Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  “I AM AS GOOD A DEMOCRAT AS YOU ARE”

  During the war years, an era in New York politics would come to an end. The violence of sporting men and Five Points brawlers would be overshadowed by a new electoral tool: corruption. In the meantime, the war had dramatic effects on several key individuals. After completing his term as county clerk at the beginning of 1862, Clancy secured an appointment as “Volunteer Aid” to General Francis B. Spinola. Clancy’s main contributions to the war effort came not in this largely ceremonial post, however, but in keeping Tammany from adopting an anti-war stance. Prominent Democrats such as Wood, Isaiah Rynders, and Governor Horatio Seymour publicly advocated compromise with the South, and even pragmatists like Tweed were tempted to adopt such a platform for the sake of Democratic unity. But Clancy insisted through the Leader that Tammany nominate only candidates who fully supported preserving the Union without capitulating to southern demands for the spread of slavery. By 1864, even Republican journals such as the Tribune commended Clancy for almost single-handedly preventing Tammany from adopting a pro-peace policy that would have seriously impeded the prosecution of the war.23

  With Clancy no longer in municipal office, Sixth Warders once again lacked a representative in citywide government. Brennan, seen at the outset of the war as one of the most prominent city Democrats, was rarely mentioned in discussions of the most powerful Tammany leaders by 1862. All that changed, however, with the unexpected announcement on November 20 that Democrats had nominated Brennan for the highest office on that year’s municipal election slate—that of city comptroller. This post was far more important than the relatively insignificant and invisible office of city register he had sought unsuccessfully two years earlier. The Leader had called the comptrollership “the most powerful office in the State next to that of Governor—locally and in point of patronage far greater” because of the many “subordinate departments, bureaux, clerkships, and offices of every description” that the incumbent could distribute to party members and factional allies. The huge municipal expenditures associated with the war made the comptrollership especially consequential.

  Journalists handicapping the race for the Democratic nomination never considered Brennan, not even as a long shot. Yet factionalism both within Tammany and between it and Mozart Hall created a deadlock. All sides could accept Brennan, though, because he was not too closely linked to any clique and was not perceived as a threat to the future ambitions of the various factional leaders. According to the Times, even Brennan himself must have been surprised when Democratic leaders announced his nomination.24

  With Democrats united behind a single slate of candidates for the first time since 1858, Brennan stood little chance of defeat. Yet the influential Herald—which generally supported Democratic candidates—endorsed Brennan’s Republican opponent instead, stating that “we do not believe that Brennan is at all qualified for the office, or fitted for so important a position.” A significant number of Democratic voters apparently found such arguments persuasive, but Brennan still won a large majority of the popular vote on election day, capturing 60 percent citywide and an unprecedented 95 percent in the Sixth Ward.25

  When Brennan began his four-year term in January 1863, Five Pointers had achieved political power almost unimaginable a generation earlier. With Republican George Opdyke serving as mayor, Brennan was now the city’s highest-ranking Democratic officeholder. Furthermore, when the two chambers of the city’s legislative branch organized that same month, both elected Five Pointers to preside over their proceedings. Former “Dead Rabbit” William Walsh, just twenty-six years old, became president of the board of aldermen, while the councilmen chose Morgan Jones as their president. Jones, a thirty-three-year-old London native, had emigrated to New York as a small child and became a Centre Street plumber and active Democrat as an early member of Matthew T. Brennan Hose Company No. 60. Jones’s links to Brennan undoubtedly helped him earn his prewar sinecure as “corporation plumber.” Jones had served twice previously as council president before regaining the honor in 1863. Clancy, meanwhile, continued to use his control of the Leader and his status as a Tammany chieftain to influence Democratic policy throughout the city and state.26

