PIRACY CONTINUED TO EVOLVE in America, mirroring America’s own evolution. As the young country approached and passed its one-hundredth birthday, it barely resembled the land it had been in 1776. Manifest Destiny, the belief that American expansion from coast to coast was both just and inevitable, was the name of the game, and the United States was growing in leaps and bounds as it tried to stretch from sea to shining sea. During the period between 1845 and 1900, eighteen states were added to the Union, including the giant states of California and Texas.
The addition of land and people to the country was a controversial enterprise. Many northern states opposed these new states, claiming they were bought with unnecessary bloodshed and unjust tactics. They also were vehemently opposed to adding more slave states to the country; they were very concerned about being outnumbered by slave states. Despite their fears, the South and West’s clamor for more land was answered. It seemed that nothing could halt America’s progress from coast to coast, though a great civil war would slow down the momentum.
The two women pirates from this tumultuous era in American history are as different as can be, reflecting the multitude of new roles that could be taken on by women during this time. America was going full steam ahead into the future, never to return to its preindustrial days. The women of America were similarly moved to evolve and change, turning their gazes away from home and hearth and toward their fellow women and dreams for tomorrow. It should come as no surprise that the women pirates from this era were also “new” American women, both ambitious and bold.
Sadie Farrell, known as Sadie the Goat, is one of the strangest examples of the American dream ever imagined. According to Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld, Sadie ran around robbing people during the mid-1800s in New York City’s bloody Fourth Ward near the East River. Asbury’s book is the sole published source of information about her, although legends abound. She is not featured in any police documents or newspapers from the period, which leads to the conclusion that she either never existed at all or was never caught. The truth, as in so many of these stories, may never come to light, but her legend looms large nevertheless.
According to Asbury, Sadie was born sometime around the mid-1800s and grew up poor among the pickpockets and lowlifes on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The city at that time was a seething mix of too many immigrants in too little space, particularly down below Broadway. The formerly fancy Fourth Ward, once home to George Washington and John Hancock, had gone to the dogs; Asbury says a wave of immigrants chased the wealthy people north. The “ramshackle tenements [housed] a miserable population steeped in vice and poverty.” Gangs ruled the streets and battled with one another often, and the gangsters of the Fourth Ward were the worst of all of them—killers and thieves more than common troublemakers.
It is no wonder that the area was full of strife, because the immigrants to America during this period were often met with cold welcomes. Americans knew the country needed more laborers to run its mills and factories, but they resented the influx of new cultures and ideas that came with those laborers. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is an example of the kind of obstacles immigrants faced. The only welcome for immigrants to New York during this time was from the political machines, such as Tammany Hall. These groups capitalized on the immigrants’ need for friends to help them understand the country’s bureaucracy and customs. They would help the new Americans . . . for the price of a vote.
William M. Tweed and his cronies got rich off this scheme to the tune of $25 million to $45 million. They controlled almost every part of New York City politics during Sadie’s lifetime and could influence anyone they pleased. “Boss” Tweed was the East Coast’s answer to Billy the Kid—a wild outlaw who both fascinated and repelled. Tweed saw an opportunity and took advantage of it, growing rich off the backs of others. Tweed was eventually brought to justice around the same time that Sadie’s pirating days came to an end. His clear control of city politics could have made an impression on the young Sadie, who saw the evidence that if you were clever and tough, the rules didn’t necessarily apply to you.
If Boss Tweed didn’t tickle Sadie’s fancy as a young woman, perhaps tales of another outlaw did. This period spawned the myth of the cowboy—perhaps the most American symbol of freedom and self-reliance there is, a landlubbing pirate. The pay was very low and the living conditions were worse, but cowboy life has become immortalized as adventurous and exciting. Outlaws such as Billy the Kid made their money robbing stagecoaches, particularly from 1866 to 1876. News of their exploits spread across the nation and could have made it to New York during Sadie’s early career. The cowboy way of life was not particularly concerned with following the law, and this spirit was palpable in the western towns of the time. It seems likely that Sadie would have been inspired by the stories of these rough men making their own way in the world, even though their world was so very different from her own.
