“WE WILL DIRK EVERY MOTHER’S SON OF YOU!”
THE ELECTION DAY scene was typical of nineteenth-century New York. Hundreds of men thronged the street outside the polling place, dressed in long, rough overcoats and tall hats to ward off the November cold. Many were in a boisterous mood, having fortified themselves at neighborhood saloons for the anticipated rushing and shoving, fighting and brawling—what were popularly referred to as “election sports.” At booths outside the polls, campaign workers handed out ballots and harangued the crowd with exhortations to vote for their candidates. Some in the crowd milled around these stands, harassing the speakers and arguing loudly with supporters of their political rivals. Others jostled their way into the line that wound from the ballot box far out into the street.
Suddenly a loud cry pierced the air, and all eyes turned to a “a lithe, dark, handsome man” standing atop a packing crate. “I am Isaiah Rynders!” he shouted, knowing that his name alone would strike fear into the hearts of many within earshot. “My club is here, scattered among you! We know you! Five hundred of you are from Philadelphia—brought here to vote the Whig ticket! Damn you! If you don’t leave these polls in five minutes, we will dirk every mother’s son of you!” New York voters, whether longtime residents or temporary Philadelphia transplants, knew that “Ike” Rynders did not make idle threats. Within five minutes, wrote an eyewitness, “five hundred men left the polls, . . . and went home without voting, for fear of assassination.”1
This was just one episode in a life story that, as the Times noted without exaggeration years later, “forms one of the most romantic of histories.” Born in 1804 near Albany to a German-American father and a Protestant Irish-American mother, Rynders earned his lifelong title of “Captain” when as a young man he commanded a sloop on the Hudson that carried produce and merchandise between New York and upstate river towns. By 1830 he had moved to the South, acquiring some notoriety there as a riverboat gambler. In 1832, after allegedly killing a man in a knife duel over a card game in Natchez, Mississippi, Ike fled to South Carolina. There he became “superintendent of the . . . racing stables” of General Wade Hampton, grandfather of the future U.S. senator of that name. After Hampton died and the Panic of 1837 set in, Rynders returned to New York and settled in Manhattan.2
In New York, Rynders became “a thorough-going sporting-man.” Sporting men did not hold steady jobs, but instead devoted themselves to gambling, politics, boxing, and horse racing. An entire sporting subculture developed in New York, with its own saloons, own patois, even its own newspapers. One, the Clipper, reminisced years later that Rynders throughout his life had “a strong love for the card-room and the racetrack.” Another admiring journalist noted that the Captain was often found dealing faro or “presiding at one of those suppers of oysters, canvasback ducks, and champagne with which the gamblers of New York nightly regale their friends and customers.”3
Isaiah Rynders as he appeared in the post–Civil War years. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
(January 24, 1885): 380. Collection of the Library of Congress.
Many sporting men were muscular bruisers, but young Rynders was a man “of medium size and sinewy form, with a prominent nose, and piercing black eyes—a knowing smile, and a sharp look altogether. He was cool and enterprising in his manners, and fluent and audacious in his speech.” Unlike others in the “sporting fraternity,” Rynders was not an especially skillful pugilist. A tough country minister, Sherlock Bristol, boasted in his autobiography that he fought Rynders to a draw on a Hudson River steamer after defying Rynders by signing an anti-slavery petition. But as a leader of fighters, Rynders was unsurpassed.4
It was in this capacity that Rynders rocketed to prominence in 1844. Realizing that Democrats needed to form an organization to rally the faithful during that year’s tight presidential contest between their candidate, James K. Polk, and Whig Henry Clay, Rynders established the Empire Club. With a membership dominated by sporting men and prizefighters, the group began to whip up support for Polk. Political veterans believed that whoever captured New York’s electoral votes would carry the presidency, and Rynders worked feverishly to turn out the Democratic vote. Led by Rynders on a “white charger,” one thousand Empire Club members marched at the head of a Polk parade on the eve of the election, with “music, and thousands of torches, Roman candles, rockets, and transparencies, with never-ending hurrahs for Polk and Dallas, Texas, Oregon, Fifty-four-forty-or-fight!”* The following day, Rynders and his club used intimidation and outright violence to prevent Whigs from casting ballots. New York swung to Polk by just 5,100 votes out of 486,000 cast. Had he lost New York’s thirty-six electoral college votes, he would have lost the election. Whigs and Democrats alike gave Rynders a significant share of the credit for Polk’s razor-thin margin of victory. In gratitude, the new president rewarded him with a lucrative no-show job as a “measurer” in the New York Customhouse, allowing him to devote his full attention to gambling and politics.5
After 1844, Rynders and the Empire Club became real powers in New York politics, dominating primaries and disrupting political gatherings of their opponents. Rynders was feared not only outside the Democratic party but within it as well. In early 1845, for example, Rynders and his Empire Club compatriots attended a Tammany Hall meeting organized to discuss the possible annexation of Texas. “Aided by a crew of his noisy associates,” complained the Evening Post, Rynders “took the resolutions prepared by the committee of arrangements and reformed them to suit his own ideas of public policy.” His men shouted down speakers and bullied the meeting into adopting resolutions that suited him. No man before Rynders had ever so boldly and impudently dominated Tammany’s public meetings. Yet Rynders was not an ignorant thug. His election night speeches at Tammany Hall, which became something of an institution, were “a mixture of terrible profanity with liberal quotations from the Scriptures and Shakespeare.” He could recite entire scenes from memory.6
By midcentury, Tammany leaders made sure never to enter a meeting or convention without first trying to secure Rynders’s support. But the ambitious Captain wanted to become one of those leaders himself. His strategy for advancement involved turning Five Points into his political fiefdom, something its emerging Irish Catholic political leaders were bound to resist. The outcome of this struggle would define the political future of the infamous neighborhood.