NEW YORK CITY was “the tongue that is lapping up the cream of commerce and finance of a continent,” as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed it, but this meant nothing to Rosanna Peers. She sold rotten vegetables.
Produce was scarce and costly that booming year of 1826. Early vegetables had not yet reached here from the South, and nobody ate tomatoes because they were considered poisonous. Rosanna Peers displayed brown-streaked cabbages and tattered lettuce outside her ramshackle shop on the northern side of what is now Foley Square, but they were a cover-up. Her real business was conducted in a dingy back room, where she sold rotgut rum for less than it cost in saloons. Lacking a liquor license, she had taken her blind piggy to market.
It was in Rosanna Peers’ back room that the city’s first organized gang came into existence. Called the Forty Thieves, it was led by Edward Coleman. All day long and half the night he sprawled in Rosanna’s hideaway, dispatching henchmen to the nearby slum area to slug, steal, rob, and kill. Rosanna’s place also bred the city’s second gang, the Kerryonians, whose members had been born in County Kerry, Ireland. Less ferocious than the Forty Thieves, the Kerryonians seldom ventured far from Rosanna’s and did little fighting, devoting themselves mainly to hating the British.
For the next century the gangs of New York terrorized the city, waged hundreds of street battles, and won the community the reputation of the most wicked city in the world. Except for a few freed slaves hanging about their fringes, the first gangs consisted almost entirely of Irishmen. The Irish, arriving in droves, lacked money and education and skills. They were met with contempt by native New Yorkers and welcomed only in the city’s worst slum—the Five Points district.
A squalid area lying northeast of the present New York County Courthouse, Five Points was formed by the intersection of five streets—Anthony, Orange, Cross, Little Water, and Mulberry. Today Anthony is Worth Street, Orange is Baxter Street, Cross is Park Street. Vanished altogether is Little Water Street. Only Mulberry Street has kept its original name. The Five Points opened onto a small triangular park with the cynical name of Paradise Square. Today this is the southwestern corner of Columbus Park.
Such was the core of what became the largest Irish community outside Dublin. The first ten or fifteen years of its existence the Five Points was fairly decent. The city had no day police, but by night a sole watchman was able to keep peace in the Five Points. He was paid $1.87½ cents a night and wore a fireman’s leather helmet from which the frontpiece had been removed. Because of this, New York’s cops once were called Leatherheads.
About 1820 the Five Points began to deteriorate. It stood on the site of the old Collect, or Fresh Water Pond, and the landfill hadn’t been packed solidly enough. Buildings slowly sank into the moist soil, their doors springing on hinges and their façades cracking into wooden grins. Respectable families fled from the decay to better parts of the city, and the Irish moved in. Clannish by nature and shunned by native New Yorkers, the Irish clustered by the thousands in the wretched rookeries, with their dank cellars and fetid garrets. Lacking other means of earning a living, the Irish carved out criminal careers.
The predominant landmark in the Five Points was the Old Brewery. It stood just behind what today is the New York County Courthouse. Erected in 1792 on the shore of the Collect and known at first as Coulter’s Brewery, it produced beer that became famous in all the eastern states. Time, weather, and neglect reduced its five stories to ruins. In the words of Herbert Asbury, “It came to resemble nothing so much as a giant toad with dirty, leprous warts, squatting happily in the filth and squalor of the Points.” Converted into a multiple dwelling in 1837 but still called the Old Brewery, the monstrosity became the most infamous tenement in the city’s history.
The murders, prostitution, perversion, drunkenness, brutality, thievery, and idleness in the Old Brewery and the Five Points were considered by native New Yorkers to be the natural condition of Irishmen. Philip Hone sniffingly noted in his diary that “they increase our taxes, eat our bread and encumber our streets, and not one in twenty is competent to keep himself.” Genteel citizens shrank with horror from an evil they refused to analyze. It took a British historian, James Bryce, to say of the Irish: “There is a disposition in the United States to use the immigrants, and especially the Irish, much as a cat is used in the kitchen to account for broken plates and foods which disappears [sic]. . . . New York was not an Eden before the Irish came.”
