* * *
In June, Joseph Taylor, the city street commissioner, died. Wood had a man in place to replace him, but the new governor, John King, overruled Wood and appointed Daniel Conover, whom one longtime New Yorker called a “dirty politician.” Wood had the police eject Conover from his office and boot him out of City Hall. The cops held Conover by the neck and arms and dragged him down the steps outside the building. An infuriated Conover obtained a warrant for Wood’s arrest and, surrounded by fifty of the new Metropolitan Policemen, stormed across the park toward Wood’s office, only to find that the mayor had locked all the doors to the building. Inside City Hall were about eight hundred of Wood’s Municipal policemen, nearly the entire force, ready to do battle if need be.
And battle they did.
The new police managed to get into the building and confront the old cops, who were already there. The old cops had been joined by a hundred or so Wood hangers-on, street thugs from the Plug Ugly gang, ward heelers, and a horde of Irishmen intent on protecting their beloved mayor. Fistfights broke out between the two battalions of police, and within minutes some of them hauled out their nightsticks and began to strike the others with them, delivering hard, vicious blows to their arms, backs, and even heads. Rumors flew that several had been killed on each side, but that was not true. Several cops, on both sides, had been badly injured, and many were taken to the office of the city recorder, where volunteer doctors treated their wounds.
Captain George Walling was there at the recorder’s office. He was trying to find out, from any city official he could locate, what was going on before he stepped in with his men. At that time, all he knew was that there was a riot going on between the two police forces. He did not know why or what had to be done, or if he was supposed to step in to restore order. All was confusion around him. In that same office were a lawyer for Conover and the sheriff. The lawyer told the sheriff that he had to serve the arrest warrant that had been obtained on the mayor. The sheriff told Conover’s attorney, Brown, and Walling that they had to go with him, Brown because he had obtained the warrant and Walling for official police protection. Captain Walling knew Mayor Wood well and was unhappy that he had suddenly been thrust into the middle of the dispute and had to arrest his boss. He managed to worm his way through the loud and raucous mob of new police and old police into the mayor’s office, the lawyer and sheriff behind him. There, Walling spoke for them all. He told the mayor that he had to arrest him because Conover had obtained a warrant. He carefully told him that if the tables had been turned, if some other man had been mayor and Wood the head of the new police, with an official warrant, he would have had to arrest that mayor, too. He was just doing his job, Walling told the furious mayor. “Mr. Mayor, here is an order for your arrest. It is in the hands of the sheriff of this county. I warn you that it is your duty as a law-abiding citizen to quietly submit to arrest,” he said to Wood.
Wood, a smirk on his lips, walked around the desk to confront Walling. He grabbed his staff of office, which was leaning against a wall, and slammed it down on the floor with a loud thud. “I will never submit!” he yelled at the police captain, standing directly in front of him. “You only want to humiliate me. I will never let you arrest me.” The mayor, shouting some epithets, then threw Walling out of his office.23
Conover’s lawyer, Brown, told the mayor that the battle between the police outside City Hall and in its corridors had resulted in many injuries, and the number would grow if he did not submit to arrest. Then, a moment later, Police Chief Matsell arrived and excitedly told the mayor that the old Municipals had driven the new Metropolitans out of City Hall and into the park that surrounded it.24
The news of the arrival of the new police and Conover had flown through the city. Hundreds of New Yorkers surrounded the building and wandered through the park, eager to watch what promised to be an event without precedent in American history.
