Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  25. Minutes of the Common Council, 18: 11–12 (“great rent”), 19–20, 632; Haswell, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, 264; John J. Post, Old Streets, Roads, Lanes, Piers, and Wharves of New York (New York, 1882), 72, 76; Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 5: 1720; Mirror, May 18, 1833, in Frank Moss, The American Metropolis, 3 vols. (New York, 1897), 3: 50–51.

  26. Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years (Chicago, 1962), 41–42; “A RESIDENT OF THE VICINITY” to the Editors, Evening Post, July 23, 1832.

  27. Sun, May 29, 1834.

  28. Sun, May 27 and 29, 1834.

  29. Sun, May 29, 1834.

  30. Ibid.

  31. The painting is in the collection of Mrs. Screven Lorillard, Far Hills, NJ. The family had once owned a tannery on the shores of the Collect and continued to own rental property there after the lake was filled in. When a lithographer from the Manual of the Common Council (popularly known as Valentine’s Manual) copied the painting in 1859 for the publication’s series of images of old New York, he labeled the work “Five Points in 1827,” though Mrs. Lorillard informs me that she can find no such date on the painting today. The Valentine’s Manual image is the best known portrayal of Five Points, but a comparison of the painting to the lithograph shows that the printmaker made many significant changes. As a result, the painting ought to be relied upon over the better-known print. See Manual of the Common Council of the City of New York for 1859 (New York, 1859).

  32. An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (Philadelphia, 1835), 48–49; Mark Derr, The Frontiersman: The Real Life and the Many Legends of Davy Crockett (New York, 1993), 214–20.

  33. Evening Post, April 9, 11, 1834; Weinbaum, Mobs and Demagogues, 5–9.

  34. Evening Post and Sun, April 11, 1834; The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851, Allan Nevins, ed. (New York, 1936), 123.

  35. Sun, April 11, 1834.

  36. Gilje, Road to Mobocracy, 140–41; Diary of Philip Hone, 122.

  37. Ray Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (Chicago, 1938), 70–76, 122–25; Commercial Advertiser, September 29, October 4, 1834, January 5, March 18, 1835, in Weinbaum, Mobs and Demagogues, 55.

  38. Courier and Enquirer quoted in Evening Post, June 25, 1835.

  39. Graham Hodges, “‘Desirable Companions and Lovers’: Irish and African Americans in the Sixth Ward, 1830–1870,” in Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore, 1996), 115; Michael Kaplan, “The World of the B’hoys: Urban Violence and the Political Culture of Antebellum New York City, 1825–1860” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1996), 78; Harlow, Old Bowery Days, 293; Evening Post, June 22, 1835; Sun, June 23, 1835.

  40. Evening Post, June 22, 1835; Sun, June 22 and 23, 1835.

  41. Sun, June 23, 1835; Courier, July 2, 1835, in Kaplan, “The World of the B’hoys,” 83.

  42. Sun, June 24 and 25, 1835; Evening Post, June 25, 1835.

  43. Sun, June 24 and 25, 1835; Evening Post, June 25, 1835; Hodges, “‘Desirable Companions and Lovers,’” 115; Herald, February 25, 1836.

  44. Herald, March 4 and 5, 1836 (quotation from March 5); Asa Green, A Glance at New York (New York, 1837), 49; J. Frank Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies (New York, 1885), 39.

  45. Herald, April 14, 1842 (a “bloody and riotous” ward); Tribune, April 12, 1848 (first known description of the ward as the “Bloody Sixth”).

  46. Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842; London, 1985), 80–82.

  47. The Prose Works of N. P. Willis (1845; Philadelphia, 1849), 582–83; Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York, 2nd ed. (New York, 1844), 26; Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 3 vols., trans. Mary Howitt (London, 1853), 3: 409; Clipper, October 3, 1868, p. 204 (for Dickens’s role in popularizing slumming).

  48. Evening Post, January 30, 1846; [George G. Foster], New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (New York, 1849), 22; Times, April 7, 1856; Lyman Abbott, Reminiscences (Boston, 1915), 33; Herald, April 12, 1842; Old Brewery, 34.

  49. [William A. Caruthers], The Kentuckian in New-York, 2 vols. (1834; Ridgewood, NJ, 1968), 2: 28; [William M. Bobo], Glimpses of New-York City, by a South Carolinian (Charleston, 1852), 97; “Slavery and Freedom,” Southern Quarterly Review 1 (April 1856): 80; John S. C. Abbott, South and North (New York, 1860), 78 (not quoted); unnamed congressman quoted in Francis W. Kellogg, Speech of Hon. Francis W. Kellogg, of Michigan, in the House of Representatives, June 12, 1860 (Washington, DC, 1860), 14. Though Caruthers’s work is a novel, his service as a doctor in Five Points makes his views noteworthy, even though expressed through a fictional character.