Sadie was a small young woman, but she was also scrappy, and she learned how to disarm her opponents without engaging them in hand-to-hand combat. Using the element of surprise, she would head-butt her mark in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. Her male partner would knock the guy out and rob him. The Fourth Ward offered endless pickings, as it housed the South Street Seaport, a bustling port where sailors could be found at all hours drinking, paying for sex, and otherwise making merry. Asbury asserts that for at least twenty-five years, Water Street was “probably the scene of more violent crime than any other street on the continent.” The seeming pleasure district held danger around every corner—and some of that danger was Sadie.
Sadie was no stranger to violence. As a teen, she could not have missed the New York Draft Riots. In July 1863, President Lincoln instituted the military draft. Men with means could buy out of it for $300, approximately $8,000 in 2016 dollars. New York City, which according to Iver Bernstein had “a history of sympathy for the South and slavery,” was not in favor of conscription, and many in the city felt that the draft fell too hard on the Irish and the working class. Many New Yorkers had recently lost their lives in the bloody Battle of Gettysburg, and those left alive were not eager to volunteer for what looked like the losing side. While the draft was in process on July 13, rioters interrupted the proceedings and unleashed hell in Manhattan for four days in what would become the bloodiest urban insurrection in American history. With mobs of men shooting and fighting in the streets, factories were closed, weapons were stolen, bridges were burned, telegraph wires and railroad tracks were torn up, and an orphanage for black children was burned down. Neighborhoods set up barricades reminiscent of the French June Rebellion some thirty years earlier.
Although the rioting was meant to protest the draft, it quickly turned racist and ugly. The poor white mob (mostly Irish) felt that they would bear the brunt of this draft, and so they turned on the only group lower in status than they: poor blacks. Reports from those four days describe beatings, mutilations, and lynchings of black people. (New York still lacks a memorial for those killed in the riots.) Eventually the Union army marched in and put an end to the fighting, but not before over one hundred people lost their lives and $3 million to $5 million in property damage accumulated ($60 million to $100 million today). A month later the draft was quietly reinstated, with a fund for poor men to buy their way out furnished by Boss Tweed.
Sadie would have seen the newspapers with RIOT! spelled out in bold, capital letters. She could have followed the coverage that, for a few days, ran before the coverage of the actual war. And if she crossed over to the East Side, she could have watched the barricades rise. There was plenty of property damage in her own neighborhood. She may have seen it right outside her door. The entire event must have left an impression on Sadie, although the violence seems to have inspired rather than frightened her. At the very least, she learned that when the rules don’t make sense, drastic action and even force can be used to strike back against them.
Sadie did well enough for herself, making small-time money but gaining excellent street cred. She must have made many enemies during her time on the street, but the only major one reported in Asbury’s book is Gallus Mag, co-owner of the Hole in the Wall pub. “Gallus” was another name for suspenders, a most unladylike accessory that the trouser-clad Mag was fond of, hence her nickname. (The bar, by the way, still stands today under the name Bridge Café. Although it was badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, it plans to reopen and is said to be one of the oldest bars in New York.) Mag was a six-foot-tall Englishwoman who served as bouncer of the bar. Asbury says she was “the most savage female [the police] had ever encountered.” She was famous for biting the ear off any patron who was especially rowdy. She kept these ears in a special pickle jar on top of the bar for all to see. One night in the spring of 1869, Sadie got into an argument with Mag and lost an ear herself, which merited its own special jar with her name written on it. Disgraced, Sadie decided she needed a new haunt and a new hobby.
