The Devil's Own Work Read online

  This reformulation of French socialist Charles Fourier's far more radical denunciations of capitalism attracted Greeley, then a conservative and a Whig, who hoped to temper the harsh effects of the free market without attacking private property or inciting class warfare. In 1841, Greeley founded the New York Tribune, a larger and more influential daily newspaper in which he gave Fourierism ample space on the front page.4*

  While the Panic of 1837 deepened Greeley's sympathy for the laboring classes and set him on the path of social reform, two other events of that year snapped him out of his complacency about slavery and his acceptance of colonization. One was the campaign of Sam Houston and other "filibusters" to annex the Mexican province of Texas to the United States, "thus expanding the area and enhancing the power of American Slavery." The second event was the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy, a young abolitionist minister who gained prominence preaching in Missouri, where a mob destroyed the press and type for his newspaper. Lovejoy started over in Ohio, a so-called free state, but he was shot and killed when he refused to stop publishing. Love-joy's martyrdom for freedom of speech convinced Greeley "that Slavery and true Freedom could not coexist on the same soil," and that slavery's "power in and over the Union" must be combated and contained.5

  The Panic of 1837 and the ensuing six-year depression exacerbated class and ethnic divisions. Protestant missionaries in the slums felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the economic crisis and began to suspect that poverty—and a foreign, "ignorant" underclass—were becoming a permanent feature of urban life.6 A combative Irish priest from Philadelphia, "Dagger John" Hughes, who drew a cross resembling a stiletto after his signature, became archbishop of New York in 1841 and took on the Protestant establishment to secure equality for the city's Catholic minority. His flock continued to grow with new waves of Irish immigration, which increased in the late 1830s and 1840s. The depression deterred some would-be refugees, but by 1839, Ireland had suffered sixteen famine winters in a century and a half, the harshest one killing some four hundred thousand people and causing many to flee to America.7

  Nativist feeling against the Irish surged and then peaked in 1844, with a prolonged street battle in Brooklyn, followed a few days later by massive rioting in Philadelphia. In New York, as the nativists prepared to join forces with their Philadelphia brethren, Hughes posted a thousand defenders around each of the city's eight Catholic churches and warned the nativist mayor, James Harper, that the whole city would burn if any harm came to them.8

  The most critical aspect of the depression for New York City in the longer term was that the building industry came almost to a standstill. The growing population quickly outstripped the already short housing supply. Working-class neighborhoods became critically overcrowded, approaching the condition of the worst slums.9

  John H. Griscom, a Quaker doctor, became city inspector in 1842 and launched a detailed study of New York's burgeoning public health crisis. His scathing report asserted that overcrowding and a lack of ventilation in the tenements, particularly in the rear buildings and cellars, were the main causes of the city's needlessly high mortality rate. Griscom also pointed to inadequate, clogged sewers and accumulating solid waste as sources of death and disease. He proposed an extensive new network of drains and sewers, as well as free, clean, running water in every household from the just completed Croton aqueduct and reservoir system.

  Griscom called for government intervention to force improvements in the design and construction of housing, bringing in light and fresh air, while capping the number of tenants allowed in a building. To make sure landlords cleaned and maintained their buildings properly, Griscom wanted to assemble a team of impartial medical inspectors empowered to shut down intolerably dirty or overcrowded buildings. The city's aldermen, who appointed the current health wardens, took no action since it would have deprived them of valuable political patronage, and Griscom was not reappointed.