In 1826 John Jacob Astor, himself an immigrant, was paid $27,000 in rentals, but there is no evidence that he concerned himself about the plight of the poor Irish. Any son of Erin lucky enough to find a job was paid only 75 cents to $1.25 a day. Even so, this was better than life in the old country, where a laborer’s wages ranged from 8 to 16 cents a day. Although rent and food were higher here, whiskey was cheaper—28 cents a gallon.
Unlike the Germans, who later arrived in family units, most Irish came as individuals. Thus, they lacked the tempering influence of family life. Besides, far from the public opinion of their native villages, uprooted Irishmen felt free of most moral restraints. Naturally, many decent and honest Irish settled here and later swelled the ranks of the city’s police—“New York’s Finest.” In 1826 the city held nearly 30,000 Catholics, most of them Irish immigrants. The three Catholic churches were run by only six priests, who couldn’t begin to cope with their countrymen, although one brave old priest broke up a Five Points riot by wading into the melee with a stole about his neck and a missal in his hand.
In the Five Points the root problems were ignorance, poverty, unemployment, ostracism, and political corruption. Churches and welfare agencies bewailed these conditions, but nothing was done to help the Irish until the late 1830’s. Then it was too late, and by the 1840’s the area had become the most vile slum on earth.
Gang leaders bore unmistakable Irish names—Farrell, Corcoran, Connolly, Ryan, Hurley, Doyle, and Hines. The gangs themselves were called the Patsy Conroys, O’Connell Guards, Bowery B’hoys, Chichesters, Roach Guards, Plug Uglies, Shirt Tails, Dead Rabbits, Adantic Guards, Daybreak Boys, Buckoos, Hookers, Swamp Angels, and Slaughter Housers.
New York’s first gangs did not consist of teen-agers but of grown men. There were more and larger gangs than at present. Gangs of hundreds of men were commonplace; one numbered 1,200 members. Small gangs grouped together into constellations of gangs, led by a supreme chieftain commanding absolute loyalty. Undeniably the gangsters were brave, but their courage was due to ignorance, insensitivity, and booze. Every battle was a fight to the finish—no quarter asked and none given. Gang leader “Dandy Johnny” Dolan stuck blades in the soles of his boots to enhance the gore when he trampled an enemy. Dolan also invented copper wedges, which he wore on his thumbs to make it easier to gouge out eyes.
Thriving on excitement, gangsters often were cruel just for the sadistic fun of it. One strolled up to an old man sipping beer and hacked open his scalp with a huge bludgeon. Asked why, the ruffian replied, “Well, I had forty-nine nicks in me stick, an’ I wanted to make it an even fifty.” Another plug-ugly seized a stranger and cracked his spine in three places just to win a two-dollar bet.
Themselves the victims of unhealthy slums, gang members averaged only 5 feet 3 inches in height and weighed between 120 and 135 pounds. But their bloody exploits created a legend, a bigger-than-life folk hero, like Paul Bunyan of the American Northwest and John Henry of the Mississippi River. This mythical figure, allegedly 8 feet tall, was called Mose, and a play entitled Mose, the Bowery B’hoy was first performed in 1849 at the old Olympic Theatre.
Among lowlifes the proper etiquette was to distinguish between American sons of bitches and Irish sons of bitches. To the non-Irish nearly every Irishman was known as “a damned Paddy.” This hostility between native New Yorkers and Irish Catholic immigrants degenerated into the dangerous, superpatriotic, spread-eagle Know-Nothing movement. It was true that many liquor-loving Irishmen became drunk and disorderly, but native-born cops were quick to arrest them when they would have helped home an equally drunk and disorderly native American. For this reason the era’s crime statistics may be distorted.
The contempt felt by most native New Yorkers for the Irish was not shared by Tammany Hall. In the beginning, what Irish Catholics sought from politics was not power but protection. Tammany, now an arm of the Democratic party organized in 1828, was eager to provide protection—at a price. Tammany helped Irishmen get their naturalization papers before the end of the waiting period. Whenever a gang leader got into trouble, a Tammany lawyer appeared for him in court, and a Tammany bondsman put up his bail. Tammany pulled strings to obtain licenses for the many Irishmen seeking to open saloons. If cops cracked down on Irish-owned bars and brothels, Tammany bribed key officials and arranged immunity from further raids. All Tammany asked in return was that the Irish prove their gratitude by voting Democratic regularly and even repeatedly. As a result of this interest in their welfare, the Irish gave Tammany fierce loyalty.