Other women might have decided to throw in the towel and get a legitimate job, such as in a mill or factory. During this era industrialization had made many new jobs available, and many of them were expressly for women. Across the country, women left their homes in droves to work in mills and factories. These jobs offered women some autonomy and allowed them some money, which they could use to buy things such as flour, soap, and clothes. The textile mills became their own communities, where women both lived and worked under the watchful eye of the supervisors. Despite the long hours and low pay, the mills offered women an escape from their families and childhood homes. The independence that could be gained at the mill was an intoxicating option for some women. “Mill girls” could take advantage of lectures organized for them, as well as night school classes, although most girls were too exhausted to do so. It is possible that Sadie would have found refuge in the sisterhood of the mill, but given her personality as related by Asbury, it appears more likely that she would have been dismissed for fighting or some other form of “immorality.” Luckily, she did not attempt to gain employment through a mill or any other legitimate means.
Sadie walked a long way after her fight with Gallus Mag, crossing out of her own territory and venturing into the west side of the city near New York Harbor. While wandering around the city, she witnessed the Charlton Street Gang clumsily trying to take over a ship in the North (present-day Hudson) River. They were the only gang that worked the Hudson during that time, and their headquarters was an old gin mill at the foot of Charlton Street. When Sadie watched them that night, they were uncoordinated and easily overtaken by the ship’s crew, who promptly kicked them off the ship. Sadie, presumably bleeding heavily from her new head wound, convinced the gang that what they really needed was a change in their leadership. If she took over their gang, she could lead them into piracy. For some reason, possibly because of their recent embarrassing failure or because Sadie’s reputation was big in the area, they accepted her proposal, and within a week they had captured a boat, hoisted the Jolly Roger, and sailed up the river, looking for places to loot.
Where Sadie learned to sail is not known. River navigation is not as difficult as ocean navigation, but she would have needed some skill in order to pilot a craft up and down the river. Maybe some of the boys in the gang had some sailing skills and guided Sadie through the work. Some sources say that at this point, she became a real pirate enthusiast and read up on other pirates and their tactics. She tried to emulate old pirating strategies but sometimes mixed fact and fiction. For example, Sadie is one of the only pirates who is said to have made her captives walk the plank—something she might have picked up from Treasure Island. She was a real pirate in that she sailed, stole, and occasionally kidnapped and murdered, but she was also acting the part of a pirate—imagining herself as a Blackbeard or a Long John Silver.
To be sure, adventure was in the air during this era. Sadie was not the only person who suffered from delusions of grandeur. Untold numbers of Americans followed their dreams all the way out to California to strike it rich after gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. These forty-niners caused a population explosion in the West that resulted in boomtowns with hastily erected buildings and slapped-together law enforcement attempting to keep order in towns filled with adventurous men with nothing to lose. The “anything goes” spirit of these towns sheltered all sorts of semi-illegal activity; in some places saloons outnumbered all other buildings two to one. Very few struck it rich panning for their fortunes. The people who really prospered during this time were the ones with enough forethought to start supply businesses: selling food, clothes, and other provisions to the prospectors. Some of these merchants would become major players in the transcontinental railroad effort that would consume the nation in a few short years.
If Sadie had not joined the Charlton Street Gang, perhaps she would have eventually disguised herself as a man and gotten a job working on the railroad. The transcontinental railroad was another big dream of this era—one that would be completed in Sadie’s lifetime. It was built in several large sections, each controlled by a separate railway company, and then joined together with a ceremonial golden spike driven by Leland Stanford, former grocer, major backer of the railroad project, and founder of Stanford University. Irish and Chinese immigrants, Mormons, Civil War veterans, and many others labored under backbreaking conditions to lay the tracks. This difficult job was one of the few available to many of these men, especially immigrants. Without their labor, the railroad would have been impossible. When held in contrast to the other great dreamers of the time, Sadie’s desire to become a pirate does not seem outré.