  However, with the support of wealthy inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper and other reformers, Griscom's groundbreaking study, The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York, which described "how the other half lives," was published in 1845. The greatest incentive for the wealthy to clean up the city, Griscom emphasized, was the threat of a violent underclass. The tenements were breeding grounds for people "more difficult to govern, more disposed to robbery, mobs, and other lawless acts, and less accessible to the influence of religious and moral instruction."10

  • • •

  In the three years between the writing and publication of Griscom's report, the forces of disorder that he identified continued to grow. "Fire rowdies, butcher boys, soap-locks, and all sorts of riotous miscreants" along with the occasional "gang of negroes" were taking over New York's streets, the Herald declared hysterically in the summer of 1841.* During the depression that lingered until 1843, dozens of nativist and ethnic street gangs formed. Since industrialization was breaking down the apprentice system and young men had less chance of progressing to journeyman or master craftsman, membership in a uniformed group gave them a sense of power and purpose. Gangs provided members with a new persona and a cushion against the shock of unemployment.11

  The Forty Thieves, Kerryonians, Shirt Tails, and Plug Uglies were Irish gangs in Five Points, each with a particular grocery-groggery as its den and command center.† The nativist American Guards congregated instead on the Bowery, which was also home to the Bowery B'hoys, O'Connell Guards, and Atlantic Guards. The True Blue Americans were not nativists but Irishmen. More dependable than the names for telling the gangs apart were their uniforms: red stripes, blue-striped pantaloons, black coat and top hat, shirttails out, plug hats stuffed with wool and leather to absorb blows during a riot.

  Using a variety of wooden clubs, bricks, and sometimes knives and pistols, each gang defended its turf. Volunteer fire companies, which already consisted of rowdy young men prone to fighting with competitors, had an increasing number of gang members in their ranks, which turned a violent culture even more so. Volunteer fire companies and gangs were also vehicles for entering the world of politics. Tammany ward and district leaders were often saloon owners as well and recruited the Irish toughs who came to their establishments on the Bowery for various assignments, including fraud and intimidation at the polls. The Whigs in turn enlisted nativist thugs, and the gangs clashed in this political capacity as well.12

  The upsurge in gang activity during the depression coincided with the city authorities' decision to stop tolerating riots and improve the police force. The daytime marshals and constables were prone to corruption as a means of augmenting the fees and rewards from crime victims they received in lieu of salaries. The night watchmen—many of them too old for such work or exhausted from their day jobs—had become a laughingstock. Residents joked that "while the city sleeps, the watchmen do too."13

  In February 1836, a disruptive labor strike had threatened the city's waterfront and trade, spurring business leaders and city officials to action. Overcoming the traditional American abhorrence of standing armies, and empowered by the state legislature to do so, the mayor ordered the elite Twenty-seventh militia regiment to be on call at all times for riot duty. These six hundred "respectable young men of the city"—who had quelled the election and antiabolition riots in 1834—inspired confidence in the city's upper classes and loathing in the crowds they dispersed without remorse.14

  The regiment had been formed a dozen years earlier and was one of the few, dressed in splendid uniforms, that marked a departure from the "old-time militia," consisting of the city's able-bodied adult males dressed in a motley collection of uniforms, who reported for an occasional day of "drill and parade" and a good deal of drinking. The Twenty-seventh was known as the "foremost in discipline and general excellence," according to one historian. Mostly "young American mechanics of some means," and "firmly fixed in [the city's] social, business and political life," members of the Twenty-seventh generally disdained the immigrant population. Some members had transf
erred out of the Ninth Regiment "on account of the predominance of the foreign element in that organization."15

  Hoping to use the military only as a last resort, the city moved tentatively to replace the fragmented, ineffectual police department with a stronger, full-time force. In 1841, the brutal murder of a cigar seller, a beautiful young woman whose battered corpse was found in the Hudson River, created a furor in the press, which spurred the state legislature to establish New York's Municipal Police Department two years later. With each of the city's twelve wards having a station house and nominating officers for mayoral approval, the police—already notoriously corrupt—would be at the beck and call of local politicians. By 1845, the Democrats had won back control of the city government from the Whigs and proceeded to fill the eight-hundred-man police force with party loyalists, including the very gang members the department was meant to curb.16

