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to Current Controversies: History Behind the Headlines
Policing the Pre-Civil War
City
On Saturday night, April 9, 1836,
Helen Jewett, a prostitute, was found dead in a fashionable New
York City brothel. The young woman had been slain with an axe
at Rosina Townsend's Palace of the Passions, and her murderer,
a nineteen-year old farm boy named Richard P. Robinson, had tried
to cover up the crime by setting fire to the prostitute's bed.
The woman's body, however, was only partially charred. This was
how one reporter described the murder scene:
The body looked as white, as
full, as polished as the purest marble. The perfect figure,
the exquisite limbs, fine face, the full arms, the beautiful
bust, all surpassed, in every respect, the Venus de Medici....For
a few moments I was lost in admiration of the extraordinary
sight....I was recalled to her horrid destiny by seeing the
dreadful bloody gashes on the right temple.
The New York Herald called the
crime "one of the most foul and premeditated murders, that
ever fell to our lot to record."
During the mid-1830s, the nation
experienced a wave of crime and rioting without parallel in early
American history. In 1834, the most violent year, municipal elections
in New York had been accompanied by three days of rioting. Three
months later, a New York mob stormed the house of a prominent
abolitionist, carried the furniture into the street, and set it
on fire, and then proceeded to gut New York's Episcopal African
Church and attack the homes of many of the city's free blacks.
On August 11, 1834, a mob composed of lower-class men and boys
had sacked and burned a convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts,
near the site of Bunker Hill. Then in October, pro-slavery rioting
swept Philadelphia, destroying 45 homes in the city's black community.
Altogether there were at least 115 incidents of mob violence during
the 1830s, compared to just seven incidents in the 1810s and 21
incidents in the 1820s.
A variety of factors contributed
to the sharp upsurge in crime and mob violence during the 1830s.
These included a rate of urban growth faster than in any previous
decade; a marked upturn in foreign immigration, generating bitter
religious and ethnic tensions; growing political polarization;
and the sudden emergence of abolitionism, which enflamed racist
anti-Negro sentiment.
The explosive eruption of crime
and mob violence during the mid-1830s revealed the total inadequacy
of traditional methods of preserving public order. Prior to the
late 1830s, the nation's cities were "policed" by a
handful of unpaid, untrained, un-uniformed, and unarmed sheriffs,
alderman, marshals, constables, and nightwatchmen. In New England
towns, tithing men armed with long black sticks tipped with brass,
patrolled streets searching for drunkards, disorderly children,
and wayward servants.
These law officers were not a
particularly effective deterrent to crime. Nightwatchmen generally
held other jobs during the day and sometimes slept at their posts
at night. Sheriffs, alderman, marshals, and constables made a
living not by investigating crime or patrolling city streets but
by collecting debts, foreclosing on mortgages, and serving court
orders. Victims of crime had to offer a reward if they wanted
these unpaid law officers to investigate a case.
This early system of maintaining
public order worked because rates of serious crime were extremely
low. Boston had only a single reported murder between 1822 and
1834. One New Yorker amazingly and inaccurately claimed that an
1819 homicide was "the first fatal assault" that had
ever occurred in the city.
Lacking an efficient police force
to enforce the law, citizen relied instead on a variety of informal
mechanisms to maintain order. Most cities were small and compact
and lacked any distinct working class ghettoes. Shopkeepers usually
lived at or near their place of business and apprentices, journeymen,
and laborers tended to live in or near the house of their master.
Under these circumstances, the poor and the working class were
subject to close supervision by their social superiors. By the
mid-1830s, however, this older pattern of social organization
had clearly broken down. Class segregated neighborhoods grew increasingly
common. Youth gangs, organized along ethnic and neighborhood lines,
proliferated. Older mechanisms of social control weakened.
After 1830, the number of violent
crimes shot upward. Drunken brawls, robberies, beatings, and murders
all increased in number. In Philadelphia the number of homicides
reached 67 during the period between 1839 and 1845 and then rose
to 75 over the next seven years and to 126 over the following
seven years. Fear of crime also mounted. Declared a New York City
council report in 1842:
The property of the citizen is
pilfered, almost before his eyes. Dwellings and warehouses are
entered with an ease and apparent coolness and carelessness of
detection which shows none are safe...Thousands that are arrested
go unpunished, and the defenseless and the beautiful are ravished
and murdered in the day time, and no trace of the criminals is
found.
During the 1830s, the increasing
number of urban riots and violent crimes led city leaders to look
for new ways of preserving public order. Many municipal leaders
regarded the new professional police force established in London
in 1829 by the British Parliament as a model. London's police,
nicknamed "bobbies" after Prime Minister Robert Peel,
were trained, full-time professionals. They wore distinctive uniforms
to make them visible to the public, patrolled regular beats, and
lived in the neighborhoods they patrolled.
Initially, resistance to the establishment
of professional police forces in American cities was intense.
Taxpayers feared the cost of a police force. Local political machines
feared the loss of the night watch as a source of political patronage.
Many critics denounced a police force as a "standing army"
that was incompatible with republican liberties.
By the mid-1840s, however, continued
rioting and violent crime overcame opposition to the establishment
of a professional police force. In New York City, the turning
point came in 1841 following the unsolved murder of Mary Rogers,
who worked in a tobacco shop. On July 25, 1841, she disappeared.
Three days later, the body of the "beautiful cigar girl"
was found in a river. The coroner said she had died not from drowning,
but from being abused and murdered by a gang of ruffians. The
case aroused intense passion in New York City, prompting vocal
demands for an end to water-front gangs. But the city's constables
said that they would only investigate the murder if they were
promised a substantial reward. Public opinion was outraged. In
1844, the New York state legislature authorized the establishment
of a professional police force to investigate crimes and patrol
streets in New York City. Boston appointed its first police officers
in 1838 and Philadelphia established a modern police department
in 1854.
The life of a mid-nineteenth century
police officer was exceptionally hard. In many cities, members
of gangs, like New York's Bowery B'hoys, Baltimore's Rip Raps,
and Philadelphia's Schuykll Rangers, actually outnumbered police
officers. Young toughs regularly harassed police officers. Many
officers resisted wearing uniforms on the grounds that any distinctive
dress made them readily identifiable targets for street gangs.
In New York City, four officers were killed in the line of duty
in a single year.
Partisan politics presented mid-nineteenth
century police officers with many awkward problems. Unlike London's
bobbies, who were expected to remain outside of politics, nineteenth
century American police officers were political appointees who
held office for a limited period of time. Such jobs provided a
valuable source of patronage to local aldermen or political leaders
who were responsible for naming precinct officers and patrolmen.
Officers who were not responsive to the demands of a local political
organization quickly lost their jobs.
The greatest problem confronting
the police was that they were often called upon to enforce laws
that large segments of the public had no interest in obeying.
During the mid-nineteenth century, many civic leaders and reformers
regarded the police as an instrument for enforcing public morality.
Strict new laws forbidding gambling and prostitution and closing
saloons on Sunday were adopted in many cities. Boston, in 1835,
made public intoxication a crime (earlier, a person could only
be arrested for habitual drunkenness), resulting in thousands
of arrests annually and generating bitter resistance from many
immigrants. When New York police tried to close saloons in the
city's "Little Germany" on Sundays, three days of rioting
ensued.
After 1850, in large part as a
result of more efficient policing, the number of street disorders
in American cities began to drop. Despite the introduction of
the Colt revolver and other easily concealed and relatively inexpensive
handguns during the middle years of the century, homicide rates,
too, began to decline. By the eve of the Civil War, the nation's
cities had became far less violent and far more orderly places
than they had been two decades before. |
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