For a while, all of Sadie’s dreams came true. Under her leadership, the Charlton Street Gang was able to pillage several houses and villages up the river as far north as Poughkeepsie. The prize target to rob was the seaport itself, but it was too heavily guarded. They also attempted to rob large ocean steamers, but they weren’t able to do that, either. Sadie and her gang took valuables from mansions along the river as well as from less-armed merchant ships. They were able to fence their stolen goods in various pawnshops back in New York—no doubt aided by Sadie’s underworld connections. For several months, Sadie and her pirate band made a good amount of money this way. The chief of police, George W. Matsell, described how Sadie and other river pirates operated: “The river pirates pursue their nefarious operations with the most systematic perseverance, and manifest a shrewdness and adroitness which can only be attained by long practice. . . . In their boats, under cover of night, they prowl around the wharves and vessels in a stream, and dexterously snatch up every piece of loose property left for a moment unguarded.”
Eventually, the landowners along the river decided they had endured enough and banded together against Sadie and her boys. Farmers greeted Sadie’s arrival with guns, and a seaborne police force impeded her from robbing any more ships. Sadie reportedly lost too many crew members, either to the police or to gunfire, to be able to continue pirating. She abandoned her ship and returned to her old stomping grounds of the Fourth Ward, where she was now hailed as “Queen of the Waterfront.”
Before she slipped out of history, Sadie had one final encounter with Gallus Mag. Some sources claim that Sadie went to make peace with the bouncer, while others claim that the Hole in the Wall had seen too many murders in a month and was about to be closed for good and Sadie wanted to pay her respects to her former favorite watering hole. Whatever the reason, Sadie returned to the bar and made up with Mag. Mag, no doubt moved by Sadie’s generosity of spirit, returned Sadie’s ear to her. Sadie allegedly wore this ear in a locket around her neck for the rest of her life.
What happened to Sadie after that is unclear. A happier version of events has her opening her own bar with the profits from her pirating days. In other stories, she fades into obscurity, disappearing from the pages of history. Perhaps she was murdered in an alley by some young thug who was clueless about her legendary pedigree. Stranger things happened in the Fourth Ward. No matter how she died—or if she ever lived—she certainly lives on in New York City and pirate folklore, appearing in some form in at least four novels, as well as a character based on an amalgam of her and Gallus Mag in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York.
Asbury writes about Sadie as if she were his charmingly eccentric niece. He seems fond but does not present her as particularly competent or frightening. His account of her is a slice-of-life story to inject a little levity into the blood-soaked Fourth Ward lore. He is much more effusive about Gallus Mag, whom he paints as a ferocious she-devil. However, he does say Sadie had “inspired leadership” that “breathed new life into the gang,” and that her “ferocity far exceeded that of her ruffianly followers,” so he does not entirely dismiss her. If anything, he’s not quite sure what to make of her, and many readers may find themselves in the same predicament. Who was this woman who wasn’t afraid to go toe to toe with murderous criminals yet had enough whimsy to fly a Jolly Roger? If she existed, it is a shame that her life was not recorded more copiously.
Another pirate who became famous during this era is Fanny Campbell, eponymous hero of Maturin Ballou’s 1844 novel Fanny Campbell, Female Pirate Captain: A Tale of the Revolution. Her story takes place during the Revolutionary War but deals with the more modern themes and issues of the period in which it was written. Although her tale is fiction, it was so popular that numerous modern sources add Fanny Campbell to the roll of real pirates as if her swashbuckling tale were factual. Her story is interesting not just as a pirate story but also as a story of a model American woman from a nineteenth-century perspective. Her values and spirit may have been intended to remind women of their place in the home, but her story inspired just the opposite reaction.
Fanny’s story is a rip-roaring adventure, full of twists that delighted readers then, and it would still entertain today. According to the story, she grew up outside Boston, Massachusetts, and was quite the tomboy. She loved to ride horses and was a cool hand with a rifle. Despite her unorthodox hobbies, she attracted the attention of the boy next door, sailor William Lovell, and they were betrothed when William was nineteen and Fanny eighteen. Although the besotted bridegroom-to-be offered to give up the sea for Fanny, she loved to hear his stories of adventure and insisted that he do no such thing. She promised to marry him after he returned home from his next voyage.
