Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  Walsh knew that leaving the neighborhood would have ended his political career. He had no base of support uptown, while in the Sixth Ward he remained a force to be reckoned with. He could still rally large blocs of the Five Points electorate, even though Italians far outnumbered Irish Americans there by this point. “Mr. Walsh had a wonderful control over the voters, particularly the Italians, in his district,” noted one biographical sketch. “It is told of him that he had only to stand on a barrel and cry, ‘Who is the truest friend of Italy in New York?’ to receive from the Italians the answer, ‘Fatta Walsha alla de time-a.’” In 1893, anxious to retain his support, Tammany leaders rewarded Walsh with a sinecure as a dockmaster.12

  Walsh still held this post when he died in 1899 at age sixty-five. Five thousand New Yorkers came to pay their respects at his funeral service. “He was a man of remarkably good nature,” said the Times in its obituary, “generous in disposition, and noted especially for his steadfastness to his friends and his pugnacity in political battles. He never knew when he was beaten.” This was the epitaph to which every Five Points politician aspired.13

  CHAPTER NINE

  Riot

  “AS READY WITH HIS PISTOL AS HIS FISTICUFFS”

  BY THE MID- 1850s, saloonkeeper and police court justice Matthew Brennan had established substantial control of Five Points politics through his dominance of the police department and two ward fire companies. He maintained that power with the help of a loyal cadre of supporters, most notably Councilman John Clancy and Captain Joseph Dowling. Yet Brennan’s power was by no means absolute. In 1853, while Brennan was still a police captain and a year before he ran for his first elective office, there appeared on the political scene another young Five Pointer—one whose popularity and disdain for the dictates of the party did not bode well for Brennan or Clancy.

  Like Clancy, James E. Kerrigan was twenty-four when he captured the 1853 Democratic nomination for councilman from the thirteenth council district (Clancy represented the eleventh). Kerrigan was also, like Clancy, relatively well educated, having studied at Fordham University. But there the similarities ended. Whereas Clancy was calculating, deliberate, and somewhat dull by Five Points standards, Kerrigan was colorful, brash, and unpredictable. Kerrigan had left Fordham after a few months to enlist, at age seventeen, in the Mexican-American War, where he was said to have “displayed marked gallantry in battle” in the assault on Monterrey. Upon his return, Kerrigan became a member of Hose Company No. 14. He first came to public attention just weeks before his nomination for council, when the press reported that he was one of the “short-boys” (political thugs) hired by city Democrats to overawe delegates at the state nominating convention in Syracuse. Tammany leaders hoped to use the intimidation tactics perfected by Con Donoho and his men in Dooley’s Long-Room to seize control of the party statewide. That Kerrigan had recently been made a letter carrier—a much sought after patronage appointment—indicates that by 1853 he had already labored extensively for the party.

  Kerrigan did not look like the typical Five Points politician. Although born in New York, his appearance was that of “the ideal Southerner. He was tall, graceful, swarthy, wore his jet-black hair long and wavy, and it fell in a cascade of curls upon his shoulders.” Kerrigan was also “a natural-born fighter, and was as ready with his pistol as his fisticuffs. He shrunk from no antagonist.” Among his antagonists were the leaders of his own party. No sooner had Kerrigan captured the council nomination than he spearheaded the successful effort of an insurgent Democratic to beat out the party’s regular nominee in the race for the ward’s third council seat. On election day, the popular Kerrigan easily won his council race, as did the insurgent candidate he supported. Aspiring ward leaders such as Brennan and Clancy knew they would have to monitor closely the temperamental Councilman Kerrigan.14

  When he chose to do so, Kerrigan dominated council proceedings by the sheer force of his personality. Even outside the legislative chambers, Kerrigan constantly drew the attention of the press. After winning reelection to the council in November 1854, he made headlines in early 1855 for his involvement in the celebrated murder of sporting man Bill “The Butcher” Poole. In late February 1855, Poole, a Whig and an American native, got into a bitter argument in a Broadway saloon with another prominent old sport, Irish-born Democrat John Morrissey. A few hours later, Morrissey’s friend Lew Baker shot Poole, and Bill the Butcher died two weeks later. The Times called Kerrigan one “of the principle [sic] accessories to the murder of Poole and the flight of Baker,” apparently because Kerrigan, himself an Irish-American sporting man, helped Baker flee the country. Kerrigan spent several days in jail while authorities investigated his role in the affair, but in the end they did not indict him.15