  The economic recovery began in 1844 but provided no relief from overcrowding in the slums of American cities, which only grew worse. Immigration to the United States increased fourfold in the mid-1840s, and prosperity widened the gap between rich and poor. In New York, Democrats were extending their grip on the city when a massive influx of Irish immigrants swelled their ranks. British colonial policies over time had forced Irish tenant farmers to subsist mainly on potatoes, and in 1845 a potato blight—exacerbated by British prejudice and mishandling of relief measures—turned into the Great Famine, one of the worst humanitarian disasters in history. During the next seven years, more than one million died of starvation and more than one million emigrated, crossing the Atlantic on disease-ridden "coffin ships," only to land in the worst slums of America's large cities.17

  Daniel O'Connell's nonviolent tactics of resistance lost favor during the Great Famine as rage mounted against British rule. However, lacking organization, weapons, and food for the people, the Young Ireland revolt of 1848 immediately collapsed, and the movement's leaders either were exiled to Tasmania or fled to the United States and congregated in New York, where they later founded the Fenian Brotherhood to raise funds for an invasion to liberate their homeland. The Fenians derived their name from Finn MacCool, the mythic leader of a band of Celtic warriors.18

  Along with famine, violent political upheaval spread throughout Europe in 1848 as popular movements in Italy, France, Germany, and elsewhere launched rebellions against established regimes. During bloody riots in Paris, dubbed the "June Days," ten thousand people were killed or injured when workers clashed with the army in the barricaded streets. European revolutionaries escaped to America, bringing their radicalism to the labor movement, which was still recovering from the depression.19

  The economic recovery in America was accelerated by the new British and German transatlantic steamships and the products of New York City's thirty East River shipyards: massive square-rigged packet ships, which were soon overtaken by "clippers" bringing tea from China, and, after 1848, infusions of gold from California.20 Social distinctions became more entrenched as New York earned its name, the Empire City, becoming the hub of far-flung commercial markets and an industrial engine in its own right. New York, like all large cities, "has its poles of social life," one working-class writer noted. "The region which skirts the Wharves with its seething purlieus, dens, and stinking stews, is the antipodes of the flowery land of the Fifth Avenue."21

  Commerce and bullion in turn spurred New York's emergence in the coming decade as America's foremost industrial city—with a growth rate rivaling that of any manufacturing center on the globe. The development of railroads in the 1830s and steamships in the 1840s had created a demand for the sprawling ironworks along the Hudson and East River waterfronts. The Novelty Works, with some twelve hundred workers, was the nation's biggest metalworking and machine shop, producing enormous ship engines and boilers, along with the "bed-pieces" that supported them.22

  Other New York foundries fabricated architectural elements and entire cast-iron facades for commercial buildings such as warehouses and stores. Like the manufacturers who were pioneering methods of mass production and prefabricated construction, retailers in the flourishing city were offering their wares in vastly greater quantities and selling them with unprecedented speed. Looking like Renaissance palaces with their tiers of cast-iron classical columns or facades of marble and plate glass, the new luxury hotels and department stores along Fifth Avenue and Broadway drew an endless stream of fashionably dressed window shoppers, turning these arteries into promenades for the city's well-to-do.

  Broadway, for all its glittering lights, was the border between two realms and was itself divided between its affluent "dollar side" on the west, and the eastern "shilling side" that touched the slums.23The intersection of these two worlds was bitterly evoked in the opening scene of Edward Judson's 1848 novel, Mysteries and Miseries of New York, in which a pack of wealthy cads out on the town surrounds a poor young seamstress on a dark street and flips a coin to see who will have her. In the nick of time, a tough old whore comes to her rescue.24

  Judson was also the right-hand man of Tammany Hall's Isaiah Rynders, a knife-wielding "sportsman" and riverboat captain who specialized in fomenting class warfare to galvanize the Democratic party faithful. In May 1849, Rynders and Judson recruited hundreds of street brawlers from the Bowery—the New York underworld's north-south thoroughfare, synonymous with gambling dens, saloons, gangs, and rowdy firemen—and gave them tickets to a performance at the exclusive Astor Opera House, where they started a riot in the balconies and drowned out the celebrated British actor William Macready. In the midst of the Great Famine and the Young Ireland revolt, which the British had crushed, the genteel Macready had become a symbol of political oppression.