As luck would have it, William’s ship was captured in Cuba, and he was imprisoned there. When word of this reached Fanny, she had no choice, apparently, but to disguise herself as a man, call herself Mr. Channing, and sign on to sail with a ship, aptly named Constance, as a minor officer heading to England via Cuba. Her plan was to use her Yankee ingenuity and American perseverance to liberate her beloved from the Cuban authorities.
Where did Fanny get all this pluck? American women during this period were certainly becoming more ambitious. By 1850 roughly one-half of American women could read and write. Over the next fifty years, more changes would come for American women. The many machines invented during this time made the lives of upper and middle class women easier, though by no means easy. Entire days were still consumed with domestic tasks like laundry. Still, new machines did speed up housework. With more time on their hands, women were able to obtain more education, as well as more leisure time. Some of this leisure time was spent on sports, which necessitated fashion changes. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, bustles and crinolines went out of style in favor of less-restricting garments that allowed women to move more freely.
Fashion was not the only area in which women were becoming more mobile. Several notable women emerged during this period who embodied the can-do spirit and limitless potential of Manifest Destiny and American industrialism. Women began making their way into the male-dominated professions such as medicine and law at this time as educational opportunities began to open up. Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, in 1849. In 1879 Belva Lockwood became the first woman to argue a case in front of the US Supreme Court.
There were also women pioneers and explorers during this era, shocking the world with their derring-do and discoveries. Maria Mitchell discovered a comet that would bear her name in 1847. After traveling extensively throughout the United States and Europe, she went on to become a teacher at the newly formed Vassar College. Nellie Bly, a journalist for the New York World, went undercover to expose the horrors practiced on patients at a mental institution in New York in 1887. Her work prompted a grand jury investigation, a massive Department of Public Charities and Corrections budget boost, and many other improvements to the field of mental health.
Finally, there were the social reformers. These women—some part of the suffrage movement, some not—agitated in whatever ways they knew best in order to better the world they lived in. They paved the way for the reformers who would dominate the coming century. Though their methods and desires were different, these women shared much with their pirate sisters—they sought to disrupt the existing laws and take something that the larger world did not want them to have. Sojourner Truth was an abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Born into slavery, she won a court case against her former master to get custody of her child after she escaped. She traveled the country speaking on women’s rights to hundreds of audiences, delivering her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech in 1851. Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was a labor and community organizer who was known as the most dangerous woman in America at one point due to her skill in organizing workers into unions. Harriet Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist and writer who penned Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel about the horrors of slavery that touched the hearts of millions. When she met President Abraham Lincoln, he is reported to have said to her, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Although many of these women were not famous yet during the time Ballou was writing the book, the heady perfume of powerful women must have hung heavy in the air while he worked. Nobody becomes a force to be reckoned with overnight, and many of these women were growing in their strength and prowess as Ballou was developing his lovable heroine. He may have been influenced by these barrier-breaking women as he worked on his book. Fanny’s adventures exemplify how, in the right circumstances, an ordinary woman can become extraordinary.
For example, Fanny must have listened very intently to her fiancé William’s stories about sailing, because onboard the Constance, she fooled everyone into thinking she was a boy and became a well-liked sailor among the crew. So well liked, in fact, that when news got out that the captain was a crook who intended to sell the entire crew into English service once they arrived in England, she was able to lead the crew in a mutiny for their freedom. Mr. Channing became Captain Channing, and all the people onboard became pirates due to their capture of the ship. Where would the new pirates like to go most? With Fanny at the helm, their first stop would definitely be Cuba.
On the way, a hostile British ship called the George was passing, and the captain noticed that something was amiss on the Constance, so he attacked. The British ship proved no match for Fanny and her merry crew, who captured the George and took it along with them on their journey to Cuba. Once they arrived, they easily freed William, as well as another American sailor. As they sailed for home, Fanny called William into the captain’s cabin and revealed her secret: that it was not a brave male captain who rescued him but his own dear fiancée. William was shocked but took the news in stride, claiming, “I never saw you look more interesting.” He did, however, promise to keep her secret from the rest of the crew.
