The Epic of New York City (47 page)

In 1857 the legislature created a new police district from the counties of New York, Kings, Richmond, and Westchester. In those days Westchester included what is now the Bronx. The governor appointed five police commissioners to run the new state police district—with the mayors of New York and Brooklyn serving as ex officio members. Frederick Tallmadge was named police superintendent. The new state force was called the Metropolitan Police; the old city one, the Municipal Police.

The state now ordered the city to disband its force. Mayor Wood
refused, declaring that the act creating the Metropolitan Police was unconstitutional. He urged the Municipal Police to stand by him. Its 1,100 members voted, and 800 of them—all Democrats—affirmed their loyalty to the mayor. The other 300 resigned to serve as a cadre for the new Metropolitan Police force, which opened headquarters in White Street and recruited new men to fill its ranks. The state went through the motions of trying the 800 cops who stood by Wood. The city did the same with the 300 who deserted him.

New York now had two police departments, each of equal strength and each regarding the other as an outlaw force. Five Points criminals danced in the streets to celebrate the vacuum of law enforcement. Decent people walked warily and knew that sooner or later the two hostile groups would clash, leaving them utterly without protection. This fateful day fell on June 16, 1857.

The street commissioner had died. His deputy claimed the right to succeed him. However, the deputy wasn't rich enough to bribe Wood, and the mayor rejected him. The Republican governor then appointed a Republican, Daniel D. Conover, to the post. Meantime, after a Democrat, named Charles Devlin, had paid $50,000 to Democratic Mayor Wood, he too was named street commissioner.

With the governor's commission in his pocket and accompanied by a dozen friends, Conover walked to City Hall to take over the office. Wood's police threw them out. Conover and his friends fought back but were overwhelmed. Conover then marched to a Republican judge and swore out two warrants for the arrest of the mayor. One charged Wood with assault, the other with inciting to riot. The captain of the Metropolitan Police, George W. Walling—one of the 300 men who had deserted the mayor—was ordered to serve one warrant upon Wood. By now the mayor had posted 500 of his Municipal Police outside City Hall, keeping a reserve force inside.

Despite this imposing array and despite the mob that gathered in front of City Hall to sympathize with the mayor, Captain Walling walked alone up the front steps. He was permitted to enter the mayor's office, where Wood sat behind a desk, one hand clutching his ornate staff of office. The captain said that he had come to arrest the mayor. Wood refused to recognize the warrant's legality or the captain's power. The captain smiled, walked around one end of the desk, and grabbed the mayor by the arm. Twenty Municipal Police swarmed into the room, seized the captain, dragged him through the
corridors of City Hall, and threw him out into the park. The obstinate captain tried again and again to get back into City Hall but was blocked each time. He was still arguing with a captain of the Municipal Police when fifty Metropolitan Police arrived on the double to rescue him and serve the second warrant on the mayor.

The mob—described by G. T. Strong as “a miscellaneous assortment of suckers, soaplocks, Irishmen, and plug-uglies”—hissed and booed the Metropolitan Police. The state cops wore plug hats and frock coats, and their new badges glistened in the sun. But they were outnumbered by the mayor's “Municipals” in their blue coats, armed with revolvers, slingshots and locust clubs.

The “Mets” advanced toward the main entrance of City Hall. The Municipals fell on them. There, on the steps of the official seat of government of the largest city in the United States, two rival police forces clashed in combat. Clubs whirred through the air. Skulls cracked. Fists thudded into faces. Bloodied men, knocked off their feet, rolled helplessly down the steps. Disabled Mets were beaten and kicked by the crowd as they lay on the ground. A few hardy Mets bulled their way into City Hall. The Municipals battered them outdoors again. Some bruised and bloody Mets fled, leaving companions writhing on the earth under a hail of blows from cursing gangsters. When the fracas was all over, most of the Mets had been injured, twelve of them seriously, and one remained a cripple the rest of his life.