Then, coincidentally, at the exact moment that the police began to clash inside City Hall, the National Guard’s 7th Regiment, composed of several hundred guardsmen, was parading in perfect formation on a street near City Hall, flags unfurled and its band playing military music. The guardsmen stopped when told of the police fracas, then moved on, uncertain what their role was, headed for ships that would take them to a prearranged visit to Boston. Then they stopped again, with the hundreds in the crowd watching intently. The leaders had a discussion about the police battle, and then the troops marched away, toward the docks, their band continuing to play. George Templeton Strong, one of many across the street from City Hall, observed the scene and followed the soldiers down the street with his eyes. They began to disappear from view, and their music seemed farther and farther away. Then something happened. “The drums that were dying away began to grow louder and to draw nearer and the National Guard re-appeared, defiling through the park gates and stationing themselves in hollow squares on the south front of City Hall,” he wrote.25
Once the 7th Regiment had formed a ring around City Hall, its leader, General Charles Sandford, accompanied by Conover, walked calmly into the building and to the mayor’s office. He told the mayor that Conover had a legitimate arrest warrant and that it had to be served on him by the police or, now, Sandford. Wood looked out the window and saw that he was surrounded by a small army of guardsmen. Matsell nodded to him that he should submit to arrest.
Wood, in a huff, agreed to accompany Matsell to a nearby courthouse. There, with friends, he arranged for his case to be heard by a magistrate very friendly to him. The magistrate said there was no cause for arrest, and the case was thrown out. The mayor returned to City Hall. By that time, the 7th Regiment had calmed down the feelings of police on both sides, the inquisitive public, and the press and formed a circle around City Hall.26 The confrontation had ended, and most of the police from both sides had left, as did the hundreds of spectators.
The new and old police jammed City Hall, and poured out into the park, all day as negotiators moved back and forth within the building to resolve the dispute between the two police forces. New Yorkers were intrigued by the unfolding Shakespearean scene.
George Templeton Strong saw the mayor as the perfect symbol of New York City corruption. “He is an egregious demagogue and scoundrel and it’s a great pity that his opponents are nearly as bad,” he said the next day as he again lingered in the park with hundreds of others to see how the police riot would end.27
It ended very badly for Wood.
On July 3, 1857, following court approval of the new Metropolitan force, all of Wood’s Municipal Police were let go, leaving the new Metropolitan force to maintain order in the city, and to do it with the annual drunkenness of the Fourth of July on its doorstep. Wood challenged the state legislature. He also told the Common Council that the new Metropolitan Police could not keep the peace on the Fourth of July, and, in fact, the new force was very disorganized as of the day the court decision was handed down. It was so disorganized that no one had bothered to legally swear in any of the new police. This was done hastily, and by late afternoon only about eighty of the eight hundred were sworn in. No one on either force knew who was technically in charge of the precinct houses, police weapons, and property that day. The next day, certain that the loss of the old force and installation of the new authorities as the sole force would cause massive police chaos, the Dead Rabbits street gang struck.28
What no one in charge of either police force, with one waiting on line to be appointed and the other still lingering, powerless, in the precinct houses, or Mayor Wood, knew was that the leaders of the largest city street gangs saw the divided police force as the opportunity to satisfy old grudges, and they did so, armed to the teeth. This surprised no one. “The old police being disbanded and the new police as yet inexperienced and imperfectly organized, we are in an insecure and unsettled state at present,” warned diarist Strong, who later described the following riots as “a state of siege.”29
Early on the evening of July 4, 1857, whi
le most city residents were still celebrating the national holiday, and drinking considerable amounts of beer, the Dead Rabbits organized several other street gangs and led them in an attack on the rival Bowery Boys gang, most of whose members were in their clubhouse in the Bowery, unaware of what was about to happen. The Dead Rabbits’ coalition marched down the street toward the clubhouse and encountered several dozen surprised Bowery Boys. One of them raced back to the clubhouse to alert the rest of the gang, who promptly poured out into the street, armed with clubs, chains, and knives. The two groups clashed in front of hundreds of stunned and frightened bystanders who alerted the police, as the gangs knew someone would.30
The gangs also knew that the splintered police force would have to scramble to halt the street riot. In the previous week, in separate incidents, street gangs had beaten up several of the new Metropolitan cops. Each of the leaders of the two police forces decided that the gang fight was the jurisdiction of the other and did not send any patrolmen to break up the men. By 9:00 P.M., the sky black, the disturbance had become a huge riot that covered several large city blocks. Unencumbered by police or any other figure of authority, the rioters engaged in mayhem. Hundreds of gang members were beaten up, and stores in the neighborhood were looted. Some residents were harassed and beaten up in their dwellings. The fighting lasted through most of the night of July 4.31
