By the 1830s, Five Points’ infamy was so well known that out-of-town visitors went there to see its depravities. The first of these tourists to record his impressions for posterity was frontiersman Davy Crockett. In 1834, Crockett toured the Northeast and soon after published An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East. Written in a style that attempted to convey that Crockett’s co-author was as much a backwoodsman as the famous colonel (the ghostwriter was actually Pennsylvania congressman William Clark), An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour listed the visit to “Five-points” as one of the highlights of the frontiersman’s tour. “The buildings,” noted Crockett and Clark, “are little, old, frame houses, and looked like some little country village. . . . It appeared as if the cellars was jam full of people; and such fiddling and dancing nobody ever saw before in this world.” The mixing of the races in these dance halls was especially noteworthy: “Black and white, white and black, all hugemsnug together, happy as lords and ladies, sitting sometimes round in a ring, with a jug of liquor between them: and I do think I saw more drunk folks, men and women, that day, than I ever saw before. This is part of what is called by the Regency the ‘glorious sixth ward’—the regular Van Buren ground-floor. I thought I would rather risque myself in an Indian fight than venture among these creatures after night. I said to the colonel, ‘. . . these are worse than savages; they are too mean to swab hell’s kitchen.’” The infamy of Five Points was now being conveyed to a national audience.32
With their reference to Vice President Martin Van Buren, though, Crockett and Clark added a new element to the discourse surrounding Five Points. Five Points was part of the city political district known as the Sixth Ward, and “Regency” was the term used by enemies to describe the Democratic party’s statewide organization, then headed by Van Buren. “The regular Van Buren ground-floor” referred to the large Democratic majority the district routinely polled—larger than that in any other ward. Crockett had recently broken with the Democrats and thrown his support instead to their Whig opponents. Crockett and Clark were using the Democrats’ popularity in Five Points to cast aspersions on the entire party.
“KEEP THOSE DAMNED IRISHMEN IN ORDER!”
The reference to Van Buren may have been inspired by a Five Points election riot in 1834. There were actually three riots there in 1834 and 1835—the first an election battle; the second the Lewis Tappan–inspired race riot; and the third an ethnic and religious fight between natives and Irish Catholics. The initial riot began on Tuesday, April 8, 1834, the first of three days set aside for voting in New York’s municipal election. That year, for the first time, the various groups that opposed the policies of President Andrew Jackson and his Democratic party had unified in a single organization, just then becoming known as the Whig party. The Whigs were determined to unseat the Democrats, who had controlled New York’s municipal government in recent years. Whigs believed that by emphasizing Jackson policies they considered unconstitutional (such as his removal of federal deposits from the Bank of the United States without the consent of Congress) and by vigilantly guarding the polls to prevent Democratic intimidation of voters in places such as the Sixth Ward, they could carry the election.
Each side blamed the other for the fighting. Whigs insisted that it started when a mob of a hundred or so Democrats, led by ex-Alderman George D. Strong (he of the slashed nose), invaded the Whigs’ Sixth Ward committee rooms, tore down banners, destroyed Whig ballots, and assaulted those Whigs present. Democrats, on the other hand, asserted that peace had prevailed in the district until Whigs from the First and Second Wards arrived at the Sixth Ward polls. They had come ostensibly to prevent Democratic intimidation, but instead threatened peaceable Democrats with weapons, insulted them by repeating slurs from the Whig press, and vowed loudly to “keep those damned Irishmen in order!” Such confrontations led to polling place fights at which a number of participants were seriously injured.33
To highlight their claim that Jackson ignored the Constitution, the Whigs had constructed a huge model of the warship Constitution which, with the aid of four horses, they pulled through the streets. When the Constitution rolled into the Sixth Ward on the second morning of balloting, more fisticuffs ensued, though this time a heavy police presence prevented severe injuries. Voting proceeded relatively quietly until noon on the third and final day of the canvass, when violence erupted outside the Whig headquarters at Masonic Hall on Broadway, at the western edge of the ward. Democrats claimed that the trouble started when one of the “sailors” from the Constitution (then parked outside Masonic Hall) beat an Irishman, whose friends headed toward Five Points looking for reinforcements. Whigs claimed that no such beating took place and that they were simply, in the words of former mayor Philip Hone, attending to the “miniature frigate . . . when suddenly the alarm was given, and a band of Irishmen of the lowest class came out of Duane Street from the Sixth Ward poll, armed with clubs, and commenced a savage attack upon all about the ship and the hall. There was much severe fighting and many persons were wounded and knocked down. The Irishmen then retired and the frigate was drawn away, but in a few minutes the mob returned with a strong reënforcement, and the fight was renewed with the most unrelenting barbarity. The mayor arrived with a strong body of watchmen, but they were attacked and overcome.” Each side had hundreds engaged in the rioting by this point.34
Determined not to be bested, the Whigs retreated into the Sixth Ward to the nearby city arsenal at the corner of Elm and Franklin Streets, where they broke in and began to arm themselves with muskets. The mayor, who a few minutes earlier had pleaded with the Democrats to desist, now implored the Whigs to leave the weapons alone before the riot turned murderous. “He begged them to consider the awful consequences of this movement” to introduce firearms, reported the Sun. “Civil war” was inevitable if they did not reconsider. “‘Stop, for the love of heaven, stop,’ said the Mayor, as the tear stood in his eye—‘You are rash—you know not what you do.’” After this impassioned plea, the Whigs came out of the arsenal without the weapons and order was restored. Thus ended the ordeal.35