There were a few other mishaps during the voyage, like the American Revolutionary War breaking out and the ship turning privateer, but eventually, Fanny and William were able to sneak off to shore, where they married and lived happily ever after. William returned to a life at sea while Fanny stayed home and raised many children, never losing her pleasant disposition.
Modern audiences might find the ending of her story a bit of a letdown. It would have been more satisfying to see the lovers sail off into the sunset together, ready to live the life of pirates evermore. The book was still hugely inspiring to nineteenth-century readers, however, due to her acts of gender-bending and role defiance. One woman wrote of her experience reading the novel, “All the latent energy of my natures was aroused. . . . I was emancipated! And could never again be a slave.”
This story was meant to capture women readers’ hearts but also to hark back to a simpler time. Although Fanny is daring, it is for a very noble and feminine reason—to rescue the man she loves and to do her duty to her country. During this rapidly changing time in America, portrayals of women who, despite great skill and courage, chose to stay home and have babies could be safely given to women as role models by men who feared a feminine uprising. The book also served as an admonition to men: do your manly jobs, or women will do them for you! Fanny’s cross-dressing was threatening to a nineteenth-century audience, now that women were beginning to figuratively wear the pants in and out of the home, but her pure motivation and conventional happy ending ensures that the social order was upheld.
If the ending to Fanny’s story is disappointing, there is a real-life story from this time that has a much more satisfying ending, although its battles are still being fought today and will continue to be fought well into the twenty-first century: the beginning of the fight for women’s suffrage. During this time, more than half of the members of social justice groups—such as abolitionist societies, temperance unions, and poverty alleviation groups—were women. With all this education and social activism on behalf of others, women soon identified a major stumbling block to really improving their own lives: the lack of a vote. Women’s suffrage became an important crusade during this period.
Two women who were banned from an abolitionist convention would go on to create their own convention, which is often hailed as the spark that lit the women’s rights movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the Seneca Falls convention, held in New York on July 19–20, 1848. This two-day event involved many speakers and presentations, including a speech from Frederick Douglass, and produced a Declaration of Sentiments, which was modeled after the Declaration of Independence and written primarily by Stanton. This document asked that women be given “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.” Many people thought that women were abandoning their traditional roles and as a result would cause the collapse of society. The Declaration of Sentiments formally announced to the nation that American women wanted to be treated equally with men and that they were tired of waiting for it.
After the Civil War ended, various groups were formed, including the National Women’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), headed by Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the rival group, the American Women’s Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. The NWSA was the more militant and unorthodox of the two groups and favored women being included in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The AWSA felt that the vote could be obtained through a state-by-state campaign. The two groups battled it out for several years before finally merging into a single group and renaming themselves the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890. Many books have been written on these groups and their roles in the women’s suffrage movement, and new studies are being produced to this day, proving that interest in this topic is alive and well in America, perhaps because many of the inequalities these founding mothers faced are still being dealt with by today’s American women.
Many of the original founders of both parties, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, did not live to see the day when women won the vote. Women’s suffrage was not passed until 1920 by President Woodrow Wilson, due to the combined efforts of NAWSA and the younger, more unconventional National Women’s Party (NWP). Were it not for the foundation laid by the women of the late nineteenth century, the women in the early twentieth century would not have won the fight for voting rights. Woman suffrage was achieved well before the time of the fictional Fanny Campbell, and Sadie Farrell most likely did not live to see it either. Although these two women pirates were not suffragettes themselves, their efforts to follow their dreams—even if those dreams took them away from what society demanded of them—place them very much in the American suffragette movement in spirit if not in fact.
Sadie the Goat is the last known American female pirate. As the twentieth century began, American pirates moved inland and became tycoons of industry and progress. The nation would endure two world wars and numerous other military conflicts in the next one hundred years, and there would be little time for seafaring mischief in that part of the world. However, as the twentieth century dawned, China was the place to be for a woman pirate.