  Other Five Points politicos increased their influence in the war years as well, none more so than Brennan lieutenants Joseph Dowling and John Jourdan. When Brennan became comptroller, Dowling was appointed to complete his mentor’s term as police justice, and Jourdan succeeded his best friend Dowling as Sixth Ward police captain. Jourdan by this point had already gained citywide fame as a detective, so much so that wealthy New Yorkers regularly sent for him when uptown officers failed to recover their stolen property. Refusing to let anything stand in the way of their crime solving, Dowling and Jourdan (with the connivance of the District Attorney’s Office) established in these years what the Times later called “‘The Police Ring,’ which held a reign of terror over all the criminals. . . . Their power was almost absolute, and instances are known where men arrested secretly at night by Jourdan and his detectives were locked up in the dark cells of the Franklin Street Station for weeks and absolutely starved into confessing their crimes and disgorging their plunder.” Despite these excesses, Dowling ran unopposed for police justice in 1863 when his temporary appointment expired. Even the Republican Times lauded the Democrat Dowling, praising “his integrity of character, his fine capacities and a personal popularity seldom attached to any man.” By mid-war, Dowling and Jourdan were nearly as well known to New Yorkers as Brennan and Clancy.27

  Yet Five Points’ ascent in New York politics came at a time when interest in local politics was waning. Residents who had once followed the factional infighting of New York politicos with intense interest now “generally seemed to regard their movements as of very little consequence,” remarked the Herald. It was the war, of course, that had come to monopolize New Yorkers’ attention. As the bloody conflict dragged on and the death toll mounted, Five Pointers—like most Manhattanites—became increasingly ambivalent about the struggle. This was especially the case after Lincoln announced in September 1862 his plan to promulgate the Emancipation Proclamation at the start of the new year. Many Democrats saw the proclamation as proof of what they had suspected all along—that the war was really being fought to end slavery. New York Catholics “will turn away in disgust,” predicted Archbishop Hughes, if forced to fight for emancipation.28

  After Lincoln’s emancipation plans became public, Irish-American New Yorkers became more openly disdainful of the war effort. At a meeting of anti-war Democrats in April 1863, one Irish Catholic judge, John H. McCunn, complained about expending millions of dollars in a war against slavery. According to a newspaper that paraphrased his speech, “he had seen the negro at the mouth of the Congo River, and the Slavery of the South was a paradise in comparison. The negro was a prince in the South compared to his situation at home.” Although the Irish-American and Leader never criticized the proclamation, Clancy’s journal called all interaction with African Americans “repulsive to the white man’s instincts,” and the Irish-American often referred to the Republicans pejoratively as the “Abolition party” and “Abolition fanatics.”29

  Emancipation also raised the specter that ex-slaves might one day come north and compete with the Irish for the lowest-paying jobs in the city. Irish Americans feared that the freedmen, accustomed to working for nothing, would accept ridiculously low pay and thus drive down the wages of Irish menial laborers. But again, historians have overestimated economic fears as a source of Irish/black tension. For generations it has been a staple of writing on Civil War New York that in early 1863, employers replaced hundreds of striking Irish longshoremen with African-American scabs, fueling Irish animosity toward emancipation. The historian Edward K. Spann described three thousand strikers in June being “forced to watch as black men, under police protection, took their jobs on the docks.” In fact, white army deserters and convalescents, not black scabs, loaded the ships under police guard. A raciall
y charged clash did take place in April, but there were only two to three hundred strikers, and they too were not replaced by a phalanx of black workers. The wildcat strikers, frustrated that their demand for higher pay had not been met despite the wartime shortage of workers, merely wandered the riverfront looking to vent their frustration on the tiny handful of black dockworkers already employed citywide. Blacks might pose a long-term threat to the job security of Irish Americans, but the wholesale replacement of Irish-American workers by African Americans during the war simply never took place.30

  Most Irish criticism of emancipation focused on the racial interaction it would necessitate. The Day Book opposed the use of African Americans in the Union armies, for example, because “equality as soldiers means equality at the ballot-box, equality everywhere,” which would result in the Irish being “degraded to a level with negroes.” When in late June an Irish-American mob in Newburgh, New York, lynched an African American accused of assaulting an Irishwoman, the Irish-American blamed Republicans, whose emancipation policy had “sedulously placed the negro, with all his drawbacks of character and condition, in opposition to the white man.” Republicans, complained the Irish-American, had “thrust the negro again in their [whites’] faces,” even though whites were already “smarting under the reverses” brought about by the war.31