The rioting that day was unprecedented in the history of New York City—at least prior to July’s race riot. “The extent and violence of the disturbance went well beyond any riot of the eighteenth century and far exceeded any previous political tumult in New York,” writes historian Paul Gilje. “Never before had an election pushed the city so near the brink. Never before had there been such anarchy.” Both Democrats (such as the Post’s editors) and Whigs (such as Hone) blamed the heightened tension on ethnic animosity. Hone characterized it not as a fight between Democrats and Whigs, but “between the Irish and the Americans.” The riot further hurt Five Points’ reputation, convincing New Yorkers that the neighborhood’s Irish threatened not only the health and morals of the city, but its peace as well.36
Just three months later, in July, the anti-abolition riot erupted. And eleven months after that, a third riot disgraced the neighborhood. Like the first, this one pitted Irish immigrants against native-born citizens. Since the election riot, tensions between natives and immigrants had increased alarmingly in many parts of the United States. In August 1834, a mob burned a Catholic convent near Boston. A few months later, Samuel F. B. Morse published a series of virulently anti-Catholic newspaper articles in New York charging the Catholic Church with a conspiracy to flood the United States with Catholic immigrants in order to assist in the overthrow of democratic government. The growing animosity between natives and Irish-Catholic immigrants manifested itself in New York as well, with street fights breaking out in September and October 1834 and January and March 1835.37
Hostility between the Irish and natives truly exploded in early June 1835, however, when word spread throughout the city that the Irish in Five Points were about to form an exclusively Irish militia company. Without a standing army of any significance, antebellum Americans relied upon volunteer militia units to defend the nation and at times quell domestic
disturbances. Two decades had passed since the United States’s last war, and because none seemed imminent, these militia companies had become primarily social organizations, with picnics and drinking occasionally interrupted for a bit of target practice or drilling. Because Irish immigrants tended to socialize with each other and probably felt unwelcome in units comprised either primarily or exclusively of natives, it was inevitable that they would form militia units of their own. Yet the nativist press vehemently objected. “No greater insult was ever offered the American people than the arrangements now being made to raise in this city an Irish regiment to be called the ‘O’Connell Guards,’” insisted the Courier and Enquirer. “Such a corps would soon attempt to enforce with the bayonet what too many of the misguided and ignorant of the foreign voters already boast of—the complete subjection of the Native Citizens to their dictation.” Similar diatribes in the Courier and Enquirer had helped foment both 1834 riots, so New Yorkers braced themselves for another outbreak of violence.38
Natives claimed that the trouble started on Sunday evening, June 21, 1835, when an Irishman upset the cart of a native-born apple vendor. The Irish insisted that it originated when natives insulted a drunk Irishman, perhaps concerning the propriety of drinking on the Sabbath. Others said the cause was a brawl between the O’Connell Guard and its neighborhood rival, the natives-only American Guard.39 Whatever the cause, every observer agreed that a “most disgraceful riot” erupted between “natives and Irish” along Pearl and Cross Streets between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. According to the Sun, “Ireland and America were the battle cry of the contending parties, and both sides found plenty of zealous friends. Bloody noses, bunged eyes, cracked craniums, and barked knuckles soon became the distinguishing marks of scores of combatants.” At its height, several thousand were engaged in the melee, and dozens were injured.40 Fighting also spread north of Five Points. On Grand Street, Irish rioters hit Dr. William McCaffery with a brick, “which broke his jaw bone.” The doctor, after “being thrown down, was jumped on, and several of his ribs broken.” McCaffery died a day later. The Courier and Enquirer claimed that the rioters had singled out McCaffery for such a malicious attack because he was an Irish Whig, and the paper set up a fund to assist his widow and children. This was the first fatality of the bloody year in Five Points.41
Rioting resumed Monday night, June 22, as both natives and immigrants gathered on Chatham Street near Orange and Pearl looking for trouble, though “the party claiming to be American” far outnumbered its adversary. Fighting spread across the neighborhood and from there both southward toward City Hall and northward above Walker Street, where the natives stoned the house of a “Mr. O’Brien” and “menaced” St. Patrick’s Cathedral (on Mott Street north of Walker) as well. They also attacked the Green Dragons tavern on the Bowery and some twenty houses on Orange Street. The next evening, a large crowd that “seemed to cherish burning resentments against the adopted citizens” collected on Chatham Street near Orange. Meanwhile, closer to the Five Points intersection, “fire arms and clubs were seen” in the hands of immigrants, who vowed to use them against natives if attacked. Many Catholics assembled at the Cathedral to protect it from an expected onslaught, but none materialized. Although there were again many “broken heads” and bruises, the mayor, aldermen, and police finally managed to disperse the rioters and bring the violence to an end.42
