring self-confidence came from a belief that he was chosen by Providence to be a leader, and everybody should know that. All should support him and hold him in the high esteem in which he held himself. The mayor was a driving social force, a political hurricane, and he would do great things, he said, because it was his destiny to do them. He had a deep, loving relationship with his brother, who had served as his top political adviser for years and whom he trusted completely. His brother also helped him through his laudatory columns in the influential newspaper of which he was the editor, the New York Daily Times.

  When he became the mayor, one of the first things Wood did was establish a good working relationship with Police Chief Matsell and several of the city’s most trusted police captains, led by Captain George Walling, famed for his recent work in cracking down belligerent criminals and gangs that had terrorized New Yorkers for more than a decade.

  At the same time that Wood rose to power by winning the election and rather speedily putting the entire police force under his thumb, Walling bloomed as a policeman. Walling had joined the force in 1847 and rose in the ranks swiftly, making captain in 1853. Walling was a hard-nosed tough guy who swung his billy club freely and agreed with the New York police philosophy that necessary force was needed to maintain law and order. Walling worked at first as a patrolman and then as a detective, bringing fresh ideas to detective work and establishing a name for himself as one of the city’s premier investigators. He had substantial administrative skills and was a driving force in the organization of the early police department. Bosses and patrolmen liked him, trusted him, and admired his tenacity for work and his fairness to all. He was disciplined, organized, and useful to others in the force. He told all that new leadership was necessary in the city, leadership that buried the old alderman/assistant-alderman patronage kingdom in blue. Political independence and strict adherence to a belief in hard work were necessary in order for the police to grow and prosper. Walling believed that if the force could be free of political influence, and the entire nefarious skulduggery that brought with it, the NYPD could become the best department in the nation, in the world. He truly believed that and told it to all the New Yorkers he knew and met.

  He believed strongly in blunt force. “No shilly-shallying” was his motto. Strong police were elementary in the new force in order to strike fear into the hearts of criminals. It was also necessary to show citizens, all so tired of an ineffective police, that the new men in blue meant business. He began to enforce a new tough-cop policy as soon as he became a captain and sold that policy to all of his superiors in the department, the city council, and the mayor. Tough police were good police, he said.

  He proved that in his treatment of the new, colorful, and brazen Honeymooners street gang, which had for weeks been terrorizing anyone living in the Madison Avenue area of lower Manhattan in 1854. The Honeymooners put one man at the corner of Madison Avenue and East Twenty-ninth Street each night to monitor the intersection. The criminal knocked down, or out, anyone he pleased and robbed him. If he saw any cops, he simply drifted back into the shadows and fled. Walling, a captain by that time, came up with a bold plan. He selected a dozen of his roughest and toughest officers, called them the Strong Arm Squad, and sent them out to Madison Avenue in plainclothes when the sun set. Their target was the Honeymooners gang. The police crept up on the Honeymoon men, from the front or rear, and, without warning, pulled out their heavy wooden billy clubs and hit them over the head repeatedly, until they fell to the ground, bleeding badly. Then each was arrested. This rough practice, repeated nightly, became so successful that Walling soon sent his men throughout the district, disguised as citizens, and they beat up all of the Honeymooners they could find. The Honeymoon was soon over. The gang, its members brutally maimed, soon broke up. An emboldened Walling then sent all of his men, in uniform and out of it, to break up battles between immigrants in tenement blocks who had been warring with each other. Hundreds of them were beaten up, too, and sent to the hospital. Hundreds of squatters crowded into abandoned buildings, and numerous fights broke out there. The Strong Arm Squad soon arrived; the strife soon stopped. Walling’s reputation grew, and so did that of the Strong Arm Squad, which was soon replicated in the other police precincts of the city. The police, all of them, were every bit as thuggish as the thugs they chased. The criminals in the city soon feared them. Walling believed that clubbing and overt brutality were necessary and that if you allowed some criminality, you would not be able to stop any criminality.