Because unskilled Irish competed for jobs with free Negroes, the sons of Erin had no love for colored men. Themselves persecuted, the Irish helped persecute Negroes and denounced the growing movement to abolish slavery. Effective in 1808, Congress forbade the importation of slaves into the United States. The ban was flouted by New York shipowners and others. In 1817 the American Colonization Society was formed to oust troublesome Negroes by settling them in Liberia, but the plan wasn’t much of a success. Only 6,000 colored people were sent to Africa—a drop in the bucket, considering that in 1820 the South contained nearly 1,500,000 slaves, to say nothing of the free Negroes scattered throughout the North.
A state law, passed in 1817, abolished slavery in New York State as of July 4, 1827. The following autumn Judge William Jay alluded to this emanciption in his charge to a Westchester County grand jury:
I cannot forbear to congratulate you on that event, so auspicious to the character and happiness of the community. . . . Within a few months more than ten thousand of our fellow-citizens have been restored to those rights which our fathers in the Declaration of Independence pronounced to be inalienable, and to have been granted to all men by their Creator. As yet we have no reason to suppose that crimes have multiplied or the public peace disturbed by the emancipation of our slaves, nor can we fear that He who commanded us to do justice and love mercy will permit us to suffer by obeying His injunctions.
Philip Hone, the diarist and onetime mayor, was less optimistic. To his diary he confided: “The terrible abolition question is fated, I fear, to destroy the union of our states, and to endanger the peace and happiness of our western world.”
New York’s freed Negroes had no easy time of it. Most were manual laborers. Some managed small stores, fruitshops, oyster stands, and barbershops. All were excluded from the white man’s churches and theaters. The nation’s first Negro newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, was established here in 1827 by Samuel E. Cornish and John Brown Russwurm, but it expired after three years. Small white boys solemnly told one another that if you kicked a Negro’s shins, his nose would bleed.
Also in 1827, the New York Journal of Commerce was founded, in part as an abolitionist newspaper. It was created by Arthur Tappan, who, with his younger brother, Lewis, gained notoriety as one of the city’s leading abolitionists. Both had been born in Northampton, Massachusetts, of solid Puritan stock and with starched Puritanical consciences. The Tappan brothers got their start in business by selling dry goods in Boston; but in 1814 Arthur moved to New York, and in 1827 he was followed by Lewis. They made a fortune with their dry-goods importing house, located on Hanover Square.
Sympathetic though they were to oppressed Negroes, the Tappan brothers acted like martinets toward their white employees. Any worker who smoked, played cards, or attended the theater was fired out of hand. Both Arthur and Lewis refused to keep chairs in their offices, for they felt that business would be conducted more briskly if visitors had no place to sit down. Yet Arthur was so ardent an abolitionist that he sank $30,000 into the Journal of Commerce. Later he sold the paper, which soon veered to the side of those favoring slavery.
It was remarkable that two wealthy merchants, such as the Tappan brothers should urge an end to slavery, for most businessmen considered the idea both foolish and dangerous. They were concerned more with profits than with principles. One New York businessman frankly said to an abolitionist minister:
We are not such fools as not to know that slavery is a great evil, a great wrong. But it was consented to by the founders of our republic. . . . A great portion of the property of the Southerners is invested under its sanction, and the business of the North, as well as the South, has become adjusted to it. There are millions upon millions of dollars due from Southerners to the merchants and mechanics of this city alone, the payment of which would be jeopardized by any rupture between the North and the South. We cannot afford, sir, to let you and your associates succeed in your endeavor to overthrow slavery. It is not a matter of principle with us. It is a matter of business necessity. . . . We mean, sir, to put you abolitionists down—by fair means if we can, by foul means if we must!