  Throughout the 1850s, freelance American adventurers known as filibusterers staged periodic raids in the Caribbean and Central America, usually in the hopes that they could turn a profit by annexing the captured territory to the United States. When news of William Walker’s filibustering campaign in Nicaragua reached New York in 1856, Kerrigan rushed to claim some of the glory, despite administration policy prohibiting any American assistance. Describing the sailing of a steamer for Nicaragua in early January 1856, the Herald noted that “among the most conspicuous of those on board was Councilman Kerrigan.” He told the Herald’s reporter that “he had about fifty men with him, and that he was their captain [he was actually a second lieutenant], and that he was going to Nicaragua to assist General Walker.” As the steamer pulled away from the dock, the ever-flamboyant Kerrigan “ascended the paddle box, and was greeted with nine tremendous cheers.” Kerrigan “will be a better soldier than statesman,” predicted the Herald a few weeks later, but military glory eluded him in Central America. Kerrigan returned quietly to New York that autumn.16

  During Kerrigan’s absence, another brawler and sporting man—Pat Mathews—attempted to assume Kerrigan’s mantle as the dominant politician in the northeast portion of the ward. Born in Ireland, Mathews had emigrated with his sister and mother to New York in 1841 when he was about ten years old. He first gained notoriety in December 1852 when he and a few others invaded a Tammany Hall meeting of the Democratic general committee. During the brawl, Mathews struck acting committee chairman Augustus Schell over the head with “a large arm chair,” knocking him unconscious and leaving him with a severe concussion. Mathews used the incident both to settle a factional score within the party and for personal financial gain. As coal dealer Frederick Ridaboek (one of the individuals at the center of the Kelly imbroglio three years earlier) prepared to enter the meeting, Mathews told him not to go in because he “would get licked.” The next morning, Mathews visited Ridaboek and insisted that because he had saved Ridaboek from harm, he was owed something. Asked what he wanted, Mathews replied, “My mother is poor, and I’ll take two tons of coal.” Ridaboek gave him one ton. Meanwhile, Mathews’s conviction for assaulting Schell did not seem to affect his political career. He was one of the “short-boys” who accompanied Kerrigan to Syracuse in the autumn of 1853 to bully the other delegates. By 1855, when the census taker found him residing at 8 Doyer Street with his widowed sister and her two young children, Mathews had secured a patronage post in the customhouse. After Kerrigan sailed for Nicaragua in 1856, the twenty-five-year-old Mathews decided to run for his council seat. Kerrigan, who returned to the city before the November balloting, did not stand for a fourth term himself, but refused to endorse Mathews. He instead threw his support to fruit dealer Martin Gilmartin.17

  On election day, the two antagonists and their allies engaged in one of the most violent polling place melees of the antebellum years. The Times described the “desperate fight” as one “between the Bowery boys, headed by MATHEWS, and the Molly Maguire boys led on by JIM KERRIGAN—between whom and MATHEWS a feud has long existed.” By nine in the morning, the antagonists had thrown the voting station at 3 Elizabeth Street into chaos as they engaged in “a regular running street fight . . . with the us
ual accompaniment of knock-downs, drag outs, damaged eyes and skinned noses.” This was the first Sixth Ward election skirmish in which firearms played a significant role. Kerrigan brandished his revolver on several occasions, and as many as thirty or forty shots were fired by the various combatants. Most of the injuries, however, were inflicted with more traditional Five Points riot weapons. “About a dozen persons were wounded from blows received by axes and clubs,” reported the Herald, “while two or three were severely stabbed.” Toward the end of the day, commented the Times, “scarcely any person could vote at [any of] the Sixth Ward polls on account of the rioting about them.” At one point, Brennan’s toughs ventured to the Elizabeth Street voting station, apparently in an attempt to discourage balloting by supporters of both his cross-neighborhood rivals. Kerrigan’s and Mathews’s men momentarily put aside their differences to defend their turf against these “Mulberry St. Boys.” But after the interlopers had been repulsed, the temporary allies once again turned their blows upon each other. Kerrigan’s men finally bested Mathews’s supporters, allowing Gilmartin to carry the council race by a wide margin.18

