The Devil’s Half Mile was supposed to be a history book. The idea was to tell the story of America’s first financial crisis, the Panic of 1792, and its aftermath, which culminated in the establishment of securities trading rules and the creation of the New York Stock & Exchange Board in 1817.
Fascinating stuff.
Too fascinating, perhaps. I disappeared down a research hole early on, trying to get a sense of what Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, and other Wall Street players of the time were really like. Despite numerous historical tomes and an award-winning musical, we still know very little about these people, what motivated them, and how they really behaved: it was all history and not enough story. And I really, really wanted to tell a story.
I also needed to get words down on the page. So, as a kind of side project—just to keep my hand in, you understand—I decided to write a murder into the narrative. That proved to be a lot more fun than combing through collections of correspondence, and after a time the scale tilted. Six months later, I had two-thirds of a novel written and the history project was consigned to a dusty folder deep in the bowels of my hard drive. And I was having a lot more fun.
As absorbing as it was to learn about how Wall Street changed in the wake of the Panic, discovering how New York changed in the same period was even more so. The city was little more than a large town in 1799, when Justy Flanagan stepped off the Netherleigh. What eventually became the Five Points was still a freshwater lake, and the tiny village of Greenwich was surrounded by open fields. But the city would double in size over the next twenty years, straining its capacity, its tolerance, and its way of life.
I was also struck by New York’s complicated relationship with the slave trade. It was perhaps the most important port in the country, and slavery was an important part of the national economy. But the tide of opinion was turning hard against human trafficking, and a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery was passed by New York State early in 1799. Bad news for the port, perhaps, but good news for the city, which had the largest concentration of free Negroes in the country and was already quite tense enough, as blacks fought with newly arrived immigrants for work.
I would not have been able to learn about any of this were it not for the collections of maps, letters, and other documents kept by various libraries. The New York Public Library, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the libraries of several universities, including Yale, Columbia, and Boston, were particularly helpful, not least because they have done such an excellent job of making so much of their materials available online.
Unfortunately, a lot of these materials contradict one another. Paintings of the period have a tavern on one corner of Wall Street and Water Street, while a letter from one merchant to another has it diagonally opposite. One map, dated 1798, shows New York built all the way up to what is now Canal Street. Another, dated 1803, shows only dotted lines above Chambers Street. These contradictions made it difficult to re-create an exact picture of New York. I found myself making changes, then changing them back and then back again. Eventually I decided to go firm on just one version, resigned to the fact that any rendition of a city two centuries distant will inevitably be flawed.
The Devil’s Half Mile is a work of fiction, and I hope that my countrymen will not be too dismayed by how the story portrays our forebears. Ireland is a country with a deep and wide cultural and intellectual heritage, and I have found that the people of its diaspora are great representatives of our homeland. Unfortunately, in the late eighteenth century, the deck was well stacked against us. Irish Catholics were oppressed and discriminated against by the British in Ireland. They were shut out of higher education until late in the century, and it was difficult for them even to get started in a trade. Most of the population were farmworkers and manual laborers, if they could find work at all, and many of these people made the dangerous trip across the Atlantic out of desperation.
Unfortunately, when they arrived in New York, they found things were not much different from the way they had been in Dublin. The English may have lost the Revolutionary War, but many still lived in New York, and their view of the Catholic Irish was the prevailing one: subhuman, stupid, useful only for the most menial work. It would take more than twenty years and the sheer force of numbers to give the Catholic Irish any kind of power in New York. Until then, they were mostly confined to the bottom of the economic barrel: to service, hard labor, and crime.
I doubt any of them would have named their son Justice. The Irish tended to name their children after the saints, and names like Justice, Hope, and Charity smack of Protestantism. But I imagined that an Irishman keen to advance his son in New York society might have chosen the name Justice, in the hope of fitting the boy in. If such a man did well enough to send his son to college, it would probably not have been in America, however: those few universities that existed were staunchly Protestant and did not generally welcome Papists. Trinity College in Dublin was an option: it was opened to a handful of Catholics in the late eighteenth century; but I liked the sound of the brand-new Royal College of St. Patrick, which was founded in Maynooth in 1795.