This plain-speaking man was addressing an unusual pastor, since at first most ministers were hostile to abolitionism. After all, churches were built, pews rented, and ministerial salaries paid by the city’s rich businessmen. The preachers, more concerned with buttering their bread than with trying on wings for size, hid behind tortured readings of the Scriptures. One New York cleric intoned from his pulpit that “slavery is a divine institution”; whereupon an abolitionist cried from his pew, “So is hell!”
Most newspapers also sided with the proslavery businessmen to safeguard advertising revenue. With Irish immigrants, wealthy merchants, preachers, and the press opposed to freeing the slaves, abolitionism was left in the hands of idealists and crackpots. They propagandized to arouse white men’s consciences. Some hewed to just one line—liberation of slaves. Others—and they cracked the solidarity of the crusade—also clamored for different humanitarian causes, such as the rights of workers, the reformation of jails, the renunciation of debtors’ prisons, more hospitals and orphanages, temperance, and equal rights for women.
Abolitionism’s cradle was New England, and its creed was enunciated by two New England sons, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Until they began ranting about the injustice of slavery, advocates of Negro freedom had behaved quietly and decorously—so much so, in fact, that the evils of slavery were all but smothered under a conspiracy of silence.
In 1831, the year Horace Greeley arrived in New York, this conspiracy was broken in Boston, broken violently by the appearance of Garrison’s new periodical, the Liberator. In his first editorial Garrison roared:
Let Southern oppressors tremble—let their secret abettors tremble—let their Northern apologists tremble—let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble. . . . I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm. . . . I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.
Arthur Tappan’s Journal of Commerce never had raised its voice this way. Garrison’s Liberator fulminated for the next thirty-five years without interruption, and the name Garrison became a red flag to white Southerners and to many of their Northern business associates. Tappan once bailed Garrison out of a Baltimore jail. Georgia’s state senate offered a $5,000 reward for the apprehension and conviction of Garrison in a Georgia court. A South Carolina editor wrote to the editor of the New York Evening Star that abolitionism could be “silenced in but one way—Terror—Death.”
In 1832 there were seven morning and four evening newpapers in this city. Most vehemently opposed abolitionism. That year a twelfth paper, the New York Sun, was established by Benjamin H. Day. All the other papers sold for six cents a copy, but the Sun was priced at a penny. It was edited and printed at 222 William Street by Day, who vacillated on the issue of slavery versus freedom. He had a reporter and editor, named George W. Wisner, who was a passionate advocate of liberty for all Negroes. Day once grumbled, “Whenever Wisner got a chance, he was always sticking in his damned little abolitionist articles.”
On December 4, 1833, the American Antislavery Society was organized in Philadelphia, elected Arthur Tappan its first president, and voted to set up permanent headquarters in New York. Tappan promptly founded its official organ, the Emancipator, and chose for its editor a Congregational minister from Massachusetts, Joshua Leavitt. Every month Leavitt sent copies of the Emancipator to members of Congress, and every month twenty to thirty copies were returned with insults scribbled in the margins. One Southern lawmaker wrote: “You damned infernal psalm-singing, negro-stealing son-of-a-bitch, if you ever show your damned hypocritical face in the dist. of Columbia, I will make my negroes cowhide you to death!”
The governor of Alabama complained to the governor of New York about the Emancipator. Tappan was marked for assassination. Vigilante groups were formed throughout the South. The New Orleans Vigilante Committee offered $20,000 for the capture of New York’s Arthur Tappan. At Charleston, South Carolina, Tappan was hanged in effigy. A storekeeper in Norfolk, Virginia, took up a subscription for the delivery of Tappan’s dripping head to him.
Even in New York abolitionists were attacked, and their homes were stoned. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, an abolitionist writer, said after one New York antislavery meeting, “I have not ventured into the city nor does one of us dare to go to church today . . . so great is the excitement here. ’Tis like the times of the French Revolution when no one dared trust his neighbors.”
On the evening of July 9, 1834, some Negroes met in the Chatham Street Chapel to hear a sermon by a Negro minister. In the audience sat the white abolitionist Lewis Tappan, a jaunty figure despite his Puritanical heritage. The meeting had just begun when members of the New York Sacred Music Society broke in to proclaim that they had rented the place for the evening. The Negroes, who had paid for use of the chapel, refused to leave. There was an exchange of words, then blows.