  Right at the same time Walling was establishing his credentials as a strict disciplinarian and sending his men throughout the city to enforce his new get-tough policy, Fernando Wood was elected to his first term as mayor. No one was happier with Wood’s election and rapid takeover of City Hall than Walling. Wood announced on his first day as mayor that he was going to reform the crooked police force and root out prostitutes, illegal tavern keepers, and casino moguls from the dark corners of the city in which they hid. He was going to sweep all the crime, sin, and human garbage off the streets of New York. He was going to do this by personally stepping in to take over the police department. No timid police chiefs or corrupt captains were going to stop him. He would wave his magic wand with one hand and with the other smite the devil. Walling and all the clean cops in the city were thrilled.

  To do all of that, Wood needed Walling and other strong, resourceful police leaders like him. He sought them out, called them into City Hall for long meetings, and, day after day, told them all that a new era was on its way for the NYPD. Fernando Wood would work miracles, Walling and the others believed. From that autumn when Walling crushed the Honeymooners and Wood ran for mayor, the lives of the two would be tightly intertwined. Wood would oversee Walling’s rise, and Walling would help Wood clean up the police department, restore law and order in the streets, and make New York the most magnificent city in the world. They were two kindred souls, two blood brothers.

  But something went wrong. Something went very wrong.

  * * *

  New York City was a carnival of ice and snow in the wintertime. Some thought that the snow made the metropolis look gorgeous, and others thought it was an endless source of trouble. “One has to walk warily over the slippery sidewalks and to plunge madly over crossings ankle-deep in snow, in order to get uptown and down … [but walking] is not so bad as the great crowded sleigh-caravans that have taken the place of the omnibus. These insane vehicles carry each [a] hundred sufferers, of whom about half have to stand in the wet straw with their feet freezing and occasionally stamped on by their fellow travelers, their ears and noses tingling in a bitter wind, their hats always on the point of being blown off.… On Broadway, the Bowery, and other great thoroughfares, there is an orgasm of locomotion. It is more than a carnival; it’s a wintery dionysiaca,” complained George Templeton Strong.2

  Regardless of the season, Broadway by the late 1850s rivaled Paris’s Champs-Élysées as the grand boulevard of the world. Broadway “when lighted at night makes the street seem as bright as day,” Whitman said. Visitors to the town were amazed at the glitter of the street after the sun went down. “The light in the rooms of the houses shining through the glass windows at night is so wonderful and is such a surprise to us that I cannot describe it,” said one man.3

  By the late 1850s, New York had grown into an enterta
inment mecca. It was jammed with saloons, casinos, theaters, symphony halls, opera houses, and clubs. Castle Garden and the Crystal Palace were two of the largest entertainment structures in the world. Visitors called it “the gayest city in the United States.” One added that Broadway and its neighborhood had “more places of amusement than perhaps any district of equal size in the world.”4

  The metropolis’s bars and restaurants had gained world renown. Many of the bars on lower Broadway and the Bowery were still a bit scruffy, but the bars in the large, elegant hotels were beautiful. The restaurants in town were superb, too. The eatery at the St. Nicholas Hotel offered two soups, two kinds of fish, ten boiled dishes, nine roast dishes, six relishes, seventeen entrees, three cold dishes, five varieties of game, thirteen varieties of vegetables, seven pastries, seven fruits; and ice cream and coffee.5

  The rich lived very well. As the years passed, the wealthy built larger and larger mansions, first downtown and later on the upper reaches of Fifth Avenue, toward what would later be Forty-second Street. The homes of the rich were full of expensive furniture, lush satin and velvet drapes, Axminster carpets, marble and inlaid tables, large looking glasses, extensive libraries filled with first-edition books, oak tables, dozens of chairs in the dining rooms, and large closets lined with the finest clothes from both America and Europe. “The furnishings and interior ornaments of these dwellings, particularly those on Fifth Avenue, are of a superb kind; no expense being apparently spared as regards either comfort or elegance,” wrote William Chambers, a visitor from Scotland.6

  Throughout the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, New Yorkers spent money recklessly to live the high life, attend sporting events, and purchase houses. No one in the world earned money faster, or spent it quicker, than the residents of Gotham. “New Yorkers seem to live to make money and spend it,” said one man.7