It appears that once the Lansdowne immigrants got settled in Five Points and found work, they focused all their energies on saving money to establish nest eggs for their families, choosing to stay in Five Points even after they could afford to move to more spacious apartments in cleaner and safer neighborhoods. Inasmuch as many of them were undoubtedly also sending money to loved ones in Ireland, either to help support aged parents or to pay for relatives’ emigration, the typical Lansdowne immigrant’s ability to squirrel away $100 or more in just a few years is truly remarkable. Some undoubtedly moved out of Five Points or to less squalid blocks within the neighborhood once they had established these competencies. But many, despite their substantial savings, decided to stay in the Lansdowne enclave, either because they enjoyed being surrounded by so many fellow Kerry natives or because they sought to continue saving as much money as possible by paying low rents. That so many of the Lansdowne immigrants’ account balances remained relatively constant indicates that once they reached their savings goal, they began to raise their standard of living by spending more of their income. “If they do not get milk and honey in abundance,” noted one Civil War–era immigrant, referring to the Irish, “they are able . . . to exchange . . . their ‘male of potatoes’ for plenty of good substantial food; their mud cabins and clay floors with fires on the hearth for clean, comfortable dwellings with warm stoves and ‘bits of carpits on their flures.’”
Through a concerted scheme of hard work and self-sacrifice, then, the Lansdowne immigrants managed to improve their lives significantly, from both the misery of County Kerry and the initial privations of Five Points. So while natives may have considered Five Points “a hell-mouth of infamy and woe,” most of the immigrants who arrived there from Ireland would have concurred with Quin’s judgment that “this is the best Country in the world.”71
5
PROLOGUE
“WE WILL DIRK EVERY MOTHER’S SON OF YOU!”
THE ELECTION DAY scene was typical of nineteenth-century New York. Hundreds of men thronged the street outside the polling place, dressed in long, rough overcoats and tall hats to ward off the November cold. Many were in a boisterous mood, having fortified themselves at neighborhood saloons for the anticipated rushing and shoving, fighting and brawling—what were popularly referred to as “election sports.” At booths outside the polls, campaign workers handed out ballots and harangued the crowd with exhortations to vote for their candidates. Some in the crowd milled around these stands, harassing the speakers and arguing loudly with supporters of their political rivals. Others jostled their way into the line that wound from the ballot box far out into the street.
Suddenly a loud cry pierced the air, and all eyes turned to a “a lithe, dark, handsome man” standing atop a packing crate. “I am Isaiah Rynders!” he shouted, knowing that his name alone would strike fear into the hearts of many within earshot. “My club is here, scattered among you! We know you! Five hundred of you are from Philadelphia—brought here to vote the Whig ticket! Damn you! If you don’t leave these polls in five minutes, we will dirk every mother’s son of you!” New York voters, whether longtime residents or temporary Philadelphia transplants, knew that “Ike” Rynders did not make idle threats. Within five minutes, wrote an eyewitness, “five hundred men left the polls, . . . and went home without voting, for fear of assassination.”1
This was just one episode in a life story that, as the Times noted without exaggeration years later, “forms one of the most romantic of histories.” Born in 1804 near Albany to a German-American father and a Protestant Irish-American mother, Rynders earned his lifelong title of “Captain” when as a young man he commanded a sloop on the Hudson that carried produce and merchandise between New York and upstate river towns. By 1830 he had moved to the South, acquiring some notoriety there as a riverboat gambler. In 1832, after allegedly killing a man in a knife duel over a card game in Natchez, Mississippi, Ike fled to South Carolina. There he became “superintendent of the . . . racing stables” of General Wade Hampton, grandfather of the future U.S. senator of that name. After Hampton died and the Panic of 1837 set in, Rynders returned to New York and settled in Manhattan.2
In New York, Rynders became “a thorough-going sporting-man.” Sporting men did not hold steady jobs, but instead devoted themselves to gambling, politics, boxing, and horse racing. An entire sporting subculture developed in New York, with its own saloons, own patois, even its own newspapers. One, the Clipper, reminisced years later that Rynders throughout his life had “a strong love for the card-room and the racetrack.” Another admiring journalist noted that the Captain was often found dealing faro or “presiding at one of those suppers of oysters, canvasback ducks, and champagne with which the gamblers of New York nightly regale their friends and customers.”3
Isaiah Rynders as he appeared in the post–Civil War years. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
(January 24, 1885): 380. Collection of the Library of Congress.