White men beat Negroes with lead-loaded canes, seriously injuring two or three of them. The fight attracted a crowd, and a riot was in the making when the police arrived and drove both whites and blacks from the chapel. The fracas continued on the street. Tappan walked away toward his home on Rose Street, just behind the present Municipal Building. Recognized as a damned abolitionist, he was followed by a yelling mob that pelted his residence with stones after he had run inside.
The next evening another proslavery crowd, still spoiling for a fight, gathered in front of the chapel. Its doors were locked, but the agitators broke in and held an impromptu meeting. A rabble-rouser, named W. W. Wilder, lashed passions with a speech denouncing abolitionists, and as the meeting closed, there came cries of “To the Bowery Theatre!”
Opened in 1826, the Bowery Theatre was the nation’s first gas-lighted playhouse and it seated 3,000 persons. It stood at the present 50 Bowery on the southeastern corner of the approach to the present Manhattan Bridge. Burned down and rebuilt many times, it remained one of America’s foremost theaters for nearly a century. That night of July 10, 1834, a benefit performance was being given for an English actor, George Percy Farren, whose cross-grained comments about Americans had irked New Yorkers.
The crowd at the chapel somehow got the idea that the Englishman’s alleged anti-Americanism meant that he was an abolitionist. Leaving the chapel, rowdies headed for the theater, picking up reinforcements along the way, their menacing roars being heard in the showplace before their arrival. The theater doors were slammed shut, but when the mob got there, it burst through them, interrupting a performance by the American tragedian Edwin Forrest. From the stage he tried to pacify the intruders but was howled down. Before the Englishman could be found and maimed, the police appeared and herded everyone out of the theater.
Now agitators howled, “To Arthur Tappan’s house!” Taking up the cry, the mob raced back down the Bowery, changed its collective mind, and turned instead toward the home of Lewis Tappan. He and his family escaped just before the throng surged into sight. The rioters took Tappan’s place apart, stick by stick, saving only a painting of George Washington. Then they rampaged through town, torturing Negroes, raping prostitutes, and gouging out an Englishman’s eyes and tearing off his ears.
This human violence followed on the heels of a natural catastrophe, for just two years earlier the city had been plagued by Asiatic cholera. For centuries the deadly disease had ravaged the Far East, but it did not spread to the Western Hemisphere until the nineteenth century. In 1831 cholera reached England, leaping from there to Ireland. The early part of June, 1832, an Irish immigrant ship brought the infection to Quebec, and on June 27 the first cases appeared in New York City.
A Mrs. Fitzgerald and her two children were found dead in their apartment at 75 Cherry Street. The police took one look and called a doctor. The deceased bore the unmistakable marks of Asiatic cholera: bodies shrunken from loss of fluid, skin dry and wrinkled, tongues white and dry, eyeballs shrunken, faces pinched, and cheeks hollow.
When the city fathers understood the situation, they ordered the streets cleaned as never before. This did no good. A coroner’s jury sat in the case of a cholera victim found dead on a Harlem road, and of the twenty witnesses and jurors who appeared, nine soon died of cholera themselves. Terrified townspeople clustered in churches to pray for deliverance. Board of health figures were appalling: On Saturday, July 14, there were 115 new cases and 66 deaths; Sunday, 133 new cases, 74 deaths; and Monday, 163 new cases, 94 deaths. Doctors treated patients with dry friction, dry heat, opium, and brandy—without much effect. Every picture of a cholera patient of the period shows a brandy glass at his head.
Aside from going to church, most people stayed home. One lawyer took up the study of Greek to while away the clientless hours. Then panic set in. First to flee were the rich, who departed in such haste that they left their fine houses in shambles. They headed toward New Jersey, Westchester County, Far Rockaway, the eastern tip of Long Island, and Connecticut. Cornelius Vanderbilt now ran a fleet of steamships on Long Island Sound, and he and other steamboatmen profited from the panic. They sent overcrowded vessels to Connecticut ports, where alarmed citizens brandished pitchforks and guns and refused to let the ships dock. Driven from the harbors, the craft nosed along the Connecticut coast until they found deserted beaches where New Yorkers could land.
