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was soon preaching to the inmates of the hospital, debtors’ prison, insane asylum, and penitentiary as well, and in 1810 was joined by Ezra Stiles Ely, a young Presbyterian minister. Stanford and Ely published such shocking details about the physical and moral condition of their charges that Divie Bethune and other prominent reformers resolved to support their work with yet another organization, the interdominational Society for Supporting the Gospel Among the Poor of the City of New-York (1812). Both Stanford and Ely were named New York’s first municipal missionaries. For a score more years, Stanford in particular would maintain a herculean schedule of ministerial rounds, reporting annually on his sermons and the number of deathbed conversions among the paupers.

THE PICTURE OF NEW YORK

Never before in the city’s history had its upper classes gone to such lengths to rescue the souls and bodies of working and impoverished folk, or to educate their children. To Senator-Doctor-Professor Samuel Latham Mitchill—Friendly Club alumnus, Freemason in good standing, cofounder of the New-York Historical Society, the New-York Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures, and the New-York Free School Society—the time had therefore come to spread the good news that New York was no longer solely a center of commerce but one of culture and benevolence too. In 1807, accordingly, he published a pocket-sized volume entitled The Picture of New-York; or The Traveller’s Guide, Through the Commercial Metropolis of the United States, By a Gentleman Residing in this City.

Basically the city’s first guidebook, Mitchill’s Picture of New-York assailed the dearth of knowledge about this “great and growing capital” (even among its own residents) and denounced writers like Jedediah Morse, whose often-reprinted American Geography (1784) had ridiculed New York for its artistic, literary, and scientific backwardness. To set the record straight, Mitchill diligently compiled evidence of the city’s breathtaking growth over the previous twenty-odd years: the multiplication of banks and insurance companies, the upsurge in overseas and domestic commerce, the expansion of municipal services. What made him proudest, however, were the signs of New York’s cultural maturity. Its numerous newspapers, booksellers, reading rooms, theaters, parks, medical and scientific organizations, literary societies, and the new apparatus of reform and benevolence—all of these now put the city far ahead of erstwhile rivals like Boston or Philadelphia. For the men and women of his class who envisioned New York as something more than an island of benighted shopkeepers, this was praise indeed.

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From Crowd to Class

In 1788, New York’s African-American community petitioned the City Council to stop medical students from stealing corpses out of the Negro Burial Ground. The petitioners understood “the Necessity of Physicians and Surgeons consulting dead subjects for the benefit of mankind,” but they were dismayed that the students, under cover of night, would carry away the bodies of their relatives and friends “without respect to age or sex, mangle their flesh out of a wanton curiosity and then expose it to beasts and birds.” Nothing was done, however—not, that is, until the body snatchers or “resurrectionists” began raiding Trinity’s whites-only graveyard as well. Digging up blacks was one thing, whites quite another, and indignation ricocheted around town.

On Sunday, April 13, a boy peered in a window at New York Hospital and observed a cadaver being dissected. The medical student at work waved a severed arm at the boy and told him it belonged to his mother, who had in fact recently died. The boy ran off to tell his father, a mason at work on a nearby building. The man gathered some friends, went to the graveyard, and found his wife’s coffin empty. Soon an enraged crowd charged into the hospital, wrecking dissection equipment and gathering up bits and pieces of human bodies for respectable reburial. They also captured and abused several medical students,