  “THE OLD SIXTH REMINDED ONE OF A HOUSE IN MOURNING”

  The 1856 rioting between the Mathews and Kerrigan loyalists involved more than a personal feud and a council race. Many of the newspapers covering the fracas noted that mayoral politics was involved as well. Two factions of New York Democrats had for some time been engaged in a struggle for control of the party at the citywide level. Mayor Fernando Wood headed one clique; the other had no single leader at this point but would eventually become identified with Tammany stalwarts such as William M. Tweed.

  Wood was the most dynamic New York political figure of the 1850s. Although he was a Protestant and native-born, the dapper, charming mayor was especially beloved by the city’s impoverished Irish Catholic immigrants, who appreciated his efforts to create jobs and distribute food during the severe recession winter of 1854–55. Such voters also lauded Wood’s efforts to obstruct enforcement of state-imposed laws limiting the sale of alcoholic beverages. Yet despite his personal magnetism and popularity with voters, Wood’s refusal to follow the dictates of Tammany’s internal leadership outraged many Democrats. Whigs and Republicans soon came to despise Wood as well, fuming that his personal popularity did not diminish even as he broke promises to reform government and enforce temperance legislation. By the autumn of 1856, the city was firmly divided into pro- and anti-Wood camps. The animosity between the two sides had contributed to the Sixth Ward election rioting of 1856—Mathews’s supporters were pro-Wood, Kerrigan’s anti-Wood. When Mathews lost his customhouse position just weeks before the 1856 election, the Leader identified his “offense” as “Wood Fever.”19

  After Wood won reelection in 1856, anti-Wood Democrats combined forces with Republicans to enact a slate of legislation designed to punish the mayor. Although some of the bills passed by state lawmakers sought to reform municipal government, others enacted in the winter of 1857 were designed primarily to strip Wood of his official responsibilities and patronage power. Two of these measures caused particular consternation in Five Points. One, a “license law,” raised the cost of a liquor license to levels beyond the reach of many of the neighborhood’s small saloonkeepers and completely banned the sale of alcoholic beverages on Sundays. The other, the Metropolitan Police Act, was the one that had so incensed Fatty Walsh. It mandated the disbanding of the city’s police department and its replacement with a force administered by a state-appointed board of commissioners rather than the mayor.

  The Irish-American condemned the Police Act for its “partisanship, odiousness, and tyranny. . . . It virtually disfranchises the people” by taking control of municipal institutions away from the city’s duly elected leaders. Even many Republicans found the legislature’s actions embarrassing. Diarist George Templeton Strong admitted that the legislature enacted the police bill “in order to take power out of the paws of Mayor Wood and get it into those of the other scoundrels at Albany.” The Republican Times agreed that rather than making the police apolitical, as it ought to, the legislature had merely taken the police “from one political party and hand[ed] it over to another.”20

  Two aspects of the new legislation especially infuriated Five Pointers. One was the sense that the new laws were part of a nativist plot against the Irish. Know Nothings had long called for liquor restrictions, and in cities where they had gained power—such as Philadelphia and Chicago—Know Nothing mayors had created natives-only police forces because they believed immigrants could not be trusted to enforce temperance laws. Know Nothings had also sought to restrict saloons because they understood that most immigrant political activity centered in neighborhood taverns. The Know Nothing movement was fading by the spring of 1857. But most Irish Catholics believed that the “Black Republicans,” so-called by Democrats because of their purported obsession with the plight of African Americans, had adopted much of the nativist platform. Sixth Warders cursed the Police Act as “‘a Know-Nothing and Black Republican scheme,’ the design of which was to disfranchise foreign-born citizens, and oust them from all political rights.”21

  Five Pointers also believed that the act was part of a continuing conspiracy to deny the Irish their fair share of the patronage. In 1856, an Irish-American journal noted that despite Know Nothing claims that “Irish citizens get all the offices,” only 10 percent of the seven hundred fifty customhouse employees in New York were natives of Ireland, and that the Irish held the lowest-paying jobs. “The cosy sinecures with large emoluments are reserved for ‘those to the manor born,’” agreed the Irish-American. The police department was one of the few government institutions that hired the Irish in significant numbers for non-menial jobs—Sixth Ward immigrants constituted 64 percent of the district’s force in 1856.