The next few weeks even the city’s poor ran for their lives, fathers carrying tots in their arms, women clutching bags of food, and boys leading horse-drawn carts piled with pitiful belongings. Roads became traffic nightmares of plunging horses and cursing men and frightened refugees. That horror-haunted summer of 1832 nearly half the population of a quarter million left the city. But the poorest of the poor, the Irish of the Five Points, lacked the means to get out of town. The Five Points lay in the city’s Sixth Ward, an area northeast of City Hall, and one-third of all cholera cases occurred in this ward. Business was paralyzed. Streets were empty. A butcher riding a cart from Houston Street down Broadway to Fulton Street in broad daylight saw no one en route except two watchmen.
In proportion to population, this was the worst epidemic in the city’s history. Nearly 4,000 persons died of cholera between June 27 and October 19, 1832.
Plague was followed by fire. About 9 P.M. on December 16, 1835, a watchman was passing the corner of Merchant (now Beaver) Street and Pearl Street when he smelled smoke. In those days Beaver Street was narrow and crooked and filled with tall stores recently put up by dry goods merchants and hardware dealers. The watchman sounded the alarm for the city’s worst fire in that era of disasters.
Fifty-five-year-old Philip Hone, the retired auctioneer and diarist, was writing in the library of his $25,000 house at 235 Broadway. Just a few blocks away at that very moment the city’s other great diarist, fifteen-year-old George Templeton Strong, lolled in his bedroom of his father’s three-story brick house at 108 Greenwich Street near Rector Street. A slender, fair-haired, precocious lad, G. T. Strong was a sophomore at Columbia College. Both he and Hone noted in their diaries that they first heard the fire alarm at about 9 P.M. Strong said that the temperature stood exactly at zero.
A northwester of nearly gale force scudded over icy streets and lashed snow into frozen surf. The moment Hone heard the news, he bundled up and struggled through the storm to see what was going on. Strong’s father had a law office on Wall Street, but at first the elder Strong didn’t think it necessary to plunge into the howling wind to look after his place. Soon, though, a man rushed into the Strong household and awakened the attorney, and the two then dashed into the night.
The fire started on the first floor of a five-story warehouse at 25 Merchant Street, at the corner of Pearl Street. This ground floor was rented by Comstock & Andrews, fancy dry goods jobbers. Apparently the blaze was caused by an overheated pipe. The watchman who discovered the fire was joined by fellow patrolmen, and they forced open the front door. The interior, filled with bolts of cloth and clothing, was such an inferno that the men backed away and tried to latch the door in place. At that moment flames licked through the roof. Wind-borne embers dashed against stores on the other side of Pearl Street, and within fifteen minutes the dumbfounded watchmen counted fifty other buildings ablaze.
Cholera had decimated the strength of the city’s volunteer firemen. What’s more, the previous night the fire fighters had battled a big conflagration at Burling Slip on the East River, and when the new alarm sounded, they were so exhausted that they responded slowly. Half an hour passed before they put the first water on the flames. Everything was pitted against them. Shorthanded and already worn out, they manned antiquated equipment. The city’s water supply was scanty. Cisterns, wells, and most fire hydrants were frozen. Firemen had to beat their hoses to keep water from congealing in them. This worked for a while, but no sooner would water spray from a nozzle than it turned to ice in the air and fell as hail. Unremitting pressure of the ferocious wind lowered the water level of the East River just enough so that firemen on the docks above couldn’t reach it with suction hoses. So the frustrated, exhausted, shivering firemen could do little more than watch as a large section of town went up in flames.
That bitter night the air was so clear that the fire’s reflection was seen as far away as Philadelphia to the southwest and New Haven to the northeast. The blaze raged 16 hours before it was brought under control, and 3 days passed before the last spark was extinguished. When all was over and citizens took stock of the disaster, they found that 17 blocks of lower Manhattan, consisting of 52 acres, had been gutted. Exactly 693 buildings—about 500 of them stores—were destroyed. Only 1 structure was left standing in the afflicted area. Not a single life was lost, but property damage came to more than $20,000,000.