Mayor Wood and his cohorts now gathered in his office to celebrate their victory. Meantime, Captain Walling had prevailed on the city recorder to order Sheriff J. J. V. Westervelt to arrest the mayor. The sheriff consulted his attorney, who said that it was his duty to take the mayor into custody. Walling, Westervelt, and the lawyer strode to City Hall and pushed their way through the threatening mob. The sheriff walked with dignity, face grim, head crowned with plug hat, and sword clanking at his heels, holding aloft his own staff of office. Under orders from Wood the Municipals fell back and let the three men enter the mayor's office. The trio told him to submit to arrest. Wood shouted, “I will never let you arrest me!”

Just then the beating of drums was heard through the windows of City Hall. The national guard's Seventh Regiment, flags flying, was marching down Broadway toward the waterfront to board a ship for Boston to help celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Met officers ran to the soldiers and cried for the attention of their commanding officer, Major General Charles W. Sanford. He halted his men. The Mets excitedly asked him to come to their aid. This, after all, was what the militia was supposed to do when the city's peace and dignity were threatened.

General Sanford marched his men into City Hall Park and surrounded the building. Now some Metropolitan Police commissioners appeared. Standing in the sun, the general, sheriff, and commissioners conferred. Then the general barked an order. Soldiers clicked bayonets onto muskets. They fell into place behind their general as he strode fierce-faced up the steps into City Hall. Entering the mayor's office, the general announced that he represented the state's military power, that he was going to take the mayor into custody, and—glaring menacingly about him—that he would brook no interference. The mayor submitted.

However, Wood was released on bond and never stood trial. Civil courts held that the governor had no right to appoint a city street commissioner and that Mayor Wood's appointee was entitled to the office.

But which of the two rival police forces was legitimate? While the issue was argued in courts, members of both departments strode New York's sidewalks, more concerned with their private feud than with the public weal. Local criminals ran wild, robbing, murdering, and looting. During the summer of 1857 respectable people were held up at gunpoint in broad daylight on Broadway and other thoroughfares. A Met would arrest a robber. A Municipal would attack the Met, while the holdup man ran away to sin some more. Then the Met and the Municipal would fight it out between themselves.

Into this power vacuum rushed gang members, who staged the biggest gang fight in the city's history on July 4 and 5. The Dead Rabbits and the Bowery B'hoys, deadly antagonists, tried to settle their ancient grudges. Barricades were thrown across streets. Between 800 and 1,000 toughs battled so ferociously that 2 regiments of militia were required to put down the disturbance. When it was all over, 10 men were dead, and more than 100 wounded.

The state supreme court upheld the law creating the state police force; in early autumn the court of appeals confirmed the finding; a few weeks later Mayor Wood disbanded his city police force. This threw 1,100 men out of work and contributed to the depression of 1857. The Mets hurt in the brawl at City Hall sued the mayor and
received judgments of $250 each. However, Wood never paid, and the city finally settled the claims.

Germany's revolution of 1848-49 precipitated a wave of emigration that rose higher every year. Between 1852 and 1854 more than half a million Germans came to America, and although many moved West, enough remained in New York to constitute the city's largest foreign-born group next to the Irish. Most Germans were better educated and more highly skilled than Irishmen; many had a background of labor organization and played an important role in the city's trade union movement. The city's first German language newspaper, the
Staats-Zeitung,
established in 1834 as a weekly, became a daily in 1850. Germans helped organize the Communist Club of New York in 1857. This was six years after Karl Marx had begun writing weekly letters for the New York
Tribune
about European politics, economics, and war. Although some German laborers donated money to build a Catholic church on Third Street, many of their fellow immigrants were anti-Catholic. This angered fanatical nativists, who denounced the Germans as atheists, anarchists, and Reds.

Along the Bowery, between Houston Street on the south and Twelfth Street on the north, the Germans created their own
Kleindeutschland,
or Little Germany. Here they established a
Volkstheater,
a lending library, singing societies, gymnastic clubs, and beer gardens. Caring little for hard liquor and unable to afford wine, they quaffed vast quantities of beer, there being 1 beer garden for every 200 Germans. They strode the streets of Little Germany clad in leather shorts, called lederhosen, kept to themselves, and were conspicuously different from the Irish because they spoke a foreign tongue.