  50. Kellogg, Speech of Hon. Francis W. Kellogg, 14; Hinton R. Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South (New York, 1860), 170–73.

  51. Clipper, October 3, 1868, p. 204.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. William Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland (London, 1847), 127–29.

  2. Gerard J. Lyne, “William Steuart Trench and the Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare to America, 1850–1855,” Journal of the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society 25 (1992): 72, 97; Ira A. Glazier, ed., The Famine Immigrants: Lists of Irish Immigrants Arriving at the Port of New York, 1846–1851, 7 vols. (Baltimore, 1983–86), 6: 629 (composition of Holland’s family). My belief that Ellen Holland must have been in the workhouse by late 1849 is based on the Lansdowne agent’s later statement that he chose as the first emigrants those who had been in the workhouse the longest. Because Holland was one of the first to leave under Lansdowne’s emigration program, she was probably in the workhouse by 1849.

  3. Descriptions of famine conditions in this prologue are based on the sources listed below in notes 34–36 and 47–48.

  4. Herald, March 17, 1851; Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare to America,” 102–4.

  5. Tribune, March 19, 1851; Herald, March 23, 1851.

  6. Evening Post, May 17, 1849 (hogs).

  7. Accounts 5479 and 9445, Test Books and Account Ledgers, Emigrant Savings Bank Collection, New York Public Library.

  8. Advertisement in Tribune, March 18, 1854; Ned Buntline, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (New York, 1848), 84; “A Voice from Cow Bay,” Vanity Fair, January 21, 1860, in Edward Lubitz, “The Tenement Problem in New York City and the Movement for Its Reform, 1856–1867” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1970), 73–74; New York Illustrated News (February 18 and 25, 1860): 216–17, 233; George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light (1850; Berkeley, 1990).

  9. Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–1863 (1949; Port Washington, NY, 1965), 20; Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York (Ithaca, 1990), 72.

  10. Citizens’ Association, Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health (New York, 1865), cxxi; Ernst, Immigrant Life, 193. My figures on Five Points’ immigrant population come from a random sample of families taken from the 1855 New York State manuscript census. Approximately one in ten families from the Five Points neighborhood was sampled. I defined the Five Points “neighborhood” as the area bounded by Centre, Canal, Bowery, Chatham, and Pearl Streets. The total number of individuals in the sample is 1,407, of whom 400 were born in the United States. Of those eighteen or older, 97 of 851 were born in the United States. I utilized city directories to determine which portions of the 1855 census covered those blocks. Given that it is sometimes difficult to determine exactly when the census taker has left or entered the neighborhood, a few families may have been inadvertently included in or excluded from my sample. All the statistics in the following paragraphs are taken from this sample unless otherwise noted—1855 New York State manuscript census, Old Records Division, New York County Clerk’s Office.

  11. Five Points Monthly (December 1864), in Pamela Haag, “The ‘Ill-Use of a Wife’: Patterns of Working-Class Violence in Domestic and Public New York City, 1860–1880,” Journal of Social History 25 (1992):
455; Times, April 11, 1860 (“every nationality”).

  12. I have assumed that if both husband and wife had lived in New York for the same number of years, they emigrated together. The percentage of married couples that emigrated together can be determined because the 1855 census takers asked New Yorkers how long they had lived in their city of residence. Some immigrants, however, might have reunited someplace else in North America before coming to New York. But comparing the dates of emigration listed in the Emigrant Savings Bank records to the “years in New York” answer in the census for families documented in both sources, I found that in 95 percent of these cases, the “years in New York” figure matched the date of emigration. For the percentage of immigrants arriving with other family members, see Glazier, Famine Immigrants, passim.

  13. Families 62, 66, 73, 101, 151, 284, 292, 329, and 680, second division, third electoral district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census; marriage of James Tucker, August 7, 1860, marriage register, Church of the Transfiguration, 29 Mott Street, New York.

  14. Religion is not listed in the census, but I determined the subjects’ religion by examining their first and last names. In most cases, the names were quite distinct. Jewish families tended to name their children Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Yetta, Sarah, and Deborah. Christians chose names such as Christian, Christine, Frederick, Catharine, August, Hildebrand, etc. Surnames such as Levy, Cohen, Isaacs, and Abraham were considered indications of Jewish roots, whereas names such as Von Glahn were considered indications of Christian ties. In cases where neither the surnames nor the given names indicated the religious background with certainty, these persons were classified as “unknown.” The religious background of six families out of forty-five could not be determined by this method.