  These tensions manifested themselves with deadly results during the 1862 political campaign. Locked in a close battle for reelection, First Ward alderman Henry Smith (a pro-war Democrat also endorsed by the Republicans) hired Five Points ropemaker Denis P. Sullivan to post handbills promoting his candidacy. With 2,500 bills to post, the thirty-three-year-old Sullivan rounded up some Five Points friends to assist him, and the nine men headed downtown with a ladder and two pails of paste on the evening of November 28. Pleased at having completed their work, the boisterous young men were heading home across Greenwich Street at 2:00 a.m. when Sullivan was approached by a gang led by First Ward politico “Big Tom” Byrnes, father-in-law of Smith’s opponent, anti-war Democrat John Fox. When Byrnes and his friends learned that Sullivan was posting bills for Smith, they upbraided and threatened him. “You are working for a nigger and you are a nigger yourself,” one of them shouted at Sullivan, adding that “the man you are working for hires nothing but niggers on the dock.” Sullivan responded, according to his subsequent testimony, that “I am no nigger—I am as good a Democrat as you are.” The former policeman flashed a pistol inside his coat, saying he would not use it if attacked by one man but would if set upon by the entire gang. Undaunted, Byrnes and his mates rushed Sullivan, vowing to “shove the pistol——.” When they threw Sullivan to the ground and struggled for his weapon, Sullivan shot Byrnes dead. The policemen who witnessed the entire quarrel (but apparently feared to intervene) immediately arrested Sullivan for murder.

  News of Byrnes’s killing caused a sensation, especially in Democratic circles. Friends of both the accused and the victim immediately attempted to shape the public perception of the case. Just hours after the incident, Sullivan’s companions wrote a letter to the Herald insisting that their friend had acted in self-defense. Councilman John Hogan replied the following day that Sullivan’s comrades could not be trusted, as they were all “residents of that well-known locality, the Five Points,” who had gone to the First Ward “with the intention of provoking a quarrel with the friends of Mr. Fox.” At his February 1863 trial, Sullivan appeared with what the Times called “an able array of counsel” retained by Alderman Smith, who in the intervening weeks had won reelection. To the prosecution’s implication that Sullivan would not have carried a pistol had he not intended to pick a fight, Sullivan’s attorney retorted that the defendant armed himself that night because it “was a well known, though a lamentable fact, that any man who had the temerity to post Republican bills in the First Ward did so at the peril of his life.” Given that Sullivan was lying on the ground surrounded by Byrnes and his men when he fired the fatal shot, the jury reasoned that Sullivan had indeed acted in self-defense and found him not guilty.32

  “FOR MANY YEARS THIS LOCALITY

  HAS BEEN A MODEL OF GOOD ORDER”

  The racial and political pressures that had been building up in New York during the first two years of the war exploded in the spring of 1863, when Congress instituted a draft to supplement dwindling voluntary enrollments. Now Five Pointers who disdained the war might be dragged into it against their will. New York’s Irish Americans were especially angry when the Lincoln administration announced that some non-citizens—those who had declared their intention to become citizens or had voted in an American election—would be eligible for the draft. Many also complained about the conscription clause that allowed a draftee to pay $300 in lieu of enrolling. Low-income New Yorkers such as those from Five Points believed, according to the Herald, that “the draft was an unfair one, inasmuch as the rich could avoid it by paying $300, while the poor man, who was without ‘the greenbacks,’ was compelled to go to the war.”33

  When federal officials began choosing the first draftees in mid-July, New Yorkers responded with the bloodiest week in their entire history. The predominantly Irish-American mobs lynched a dozen or more African Americans and terrorized thousands. Hundreds of fires were set. Rioters fought pitched battles with the police and the militia for control of uptown avenues. The homes and businesses of prominent Republicans were looted and ransacked. Symbols of federal power in the city also drew the wrath of the enraged populace in what the Irish-American called “a saturnalia of pillage and violence.”34

  New Yorkers assumed that Five Pointers must have played a major role in the Draft Riots’ carnage. A few months after the unrest, when Republican leader Charles Spencer announced the November election results at his party’s city headquarters, he described the Sixth Ward as one populated by that “class of individuals who would like to murder, steal, and burn ad libitum,” an obvious reference to the Draft Riots. Many modern writers have made the same assumption. According to Luc Sante, “the core of the participants unquestionably came from the Five Points.”35