In many ways, this riot was the least dreadful of the three. The neighborhood never seemed as close to anarchy in June 1835 as it had fourteen months earlier when the Whigs stormed the arsenal. There was no serious damage to property this time, in stark contrast to the rampant destruction during the anti-abolition violence of the previous summer. Yet the deaths of Dr. McCaffery and an English-born piano maker made the final melee the only one to result in fatalities, something virtually unprecedented in previous American rioting. The final unrest also helped lead to the creation of the city’s first nativist political party.43
A subsequent incident, one that did not receive the attention of the riots, reflected the lingering ethnic and religious tensions in Five Points. In March 1836, the Herald reported that “the Bowery gang” was up to its old mischief again, invading the oyster bar at the North American Hotel at the corner of Bowery and Bayard and causing a commotion. Later that day, gang members threw snowballs and ice at the predominantly Irish-American city workers clearing snow from the streets. When the workers protested, the Bowery gang beat them unmercifully with the laborers’ own shovels and pickaxes, injuring one badly. The reaction of the crowd when Alderman Ferris and some constables arrived at the scene revealed the ethnic tensions at the source of the attack. The offenders had long since disappeared, but the crowd defended the assailants and excoriated Ferris and the city workers, shouting “D__m the Irishmen, they ought not to have work—the Corporation always gives them work and not us Americans.” Some of this animosity, of course, had a religious underpinning. Writing at about this time, New Yorker Asa Green reported that the city was brimming with anti-Catholicism and that he commonly heard it said that “the Pope of Rome is coming hither, with hasty strides, to take the land.”44
From this point on, Five Points would be renowned as the most violent part of the “Bloody Sixth” Ward, where collective violence was the standard response to almost any grievance. The reputation was mostly unwarranted, at least at this point. Outsiders had instigated most of the violence in the anti-abolition riot, and much of the blame for the 1835 anti-Irish riot rested outside the community as well. Nonetheless, observers concluded that any neighborhood in which three major riots could take place in just fifteen months must be particularly brutal. Additional election riots, particularly one in 1842, would reinforce this impression.45
“LET US . . . PLUNGE INTO THE FIVE POINTS”
By the late 1830s, all the major elements of Five Points’ reputation were well established in the minds of New Yorkers and many Americans. It was an Englishman, however, who brought that reputation to the world. Charles Dickens was not yet thirty years old when he embarked on a five-month tour of North America in 1841. He had become a celebrity a few years earlier for his Pickwick Papers, and the subsequent publication of Oliver Twist established his reputation as a severe critic of England’s treatment of the poor. Consequently, one might have expected Dickens to portray Five Pointers with sympathy and compassion. But the young writer harbored a burning resentment of the United States, where inadequate copyright laws brought him little compensation for sales of his work. Dickens’s account of his visit, the American Notes, brutally condemns nearly every aspect of American life.
His description of Five Points revealed its appalling conditions, already well known to New Yorkers, to readers all over the world:
Let us go on again . . . and . . . plunge into the Five Points. . . . We have seen no beggars in the streets by night or day; but of other kinds of strollers plenty. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice are rife enough where we are going now.
This is the place, these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. . . . Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of those pigs [previously described wandering the streets foraging for food] live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting? . . . . Here, too, are lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee deep; underground chambers, where they dance and game . . . hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.
Dickens described in detail his visits to some of the neighborhood’s wretched tenement apartments. In one, what initially appeared to be piles of rags was in fact several African Americans sleeping in their clothes on rag-pile beds on the floors of their apartments. Although he had thought that no slum in America could match those of London, Di
ckens concluded that Five Points contained every bit as much misery as the “Seven Dials, or any other part of famed St. Giles.”46
Although this image dates from the 1880s, slumming parties had begun to visit Five Points as early as the 1830s. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, December 5, 1885. Collection of the Library of Congress.
Dickens’s visit to Five Points made it fashionable for well-to-do New Yorkers to go “slumming,” visiting Five Points as Dickens had done, with a police escort, to marvel at its poverty and gawk at its displays of vice. Indeed, the term “slumming” may have been coined there to describe such tours. “I had never before any adequate idea of poverty in cities,” admitted the writer and literary critic Nathaniel P. Willis after visiting Five Points in the mid-1840s. “I did not dream that human beings, within reach of human aid, could be abandoned to the wretchedness which I there saw.” The writer, abolitionist, and reformer Lydia Maria Child toured Five Points in about 1844. “Morally and physically, the breathing air was like an open tomb,” she wrote in Letters from New York:
How souls or bodies could live there, I could not imagine. If you want to see something worse than Hogarth’s Gin Lane, go there in a warm afternoon, when the poor wretches have come to what they call home, and are not yet driven within doors, by darkness and constables. There you will see nearly every form of human misery, every sign of human degradation. The leer of the licentious, the dull sensualism of the drunkard, the sly glance of the thief—oh, it made my heart ache for many a day. . . . What a place to ask one’s self, “Will the millennium ever come!”
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