I have taken liberties with Justy’s college curriculum. I doubt a jurisprudence course at Maynooth included a concentration—or even a class—in criminal law, but if Justy had wanted to spend some time with a police force as part of his studies Paris would have been the place to go. France established its first police force in 1667, and Paris had been patrolled by a force of inspectors since 1709. The city’s waterfront commissariat provided the model for England’s first experiments in policing on the wharves of the Thames in 1798.
That Irish students took part in the Irish Rebellion of 1798 is not in doubt. It was a short-lived but brutal affair that took place from May to September of that year. Lars’ home of Gorey in Wexford suffered badly. The town was used as a garrison for loyalist militia forces, and the people of Gorey had to endure some of the most appalling atrocities of the conflict, including murder, rape, and torture on a large scale, until the militia evacuated following the United Irish victory at Oulart Hill on May 27. The pitchcap was one of the most common methods of torture, although I should note it was used by both sides. The militia commander Hunter Gowan existed. He was born in Gorey, served as a magistrate, and led a yeomanry corps in the area called The Black Mob. He was infamous for summarily murdering Catholics suspected of rebel sympathies, and for using a human finger to stir his cocktails. These kinds of outrages united the Catholic population and inspired groups of rebels to rise up all over the country to fight British forces and the loyalist militia. Much of the action took place in county Kildare, close to Maynooth. Justy would have felt the shock waves that swept across the country in the aftermath of the Curragh massacre, when 350 men and boys surrendered to the English, only to be subsequently gunned down in an open field, just twenty-five miles from Justy’s college. It is not a stretch to imagine a young, idealistic lawyer joining the Defenders to fight. It is perhaps harder to believe that such a man would be able to survive the particular horrors of guerrilla warfare and return to school to complete his studies, but that, I would answer, speaks to Justy’s resilience and his spirit.
Justy, Kerry, John Colley, and the Bull are all fictional, but several of the characters in this novel did exist. Alexander Hamilton appears briefly, and I have described him as he appears in a portrait dating from that time, not long after he stepped down from the position of Secretary of the Treasury.
Jacob Hays was made a Mayor’s Marshal in 1798. He had a reputation as a hard charger who led from the front and did not spare the rod. “Old Hays” became so feared and respected that his very appearance was enough to break up an unruly gathering. He had little in the way of men or resources to work with, but his tireless work laid the ground for the creation of New York’s police force in 1845. Whether he wore an ostentatious scarlet coat I do not know, but he struck me as the kind of man who might.
William Duer was a onetime congressman turned speculator, who did indeed die at home, on release from debtors’ prison. I have not invented his friendship with all sorts of eminent people, including Alexander Hamilton, who wrote to him often but refused to bail him out. I have not invented Duer’s pivotal role in the Panic of 1792: he indulged in the kind of behavior that would give the New York Attorney General a slam dunk in an insider trading and stock manipulation case today. My story of Duer’s involvement in a trafficking ring and a Ponzi scheme, however, is entirely fictional.
It is interesting to compare the Panic of 1792 and the Financial Crisis of 2008. Like his successor Hank Paulson, Alexander Hamilton feared the panic would bring the country down, but while the 2008 Crisis triggered a torrent of new rules in the Dodd-Frank Act, the 1792 Panic ushered in very little in the way of change. Like most Americans, who felt they had thrown off the shackles of government interference along with the tyranny of the Crown, Wall Street men thought they should be able to regulate themselves. The result was that there were few, if any, rules when it came to securities trading and the entire system was based on the twin pillars of trust and caveat emptor. Consequently, the markets lurched from one crisis to another, trust was eroded to a nub, and cynicism reigned. Even the New York Stock Exchange was conceived as a power grab from the auctioneers who dominated the system at the time.
Many people might look back at those days wistfully: it’s certainly easy enough to find Wall Street players happy to argue that banks and investment houses can regulate themselves and government should just get out of the way. Unfortunately, experience has proved that a poorly regulated system is too easily abused and that cynical bankers and traders—whether frock coated and bewigged in 1792 or clad in business casual today—are quite willing to abuse it.
Paddy Hirsch
Los Angeles, June 2017