In the morning, the Rabbits attacked the Bowery Boys at another building and began the battle all over again. They burst into a bar run by the Bowery Boys and destroyed it, hurling rocks through the windows and shattering mirrors. Other, smaller gangs, who had held grudges against the Dead Rabbits from back in the early days of the 1830s, then joined the Bowery Boys and attacked the Dead Rabbits’ coalition on Bayard Street. A few patrolmen on the new force, and several from the old force who were still working, were swept up into the battle and badly beaten. One cop tried to edge his way through the crowd to the leaders of the Rabbits, but he was battered. He was disarmed, knocked about with his own nightstick, and then stripped of his clothes. He crawled away through the crowd of battlers in his shorts and made it to a precinct house on White Street. The captain there sent several dozen cops into the neighborhood to break up the riot, but they were pushed back on their first assault. They regrouped and charged again; this time they broke through the lines of street-gang brawlers and reached some gang leaders, arresting them. They tried to pull them out of the melee and take them to a police station, but rioters raced to the rooftops and hurled hundreds of paving stones and iron bars down at the police, forcing them to run away and leave the gang leaders behind. The police were also assaulted by hundreds of bystanders caught up in the riot. The bystanders mistakenly believed that the police were out to get them, not the street thugs, and hurled hundreds of rocks and missiles at them in a rage.32
A Sergeant Hicks, who had been in the melee, told reporters later that “a strong malignant feeling was manifested in my district last night by a large gang of rowdies residing therein, [especially] against the Metropolitan Police.… [There was] considerable fighting during a latter part of the night between those rowdies and a party of men in the Bowery.”33
Witnesses to the riot said it was “indescribable confusion.” A Herald reporter wrote that “the crowding, fighting mass in the streets—the howling, shrieking women and children in the upper floors busily engaged in showering every description of missile on the heads of those below, hitting indiscriminately friends and foes, the explosions of firearms amid the shrieks of the wounded and dying, rendered the scene one of horror and terror.”34
That night Captain Isaiah Rynders, who also served as political boss of the Sixth Ward, arrived at the scene around 7:00 P.M. He stood on top of a barricade that had been built across one of the city streets and asked all of the men to cease and desist and go home. He was immediately attacked, hit several times in a hail of rocks and projectiles thrown at him, and forced out of the neighborhood. He left as fires were set in the lobbies of several buildings and in stores. The blaze grew higher and higher as Rynders walked as fast as he could to police headquarters. He told the captain that the city needed all of the men and firepower available to settle the riot. The 8th and 71st Regiments of the state militia, under General Charles Sandford, were called in to disperse the rioters.35
The militia, as always, arrived quickly, and its members were heavily armed. Sandford led several hundred men down the street, bayonets at the ready, revolvers in their belts, and rifles slung over their shoulders. They were joined by nearly two hundred police from both departments. This army charged into the rioters, beating them and pushing them back. The leaders of the street gangs, seeing so many National Guardsmen and fearing even more rumored to be on their way, retreated out of the neighborhoods, leaving dozens of broken storefront windows, hundreds of tossed paving stones, and smoldering fires behind them. News soon arrived that about five hundred more guardsmen and police had secured City Hall and the park in front of it and were ready for any fight that anybody wanted. The rioters pulled back, and peace was restored.
Twelve men had been killed in the fighting, but both sides claimed that there were several more deaths and that those corpses had been pulled out of the fracas and buried secretly in neighborhood backyards and basements. Over three hundred rioters were injured, and half of them were sent to local hospitals. The Herald and other papers printed the names of those killed and wounded for several days but never reached a complete total. Police said just over one thousand men from all of the gangs participated in the two-day riot, making it the largest in New York history up to that time.36
Everyone in New York City was shaken by the riots. It was the worst melee since the fabled Astor Place riot of 1849. Residents and city officials were appalled that no police were at first sent to break up the disturbance, that the lack of police permitted the riots to spiral out of control, and that those police who did arrive later had no effect on the disorders and were driven back, rather hastily. If it was not for the National Guard, the street gangs would have run roughshod all over New York. Gotham was, all realized, a city without a real police force even though it had two on the payroll.