The city’s fire insurance firms, unable to pay policies in full, were ruined. Many banks closed. As a result, businessmen were unable to get money to rebuild their shops and factories. Thus, the great fire of 1835 was one of the causes of the panic of 1837.
Since the year 1762 the nation had experienced ten major depressions; two were especially severe. The panic of 1784-88 lasted forty-four months, while the panic of 1815-21 stretched out for seventy-one months. The depression beginning in 1837 was fated to endure for seventy-two months. In fact, it remained the worst panic in the nation’s history until the Great Depression, which started in 1929.
The fire, however, was only one of many factors triggering the panic of 1837. States had piled up huge debts to build canals and railroads. People had speculated recklessly in buying land in the West—and even on Long Island. To check the speculation, President Andrew Jackson ordered all payments for public land to be made in gold or silver; this cramped banking operations. Banks overextended themselves. Interest rates were too high. Imports exceeded exports. Bad weather ruined crops. British bankers called in their loans. Stock prices fell. Real estate collapsed.
“This is the most gloomy period which New York has ever known,” Hone scribbled in his diary. “The number of failures is so great daily that I do not keep a record of them, even in my mind. . . . All is still as death; no business is transacted.” Depositors began a run on the city’s banks, which held more than $5,500,000 of their securities. Hone “witnessed the madness of the people—women nearly pressed to death, and the stoutest men could hardly sustain themselves; but they held on as with a death’s grasp upon the evidence of their claims, and, exhausted as they were with the pressure, they had strength enough to cry, ‘Pay! Pay!’ ” The banks hired plug-uglies and ordered them to fire on the crowds if the situation got out of hand.
All coins vanished. Firms paid their workers in shinplasters. A real shinplaster was a paper plaster saturated with tar and vinegar and applied to a sore shin. During the American Revolution the word took on the meaning of fractional currency. Now the paper currency called shinplasters assumed every form and denomination, from the alleged value of five cents to five dollars. Badly printed, it was easy to counterfeit; in fact, counterfeiting became a flourishing business. Although workers didn’t know if shinplasters had any value, they were compelled to accept them or starve.
Wages were cut. Jobs grew scarce. With the cessation of all shipbuilding for two years, shipyard employees were left idle. Building construction came to a halt, throwing 6,000 more laborers out of work. Soon every third workingman was unemployed. Job-seeking Negroes vied with the Irish, native Americans competed with the foreign-born, skilled craftsmen wrangled with the unskilled—and the puny labor movement collapsed. About 10,000 citizens lived in absolute poverty. The almshouse commissioners said that seven-tenths of all relief applicants were Irish women whose husbands were out of town. But—added the native-born anti-foreigner officials—the husbands were “very particular to be here to vote at the spring election.”
This “year of national ruin,” Horace Greeley was publishing a weekly, called the New Yorker, from an office at 18 Ann Street. Troubled by the misery he saw at every hand, Greeley wrote: “Mechanics, artisans, laborers, you cannot with safety give heed to those who prophesy smooth things. . . . We say to the unemployed, you who are able to leave the cities should do so without delay. . . . Fly—scatter through the land—go to the Great West.” In issue after issue he repeated this advice until he became known as “Go West” Greeley.
He also claimed that local rents were higher in New York than in any other great city of the world. Agreeing, the City health inspector, Gerret Forbes, said, “We have serious cause to regret that there are in our city so many mercenary landlords who only contrive in what space they can to stow the greatest number of human beings in the smallest space.” John Jacob Astor, the so-called landlord of New York, didn’t suffer lack of space himself; his thirteen-acre Hell Gate estate on the East River gave him plenty of elbowroom.
Seventy-four years old when the panic began, his once ruddy skin sagging in gray pouches, Astor no longer needed his China trade or fur profits to earn money to buy ever more Manhattan real estate. Income from rent alone more than covered the price of his new land. While hungry men scrabbled for jobs that paid off in dubious shinplasters, Astor lent a friend $250,000. The old man also bought mortgages from people who couldn’t keep up payments on their property and then promptly foreclosed, thus accumulating more land at ridiculously low prices. He made millions out of the panic.