  15. Accounts 924, 2130, 2281, 2487, 3527, 3626, 3847, 5367, 5948, 6199, 6709, and 7242, 8440, 9414, and 9569, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books.

  16. Accounts 450, 451, 1245, 1723, 2501, 2608, 2723, 2725, 3135, 3173, 3191, 3538, 3580, 3616, 3652, 4260, 4740, 4780, 5134, 5192, 5230, 5731, 6077, 7171, 7204, 8970, 9263, 10021, and 10864, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books.

  17. Carol Groneman, “‘The Bloody Ould Sixth’: A Social Analysis of a New York City Working-Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1973), 35; Commercial Advertiser, August 23, 1849; Tribune, June 5, 1850 (quotation); Times, April 7, 1860; J. Frank Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies (New York, 1885), 41.

  18. Dwellings 63–74, 82–87, first division, third electoral district, dwellings 6–73, second division, third electoral district, dwellings 16–26, fourth election district, dwellings 135–61, fifth election district, dwellings 94–113, sixth election district, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York census.

  19. I refer to Irish Catholics rather than all Irish because the source for my Irish nativity figures is the marriage records of Five Points’ Roman Catholic Church of the Transfiguration, which from 1853 to 1860 recorded the place of birth of virtually every person married at the church. My figures probably approximate the county origins of all Five Points Irish fairly accurately, because although there were undoubtedly some Irish Protestants in the neighborhood, there were not many. This is confirmed by an analysis of the Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books, which also list place of birth and whose depositors included Protestants and Jews as well. Of the Five Pointers in the Transfiguration register, 173 were from Sligo, 142 from Cork, 141 from Kerry, 59 from Galway, 56 from Limerick, 52 from Tipperary, 42 from Mayo, 36 from Leitrim, 40 from Roscommon, 30 from Waterford, 27 from Kilkenny, 19 from Dublin (city and county), 17 from Tyrone, 16 from Donegal, 15 from Fermanagh, 15 from Clare, 15 from Longford, 14 from Meath, 14 from Louth, 13 from Queen’s, 12 from Westmeath, 12 from King’s, 12 from Cavan, 10 from Monaghan, 9 from Wexford, 9 from Armagh, 9 from Derry, 8 from Kildare, 7 from Carlow, 3 from Down, 3 from Wicklow, and none from Antrim.

  20. Accounts 1005, 2661, 3787, 5419, and 6433, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books.

  21. Eighty-seven of the 173 Sligo natives listed in the Transfiguration marriage register for 1853–60 had been born either in the parish of Ahamlish (Palmerston’s estate) or Drumcliff (the parish owned almost exclusively by Gore Booth). Seventy-nine percent of the Kerry natives married there in those years were natives of Kenmare, Tuosist, or Bonane parishes, all owned primarily by Lansdowne.

  22. Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers, “Colonies, Canada” series (Shannon, 1969), 17: 469–70 (hereafter cited as IUP-BPP, Colonies, Canada); David Fitzpatrick, “Emigration, 1801–70,” in Ireland Under the Union, 1: 1801–70, vol. 5 of A New History of Ireland (Oxford, 1989), 592.

  23. House of Commons, “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix D, Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Earnings of Labourers, Cottier Tenants, Employment of Women and Children, Expenditure,” Sessional Papers, Reports from Commissioners, 1836, 31: 13, and supplement p. 38.

  24. Commons, “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix D,” 31: 13–14, 77, 85, 95; “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix F, Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Con Acre Quarter or Score Ground, Small Tenantry, Consolidation of Farms and Dislodged Tenantry, Emigration,” Sessional Papers, Reports from Commissioners, 1836, 33: 6–7, 41–42, 224; Evidence Taken Before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of the Law and Practice in respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland [Devon Commission], No. 616 (1845), 20: 203–8, 223–25.

  25. House of Commons, “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix E, Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Food, Cottages and Cabins, Clothing and Furniture, Pawnbroking and Savings Banks, Drinking,” Sessional Papers, Reports from Commissioners, 1836, 32: 7–8.

  26. Ibid., 32: 7; “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix D,” 31:108 (Christmas); Evidence Taken Before her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry, 20: 919.