Many sporting men were muscular bruisers, but young Rynders was a man “of medium size and sinewy form, with a prominent nose, and piercing black eyes—a knowing smile, and a sharp look altogether. He was cool and enterprising in his manners, and fluent and audacious in his speech.” Unlike others in the “sporting fraternity,” Rynders was not an especially skillful pugilist. A tough country minister, Sherlock Bristol, boasted in his autobiography that he fought Rynders to a draw on a Hudson River steamer after defying Rynders by signing an anti-slavery petition. But as a leader of fighters, Rynders was unsurpassed.4
It was in this capacity that Rynders rocketed to prominence in 1844. Realizing that Democrats needed to form an organization to rally the faithful during that year’s tight presidential contest between their candidate, James K. Polk, and Whig Henry Clay, Rynders established the Empire Club. With a membership dominated by sporting men and prizefighters, the group began to whip up support for Polk. Political veterans believed that whoever captured New York’s electoral votes would carry the presidency, and Rynders worked feverishly to turn out the Democratic vote. Led by Rynders on a “white charger,” one thousand Empire Club members marched at the head of a Polk parade on the eve of the election, with “music, and thousands of torches, Roman candles, rockets, and transparencies, with never-ending hurrahs for Polk and Dallas, Texas, Oregon, Fifty-four-forty-or-fight!”* The following day, Rynders and his club used intimidation and outright violence to prevent Whigs from casting ballots. New York swung to Polk by just 5,100 votes out of 486,000 cast. Had he lost New York’s thirty-six electoral college votes, he would have lost the election. Whigs and Democrats alike gave Rynders a significant share of the credit for Polk’s razor-thin margin of victory. In gratitude, the new president rewarded him with a lucrative no-show job as a “measurer” in the New York Customhouse, allowing him to devote his full attention to gambling and politics.5
After 1844, Rynders and the Empire Club became real powers in New York politics, dominating primaries and disrupting political gatherings of their opponents. Rynders was feared not only outside the Democratic party but within it as well. In early 1845, for example, Rynders and his Empire Club compatriots attended a Tammany Hall meeting organized to discuss the possible annexation of Texas. “Aided by a crew of his noisy associates,” complained the Evening Post, Rynders “took the resolutions prepared by the committee of arrangements and reformed them to suit his own ideas of public policy.” His men shouted down speakers and bullied the meeting into adopting resolutions that suited him. No man before Rynders had ever so boldly and impudently dominated Tammany’s public meetings. Yet Rynders was not an ignorant thug. His election night speeches at Tammany Hall, which became something of an institution, were “a mixture of terrible profanity with liberal quotations from the Scriptures and Shakespeare.” He could recite entire scenes from memory.6
By midcentury, Tammany leaders made sure never to enter a meeting or convention without first trying to secure Rynders’s support. But the ambitious Captain w
anted to become one of those leaders himself. His strategy for advancement involved turning Five Points into his political fiefdom, something its emerging Irish Catholic political leaders were bound to resist. The outcome of this struggle would define the political future of the infamous neighborhood.
CHAPTER FIVE
Politics
LIKE ALL NEW YORKERS in the early nineteenth century, Five Pointers deferred to their elite neighbors in political matters. Prominent merchants and manufacturers held most important elective offices. With the adoption of universal white male suffrage, however, this deference began to wane. The election of the uneducated and uncultured Andrew Jackson as president in 1828 and his raucous inauguration the following year helped inspire this political revolution. The Five Points election riots of 1834 marked its climax on the local level, as the neighborhood’s Irish immigrants rose up to seize power. Because the well-to-do in these years were already rapidly abandoning the Sixth Ward for more prestigious neighborhoods, few of the old political elite bothered to contest this transfer of power to the brawling multitude. Five Pointers were consequently among the first New Yorkers to experience the new style of mass politics.
“A ZEALOUS, FIRM, HARD-FISTED
DEMOCRAT OF THE OLD SCHOOL”
Prominent Five Pointers still held the majority of political offices in the years after the 1834 riot, but the political elite now comprised saloonkeepers, grocers, policemen, and firemen rather than manufacturers and wealthy merchants. The political power of these four groups resulted from their particular ability to influence voters. Saloonkeepers were the most respected men in Five Points and other low-income neighborhoods. “The liquor-dealer is their guide, philosopher, and creditor,” commented The Nation in 1875. “He sees them more frequently and familiarly than anybody else, and is more trusted by them than anybody else, and is the person through whom the news and meaning of what passes in the upper regions of city politics reaches them.” Saloonkeepers could thus earn the gratitude and confidence of large numbers of tenement dwellers, gratitude that could be repaid as votes on election day. The liquor dealer also had the name recognition and financial resources to bid successfully for political office. Because many groceries sold little more than alcohol, grocers were as well positioned as saloonkeepers for political advancement.7
Another route to political prominence ran through the volunteer fire department, one of old New York’s most colorful institutions. A well-drilled fire company was just as likely to turn out in force to support a particular electoral slate as to extinguish a fire. Intimidation was an important weapon in the rough-and-tumble world of Five Points politics, and the renowned fighters of the Sixth Ward fire companies frequently determined the outcome of a primary meeting or general election, often through a brawl with a competing company. Most companies admitted at least a few members to their exclusive ranks specifically for their fighting skills.