Washington Irving, now back from Europe, was glad to take money from Astor to write an authorized history of Astoria, the old fellow’s ill-fated trading post on the Pacific Coast. Despite the fame Irving enjoyed, he wrote: “My own means. . . are hampered and locked up so as to produce me no income.” It was during the panic of 1837 that Irving coined his famous phrase, writing of “the almighty dollar. that great object of universal devotion throughout our land.”
Cornelius Vanderbilt now owned the greatest fleet of steamers on Long Island Sound, and in 1837 the press began calling him Commodore. Arthur and Lewis Tappan failed in business. Philip Hone lost two-thirds of his fortune, but in the depth of the depression he wrote: “We had a handsome supper, with oceans of champagne.” Meantime, a pale, sharp-faced painter, named Samuel F. B. Morse, who hadn’t yet won fame with his telegraph, went twenty-four hours without food.
Speculation in flour boosted the price from $6 to $15 a barrel, and it was rumored that a few big flour and grain merchants were buying all the flour in town. On February 10, 1837, newspapers and placards announced that a protest meeting would be held in City Hall Park, at 4 P.M. on February 13, to denounce the high price of bread, meat, fuel, and rent.
Although it turned out to be a cold bleak afternoon, there gathered 6,000 persons, most of them Irish immigrants and nearly all of them in faded working clothes. Speaker after speaker reviled the rich, especially landlords and those who hoarded flour. One agitator cried, “Fellow citizens, Eli Hart and Company now have fifty-three thousand barrels of flour in their store! Let’s go and offer them eight dollars a barrel for it, and if they do not accept—” A man who stood near the speaker, noticing the presence of Mayor Cornelius W. Lawrence, Eli Hart, and a knot of policemen, whispered into his ear. The orator then ended, in a softer voice, “If they will not accept it—we will depart in peace.”
But the crowd understood the speaker’s meaning. With a roar, people rushed down Broadway. Hart’s big brick building stood on Washington Street between Dey and Cortlandt streets. The worried merchant gathered some cops and trotted toward his place; but at Dey Street they were surrounded, and clubs were snatched out of the hands of policemen. Hart’s clerks tried to bar the store’s three iron doors and its windows, only to be assaulted before the place was secured.
Surging inside and swarming upstairs, the rioters rolled flour barrels to the windows and pushed them out. Dashed onto the icy pavement, the casks burst open, spilling flour everywhere. Then the mob ripped open burlap bags holding wheat and spilled their contents on the street; a fog of powder thickened the air. The mayor got to the scene, mounted a flight of steps opposite the store, and tried to reason with the vandals. Nobody listened. Angry people pelted him with bricks and stones and hunks of ice until he retreated. The rioters tore one of the store’s iron doors from its hinges and used this as a battering ram to beat open the other two doors. Three streams of maniacal people poured into the place to hasten the plunder.
The violence reached its peak at twilight. With Washington Street knee-deep in flour and wheat, scores of tattered women waded in to scoop the precious grain into boxes, pails, sacks, baskets, and aprons. They worked fast and panted, and their breath bloomed like white flowers before their pinched faces. They were helped by small boys, one of whom was sentenced to hard labor in Sing Sing Prison. Finally, as the edge of night crept over the city, two companies of national guardsmen trotted up. The sight of their loaded rifles dispersed the rioters.
The police arrested several vandals and began marching them toward the jail in City Hall Park. Other rioters jumped the cops and rescued some of their friends. In the brief fight the police chief had his coat torn off his back. Forty persons were convicted and sent to Sing Sing, built in 1825. Two other stores near the Hart establishment were attacked, and a total of 1,000 bushels of wheat and 600 barrels of flour were destroyed. The next day the price of flour rose again.
The financial panic that began in 1837 ended in 1843. By this time the city had a fabulous new water supply, and Irish Catholics had reached a turning point in their political fortunes. The Democratic administration gave some Irishmen petty jobs, such as marshals, street inspectors, health wardens, lamplighters, fire wardens, dock-masters, weighers, clerks, and inspectors of pawnshops, junkshops, and meat markets. The lucky ones joined the white-collar class. Philip Hone wrote bitterly that Bishop John Hughes deserved “a cardinal’s hat at least for what he has done in placing Irish Catholics upon the necks of native New Yorkers.”