  27. Jonathan Binns, The Miseries and Beauties of Ireland, 2 vols. (London, 1837), 1: 50; “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix D,” 31: 13–14. Binns was an “assistant agricultural commissioner” involved in the 1836 Irish Poor Inquiry.

  28. Binns, Miseries and Beauties of Ireland, 1: 49–50; “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix E,” 32: 7–8, 25, 58, supplement p. 213; Kevin Danaher, The Year in Ireland (Cork, 1972), 163–66 (“hungry July”).

  29. William S. Trench, Realities of Irish Life (London, 1868), 112–13; Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare,” 66; Commons, “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix D,” 31: 52 (quotation); Henry D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834: A Journey Throughout Ireland During the Spring, Summer, and Autumn of 1834, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1835), 1: 209–13.

  30. Commons, “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix E,” 32: 41.

  31. Inglis, Ireland in 1834, 209–13; Michael Doheny, The Felon’s Tracks (1849; Dublin, 1951), 244; Binns, Miseries and Beauties of Ireland, 2: 333–34; Commons, “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix E,” 32: 58, 90, supplement p. 213.

  32. “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix E,” 32: 70, supplement p. 213.

  33. “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix F,” 33: 148 (“extremely wretched”); “Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix D,” 31: 15 (early marriage); Trench, Realities of Irish Life, 112–13 (early marriage); Evidence Taken before Her Majesty’s Commissioners of Inquiry, 20: 912 (early marriage), 919 (“face of the globe,” not Lansdowne’s fault); Binns, Miseries and Beauties of Ireland, 2: 336–37.

  34. [Sixth] Marquis of Lansdowne, Glanerought and the Petty-Fitzmaurices (London, 1937), 127; Trench, Realities of Irish Life, 113–14; Kenmare Relief Committee to the Lord Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Treasury, August 22, 1846, in Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers, “Famine” series (Shannon, 1970), 6: 94–95 (hereafter cited as IUP–BPP, Famine).

  35. Mr. Gill to Mr. Russell, February 25, 1847, in IUP–BPP, Famine, 7: 550; Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland, 132. For more on conditions in Tuosist, see IUP–BPP, Famine, 2: 835, 838, 843–50, 852; 3: 336; Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration f
rom Kenmare,” 124–25.

  36. O’Sullivan Diary, c. March 1847, in Lyne, “Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare,” 125; O’Sullivan to Trevelyan, “February, 1847,” in IUP–BPP, Famine, 7: 524; Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland, 127–29.

  37. James R. Stewart and Joseph Kincaid to Palmerston, December 24, 1845 (BR 146/7/57), February 6, 1846 (BR 144/10/30), Broadlands Papers, University of Southampton. See also [Stuart] Maxwell to Stewart, November 5, 1845, Widow O’Farrel to Kincaid, November 10, 1845, Dr. West to Stewart or Kincaid, n.d. [March 1846], in Desmond Norton, “Landlords, Tenants, Famine: Letters of an Irish Land Agent in the 1840s,” manuscript in the possession of the author (hereafter cited as Norton manuscript). The letters quoted from Norton’s manuscript are apparently in his possession, and I sincerely appreciate his sharing their contents with me.

  38. Sligo Champion, October 10, 1846; Kincaid to Palmerston, August 6, 1846, BR148/3/5/1, undated newspaper clipping BR148/3/20/2, enclosed in letter dated December 9, 1846, Broadlands Papers; Dr. West to Kincaid, December 13, 1846, Norton manuscript; Captain Flude to Charles Trevelyan, December 20, 1846, in Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–1849 (1962; New York, 1991), 160.

  39. Sligo Champion, March 20, 1847; Captain O’Brien to Lieut.-Colonel Jones, March 2, 1847, in IUP–BPP, Famine, 7: 204.

  40. Captain O’Brien to Lieut.-Colonel Jones, March 2, 1847, in IUP–BPP, Famine, 7: 204 (block quotation); undated newspaper clipping (“a waste”) in BR148/3/17/2, Broadlands Papers; letter with illegible signature to Sir Robert Gore Booth (“actually starving”), January 13, 1847, reel 1, microfilm 590, series H/8/1, Lissadell Papers, Public Records Office of Northern Ireland; S. H. Cousens, “The Regional Variation in Mortality During the Great Irish Famine,” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 63, section C, no. 3 (February 1963): 130; Joel Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved (London, 1983), 267. Just about the only thing that Cousens and Mokyr agree upon is Sligo’s status as one of the leaders in excess mortality during the famine years.