  Three days later, after prominent New Yorkers had convinced Macready to continue with his scheduled performances, Rynders again had rioters disrupt the play while ten thousand protesters outside in Astor Place smashed the theater's windows and charged the doors, shouting, "Burn the damned den of the aristocracy!" Overwhelmed, the police called in the militia, mustered in advance by Major General Charles Sandford: cavalry and artillery units, along with two hundred men from the elite Twenty-seventh—recently renamed the Seventh Regiment. They fired into the crowd, ultimately killing 22 people and wounding 150.

  Judge Charles Patrick Daly, who handed down harsh sentences for ten of the rioters, was the son of Irish immigrants and a Democrat, but he had little tolerance for machine politics and civil disorder. Judson was identified as a ringleader and spent a year in jail. Greeley's Tribune praised the verdict, while the Herald and Irish-American blamed the Whig merchants and mayor for insisting on Macready's second performance and bringing the military into the fray. Rynders and several followers were tried separately, with Judge John W. Edmonds presiding. This time, however, Tammany used its political muscle to ensure that Rynders and the others were acquitted. The shattered windows of the Astor Opera House were boarded up, and it never reopened.25

  The Nation, published by Thomas D'Arcy McGee, warned fellow Irishmen to be independent; to avoid "second-rate demagogues" who were exploiting them for votes and creating mob rule: "These men, mostly of Irish origin, flattered them on election days, and despised them all other days; appealed to their passions and bigotries; encouraged their weaknesses and vices. Ward and local meetings were held in taverns . . . political placards were issued with the cross emblazoned on them—the British lion was publicly gored and his 'fangs cut' on innumerable platforms." The Irish-American shot back that such charges were "a coarse, vulgar, beastly lie, not having a shadow of truth to bear it out." The Nation soon folded, and its editor left town.26*

  Democratic operatives like Rynders were at work all across America stirring up mobs and trouble, according to Greeley, who remained a staunch law-and-order Whig despite his increasingly liberal and progressive views. A Protestant and a pious temperance man, Greeley despised the Democrats. Moreover, working for the Whigs subsidized his failing New-Yorker, and editing their national campaign
weekly, the Log Cabin, had made him famous while helping William Harrison and John Tyler win the White House in 1840 on the slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler too."† Greeley stuck with the Whigs, perpetually expecting to be rewarded with a political appointment such as postmaster general or an ambassadorship.27

  In the early 1840s, sparring factions within the Democratic party lost control to the southern slaveholders. Led by South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, they had gained strength as slavery expanded westward across the states on the Gulf of Mexico; eventually they aimed to include in their empire not only Texas and the Southwest but all of Mexico and parts of South America and the Caribbean islands.28Democrats had roused the people and led America into all its foreign wars, Greeley charged, most recently, under President James Polk, annexing Texas in 1846 and starting the Mexican War in order to conquer the Southwest and extend slavery's reach.29

  In 1846, Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot called for the exclusion of slavery from any territories won from Mexico, and his amendment was included in a spending bill approved by the House. Northern Democrats, disgruntled with southern domination of their party, had joined forces with northern Whigs to pass the amendment, while southern Whigs had sided with southern Democrats to oppose it. Passage of the Wilmot Proviso signaled a worrisome sectional realignment of the two major political parties. The slavery issue had begun to divide the country, North from South, straining the old two-party system to the breaking point.30

  When radical abolitionists fused with antislavery Democrats and Whigs to form the Free Soil party in 1848, with a platform of keeping slavery out of the western territories, Greeley "clung fondly" to the Whig party, reluctant to move with the rising tide of change that was reshaping American politics. Greeley insisted that the Whigs—not a fledgling third party—were the best hope for resisting the "aggressions of the Slave Power."31However, when the Whig party's power brokers chose a slave owner, General Zachary Taylor, as their candidate and installed him as their puppet in the White House, Greeley's failure to bolt the party smacked of ambition for a political appointment.32