That squabble was followed just a week later by another outburst of riotous violence. A group of the new Metropolitan Police encountered a crowd of Germans in the Seventeenth Ward on July 12, and a melee broke out. One man was killed by a single gunshot. No one ever discovered who fired the gun. The death triggered an outpouring of anger from the German community. The Metropolitans left but that night came back in force, nearly four hundred of them, and battled the Germans again. The next night, genuinely scared that the police—both forces—were out of control, several thousand Germans met at a large outdoor public meeting. There, leaders got them to cease the civil disturbances and to pledge not to harass the police. The German leaders also complained loud and long, though, about police brutality on the part of the new Metropolitan Police, who charged into the crowd of their friends and neighbors without much warning. The Irish in the city, no friends to the Germans, allied themselves with the Germans in protesting police violence. Those two ethnic groups, and others, began to complain that the new Metropolitan Police had become the standing army of the state, just as all Americans had feared for years. Within days, New Yorkers had a dim view of the new police, a worse view than they had of the old Municipal force. They argued, too, that the new police were given their jobs as patronage by the Republican Party, just as the old police had benefited so heavily from the Democrats. Nothing had changed at all; New Yorkers just had a different political machine to worry about. It had been promised that many of the Municipal Police would be rehired for the Metropolitan force because of their experience. They were not; the Republicans in the statehouse wanted to keep them out. As an example, in one ward, there were twenty-eight new Metropolitan policemen, and just one of them was from the old Municipal force. The new force was not heavily composed of the Irish, either, and the Irish in the city saw it as discrimina
tion.
Some applauded the changeover to the new force and the lessening of power in the mayor’s office, and some condemned it. In Brooklyn, there were celebrations hailing the takeover of the new Metropolitan Police force. Candles were put into the windows of precinct houses, and there were rifle salutes. In the Wall Street area of Manhattan, there was disappointment. The businessmen had become close to the old police force and cherished it; they were also reluctant to deal with a new police department.37
The city newspapers urged everyone to obey the new law and the new police force, given substantial legitimacy by the courts. The editor at Harper’s Weekly urged all to “rally bodily to support the Albany Commissioners, and help them, honestly, fearlessly, like good citizens, preserve the peace and enforce the laws.”38
Slowly, in the following week, the civil disorders ceased, order was restored, and New York City’s law enforcement contingent settled in. But then, in 1858, the criminals came out of their abodes and the crime wave began all over again.
EPILOGUE
Crime patterns did not change much when the new, state-appointed Metropolitan Police settled into their jobs in New York City. The street gangs continued fighting each other, bank frauds remained routine, muggers and robbers continued their practices, the number of drunks on street corners increased, prostitutes carried on as usual, and gambling remained uncontrollable. The new police did not do much more than the old Municipal force. That was illustrated one night a week after the Dead Rabbits riot when George Templeton Strong took a walk downtown to get more information for his daily diary. He headed for the area around Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side because there had been a small riot there the night before, and another the day before that. The disturbances were played up in all the newspapers. Some of the papers even suggested the chaos was started by the retired Municipal policemen in an effort to get their jobs back. Strong did not find the trouble. There were no “mobs” of ruffians, as he had expected. “I saw nothing more alarming than sundry groups of Teutons jabbering gutterals with vehemence and smelled no gunpowder,” he wrote. One thing he did notice was the lax behavior of the police. “The new police seem very inefficient from want of organization and a couple of regiments [National Guard] were under arms last night. Should there be occasion for their active intervention, I trust they will fire low and give the blackguardism of the city a sharp lesson.”
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