  The two most scholarly studies of the riots, in contrast, do not mention a single act of violence occurring in the Sixth Ward, and found few acts of violence uptown that can be traced to Five Pointers. Contemporaries agreed. Clancy seized upon the apparent lack of bloodshed in Five Points to remind New Yorkers that the neighborhood no longer lived up to its violent, dangerous reputation. “While nearly every portion of the city has been the scene of tumultuous outbreak,” asserted Clancy, “the Sixth Ward has maintained its usual uninterrupted quiet. For many years this locality has been a model of good order, and its citizens have much cause for congratulation on having passed through the fearful scenes of the week without a single evidence of excitement. . . . Let us hear no more the libelous epithet ‘Bloody Sixth.’”36

  The truth, it turns out, lies somewhere in between the overwrought charges of Sante and the equally exaggerated claims of innocence propounded by Clancy. Of the hundreds of rioters arrested, primarily in uptown wards where the rioting was most fierce, only two of those whose residence could be established lived in Five Points. Instead, most of those indicted lived, as one might expect, in the northern neighborhoods where the disorder was concentrated.37

  Nonetheless, Clancy’s claim that the Sixth Ward witnessed not “a single act of disorder” is also patently false. Although the bloodshed and destruction in Five Points were relatively mild compared to the mass murder and wholesale devastation found uptown, the rioting there was terrible nonetheless and terrorized the neighborhood’s African-American residents. The unrest began in Five Points on Monday, July 13, the first day of violence citywide. That afternoon, police discovered that “the negro shanties in Baxter Street were being fired” and that the nearby tenement and meetinghouse at 42 Baxter belonging to the New York African Society for Mutual Relief were also under attack. Captain Jourdan and his men “were soon at the spot, and after a severe fight, in which the force was boldly
opposed, the rioters were dispersed, many of them badly injured.” A mob also descended upon “the saloon of Mr. Crook on Chatham St.” to attack the black waiters he employed, but the prompt arrival of police prevented any significant injuries there. Around five-thirty, more anti-black violence erupted, this time in the northeast corner of the neighborhood. According to one account, “some three hundred men, women, and boys attacked the dwellings of colored people in Pell, near Mott Street.” One of the African-American residents, fifty-seven-year-old Elizabeth Hennesy, was severely injured when hit by a flying brick. Meanwhile, at about six o’clock, “upwards of six hundred rioters” near the corner of Leonard and Baxter Streets “attacked a house . . . occupied by some twenty colored families, stoning in the windows, [and] attempting to break in and fire it.” When police arrived, “a severe fight ensued; the rioters were effectively handled, and dozens lay senseless on the street; ultimately they fled.”

  The violence continued into the evening. Around 8:00 p.m., “a mob of six hundred” terrorized 104 and 105 Park Street, African-American boardinghouses located near the corner of Mott. In order to disperse them, the police “made a charge; had to fight hand-to-hand, [and] using locusts [billy clubs] effectively, beat and scattered the rioters.” The final melee that night was “a riot in . . . a locality known as Cow Bay,” where for thirty years the largest concentration of African Americans in the neighborhood had lived. Police again successfully scattered a crowd menacing the three-story tenements there. Rumors that the rioters torched the nearby Five Points Mission—repeated to this day—were totally unfounded.

  The bloodshed subsided considerably in the Sixth Ward on the following day, though sporadic attacks on Five Points African Americans continued. That morning, a mob gathered on Leonard Street “assaulting and beating colored people.” The police rescued six African Americans from the rabid throng “and brought them in safety to the station.” On Wednesday morning, police again had to disperse “a mob in Centre, near Worth Street, who were assailing every colored person they met.” In the evening, rioters returned again to the block just north of the Five Points intersection, where “there were many demonstrations against the dwellings [at] Nos. 38 and 40 Baxter Street, occupied by colored people.” Police once more managed to subdue the mob, “sometimes with and sometimes without a battle.” This was apparently the last of the violence, though it raged on uptown for three more days.38