The popularity and respect that carried a Five Pointer to leadership within a fire unit were the same qualities political kingmakers sought in their candidates. Future Five Points political leaders such as Matthew T. Brennan, his brother Owen, Alderman Thomas P. Walsh, Assemblyman Michael Fitzgerald, and Police Justice Joseph Dowling all began their political careers in Engine Company No. 21. Because of its role as a means of political advancement, competition for places in No. 21 was fierce. As a result, some of its members created an auxiliary unit, the Matthew T. Brennan Hose Company No. 60, named in honor of No. 21’s most prominent and politically powerful alumnus and dominated by his political allies. Its first foreman, John Clancy, became president of the board of aldermen and city register. Other early members included future alderman Morgan Jones, future county supervisor Walter Roche, and future city councilman Michael Brophy. Indeed, most Five Points politicians first came to prominence as foremen of the ward’s fire companies, as did Tammany “Boss” William M. Tweed.8
Another path to political power wound its way through the police department. “There is no patronage . . . that a district leader desires so much and seeks so eagerly as places on the police force,” noted the postbellum attorney and reformer William M. Ivins. Politicos usually reserved positions in the police department for young men who had demonstrated party loyalty through previous campaign efforts. In return for such a high-paying and secure job (about $12 per week in the mid-1850s), the officer was expected not only to continue laboring for the party at election time, but to contribute a portion of his salary to party coffers, and use his influence to assist party members who might run afoul of the law. In this “unobtrusive and quiet way,” Ivins recognized, a policeman could render “valuable service” to both the political benefactor who secured him his job and the party as a whole. Such “service” enabled many a Five Points policeman to rise out of the ranks to both party leadership and elective office.9
A few Sixth Warders managed to claw their way to political prominence without first working in the police and fire departments or owning a saloon. A Five Pointer might, for example, approach a neighborhood political leader and promise to deliver the votes of a pair of large tenements or of those immigrants from a certain Irish county. Or he might offer the services of his gang to intimidate the leader’s opponents at a primary meeting or on election day. Whether he offered voters or fighters, this political aspirant would expect something in return. Some gang leaders asked for money; but the more politically ambitious sought patronage—jobs with the local, state, or federal government—either for themselves or for their allies. Patronage was one of the keys to increasing one’s political clout, especially for those who could not count on the support of a fire company or saloon customers. The aspiring politician who could deliver jobs to supporters was in the best position to increase his strength. This was especially the case in Five Points, where steady jobs were so hard to come by.
By the end of the Civil War, these paths to political power had been systematized into a relatively well-defined hierarchy. At the top sat the city’s party “boss.” His lieutenants each controlled one of the city’s assembly districts, and they in turn relied upon the ward leaders. Every ward was divided into election districts, headed by a single leader or a committee of ward captains or “heelers.” In the postbellum years, the subdivisions continued until every block (and sometimes even single buildings within a block) had its designated party leader. But before the Civil War, the situation was far more fluid. No “boss” anointed a ward or district captain in those years. Instead, factional leaders and their supporters fought (often literally) for control of each ward.10
The battles for the political supremacy of Five Points were always waged among Democratic factions. In the twenty years before the Civil War, Whigs and their Republican successors won only a single Sixth Ward political contest, and that only because the Democrats in that year split their votes among three different candidates. By the late 1850s, Republican candidates had trouble garnering even 15 percent of the district’s vote. Five Pointers’ overwhelming support for the Democratic party resulted from a number of circumstances. Democratic opposition to both the anti-slavery movement and to laws that would restrict the sale of alcohol drew many Five Pointers. So too did the party’s reputation as the friend of the immigrant and opponent of nativism. But substantive issues were rarely discussed during Five Points political contests. Platforms and policy statements are conspicuously absent from neighborhood political campaigns, even the few covered thoroughly in the press. Instead, political struggles were usually decided by the personal popularity of the individual factional leaders; their ability to deliver patronage to their followers, and their skill at wielding violence and intimidation at primary meetings and on election day to secure power and maintain it thereafter.
The career of Constantine J. Donoho, the first Five Points political leader to emerge in the tumultuous new world of mass politics, exemplifies many of these rules of political life. What little we know about Donoho’s career comes from the memoirs of Frank “Florry” Kernan
, a self-described “sporting fireman” whose colorful reminiscences provide some of the most vivid depictions of political and cultural life in Five Points. Kernan remembered Donoho as “a zealous, firm, hard-fisted Democrat of the old school,” who emerged as “king of the politicians of the sixth ward” during “the reign of Felix O’Niel [sic].” O’Neil served as Sixth Ward alderman in 1841–42, which made him the titular leader of the district’s Democrats, but Donoho’s role as kingmaker gave him every bit as much, and perhaps more, influence and power.11
Donoho’s political support rested on the twin foundations of liquor sales and patronage. “Con” (as he was universally known) operated a grocery at 17 Orange Street, a half block south of the Five Points intersection. “The steps that led to the barroom from the street, although wide,” recalled Kernan, “afforded only room for one customer at a time, as upon each step a barrel stood containing two or three brooms, another with charcoal, another with herrings nearly full to the top, while upon its half-open head lay piled up a dozen or two of the biggest, to denote what fine fish were within.” Inside was “a bar quite ornamental,” well stocked with liquor, pipes, and tobacco. “Seats there were none, as Con kept no accommodations for sitters, unless they found it on a half-pipe of gin, ‘Swan brand,’ that lay on its side near the counter, or a row of Binghamton whisky-barrels, interspersed here and there with barrels of pure spirits, much above proof, that told the fact that Con Donoho was a manufacturer of ardent spirits as well as ardent voters.”12
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