  Led by Wood, many city Democrats fought the new Police Act. In the spring of 1857, when the state set up its new “Metropolitan” police department, Wood refused to disband the old “Municipal” force. For more than a month, the city witnessed the spectacle of rival police departments. Criminals sometimes escaped as members of the two squads fought for the right to make arrests. On one occasion, the two units engaged in a full-scale riot on the steps of City Hall. The farce finally ended on July 2 when the state’s highest court ruled that the disbanding of the old force was constitutional. Wood reluctantly dissolved the Municipal Police the next day. The stage was set for Fatty Walsh’s riot.22

  According to the Tribune, “the old Sixth reminded one of a house in mourning,” as word of the mayor’s capitulation spread across Five Points on Friday, July 3. Reports that the Metropolitan Police Board had not appointed any Irishmen to the new force, except for the occasional Irish Republican, confirmed Five Pointers’ fears, and rumors flew that “the Know Nothings & Black Republicans were coming down to burn the [Transfiguration] Catholic Church in Mott St.” With the typically raucous Fourth of July celebrations about to begin, Clancy offered the Metropolitan commissioners the services of Captain Dowling and his old Sixth Ward police force free of charge over the holiday weekend, so long as the men remained under Dowling’s command. The commissioners wanted the extra manpower, but only if the men took orders from the Metropolitan commanders, something Dowling and his men refused to consider. Vowing to “lick” any Metropolitan foolish enough to show his face in the district, Five Pointers braced for a bloody Fourth of July in the bloody old Sixth.23

  A “RATHER EXTRAORDINARY SIXTH WARD MUSS”

  What transpired on the Fourth, not just where Walsh was involved but before, after, and elsewhere, exceeded even the most dire predictions, as the ward degenerated into what one historian has termed “the most ferocious free-for-all in the history of the city.” Contemporaries agreed that the ensuing Sixth Ward riot threw the entire city into “a state of anarchy.” No sooner had the clock struck midnight on the morning of the Fourth than the anticipated violence began. Shouting “Kill the G–d d——d Black Metropolitan Police s�
�n of a b——,” a mob of Five Pointers beat and stoned a new policeman making an arrest after a street fight at the corner of Mulberry and Chatham Streets. The officer died several days later of injuries sustained in the brutal attack.24

  About an hour later, a large crowd of Five Pointers appeared on Chatham Street, determined “to beat all the new policemen they could find.” The rowdies moved north from Chatham onto the Bowery, “hooting & cheering Fernando Wood & making very noisy demonstrations.” North of Bayard Street, the Five Pointers found Metropolitan Abraham Florentine Jr. of Mulberry Street. The mob wrestled Florentine’s club from him, but before it could harm him seriously he ran up the street and ducked into the saloon at 40 Bowery, known throughout the neighborhood as headquarters of Pat Mathews and his “Bowery Boys.” Though the tavern was relatively deserted, the occupants barricaded themselves in as the rioters bombarded it with rocks and bricks. Meanwhile, the mob noticed another Metropolitan attempting to slip away undetected. With seventy-five to a hundred men at his heels, the officer ran inside Henry McCloskey’s “coffee and cake saloon” at 36 Bowery. According to the establishment’s baker, Richard Quinn, the crowd smashed the windows and hurled missiles inside at the occupants, who returned fire “with tumblers, bottles and other things that we could seize upon.” After about ten minutes, a gang of Mathews’s Bowery Boys arrived to repel the assault. The rioters then retreated down Bayard into the heart of the Five Points neighborhood, giving “three cheers for Fernandy Wud” as they made their escape. The Bowery Boys did not pursue them, “not desiring to penetrate too far into the enemy’s camp.” The two gangs clashed once more just before dawn.25