Hatred of all foreigners rose as tens of thousands of Europeans landed on America's shores. Supersecret societies multiplied under such names as the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner and the Wide-Awakes. New York City teemed with sixty of these dark-lantern lynch-minded groups. Horace Greeley lumped all together under the term “Know-Nothings,” because whenever a man was asked if he belonged to such a society, he would say that he knew nothing about it. There were secret grips and secret signs, and meetings were called by cutting colored paper into distinctive shapes and scattering them on sidewalks. This mumbo jumbo attracted members hoping to escape their drab lives by identifying themselves with something that must be very powerful because it was mysterious. For the frustrated
and ignorant, the confused and bitter, the Know-Nothings also acted as a bridge between the decline of the Whig party and the rise of the Republicans.

Abraham Lincoln said, “When the Know-Nothings get control the Declaration of Independence will read, ‘all men are created equal except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' ” By 1853 New York had the world's largest anti-Catholic library. Irish domination of politics evoked the saying “Erin e Pluribus, Unum go Bragh.” There was a revival of Paddy-making—the creation and humiliation of scarecrow figures supposed to resemble Irishmen. Itinerant anti-Catholic preachers roamed streets and parks, protected by Protestant bullies, shrilling a gospel of hatred for all foreigners. An agitator, named John S. Orr, wore a white gown, blew a horn, and called himself the Angel Gabriel. Linking Popery and slavery as “twin sisters,” he cursed the Irish and cried that even though the Negro had a black skin, the Irishman was black inside. Archbishop Hughes appealed to Catholics to stay away from such street meetings, but hot-tempered sons of Erin clenched their fists and sailed into their tormentors.

One Know-Nothing leader was Bill Poole, a butcher, bartender, and street brawler, who specialized in gouging out eyes. He met his match in cocky little Patrick “Paudeen” McLaughlin, and when their free-for-all was over, Bill Poole died. With his last breath he gasped, “I die an American!” Because of this precious remark, as George Potter has said, “nativists translated this gutter gladiator into a hero-martyr.” In 1858 the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor lamented, “Our city, operating like a sieve, lets through the enterprising and industrious, while it retains the indolent, the aged, and infirm, who can earn this subsistence nowhere.”

Among the infirm were patients in the state quarantine hospital at Tompkinsville, in the northeastern corner of Staten Island. Neighbors feared infection and felt that the pesthouse kept down property values. For ten years they petitioned the legislature to remove the building, but nothing was done. When yellow fever reappeared in 1858, the Castleton board of health said, “The board recommends the citizens of the county to protect themselves by abating the abominable nuisance without delay.” Copies of this inflammatory suggestion were posted throughout the island. Now people took matters into their own hands. They struck on the night of September 1, while the Metropolitan Police commissioners and other civic leaders were
gathered in Manhattan to celebrate the completion of the first Atlantic cable.

The Staten Island plot was hatched by 30 men of wealth and social prominence. That warm evening they met for a final briefing under a tree on Fort Hill, a stronghold erected by Hessians during the Revolution. Some of the conspirators wore masks. Each was given a handful of straw, a bottle of camphene, and a box of matches. Then they began marching, shadows amid shadows, toward the quarantine station. Other men fell into line until a mob, 1,000 strong, descended on the dreaded sanctuary.

Surrounding its many buildings was a brick wall too high for easy scaling, so the attackers used wooden beams as battering rams, pounding at the wall until they had smashed holes big enough to admit them all. Quarantine officials had armed stevedores with muskets, but the rioters grabbed the weapons from their hands. Now, whooping and screaming and fanning out across the grounds, the invaders set fire to a dozen structures. Smallpox patients were saved from fiery death only by heroic nurses. The main hospital building somehow survived the attack.

The next night the mob returned and succeeded in putting the torch to the main building. Its flames illuminated much of the island and the Upper Bay. Delirious patients, some near death, were carried out and laid on the grass, where they remained the rest of that night and most of the following day. A regiment of militia and a boatload of marines arrived after the riot was over.