• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The next day another crowd, perhaps as many as five thousand strong, demanded to reexamine the hospital. Finding no more stolen bodies, they searched the buildings of Columbia College and the residences of city doctors (including that of Sir John Temple, the British consul, mistakenly identified as “Surgeon” Temple). At sunset, their wrath still unappeased, the rioters regrouped and headed for the jail, where a number of doctors and medical students had taken refuge. Governor George Clinton, Chancellor Robert Livingston, John Jay, Baron Friedrich von Steuben, and Mayor James Duane all pleaded for restraint, only to be answered with a hail of bricks and stones. Jay, struck in the head, was carried home unconscious. Duane summoned a troop of militia to disperse the crowd and was met with another shower of missiles. Baron von Steuben, also struck in the head and bleeding profusely, shouted, “Fire, Duane! Fire!” Duane, or perhaps Clinton, gave the order. The first volley killed three rioters outright and wounded many others. Before a second could be fired, the crowd had scattered.

Spontaneous, short-lived, and aimed at redressing a specific offense against communal sensibilities, the so-called Doctors Riot closely resembled pre-Revolutionary popular disorders in the city. That resemblance was strengthened by the willingness of public authorities to address the rioters’ grievances. Within a year the state legislature passed an act banning “the Odious Practice of Digging up and Removing, for the Purpose of Dissection, Dead Bodies Interred in Cemeteries or Burial Places.” (The law also allowed the bodies of executed criminals to be assigned to the doctors.)

But in certain crucial respects the Doctors Riot was unprecedented. No colonial mayor or governor had ever ordered soldiers to open fire on a crowd. Never before had gentlemen ever proved so ineffectual in controlling the actions of a crowd or (with the possible exception of Leisler’s Rebellion a century earlier) actually come under attack themselves. In retrospect, indeed, that violent clash in front of the jailhouse was an early manifestation of what would become increasingly antagonistic relations between patrician and plebeian residents of the city. For over the next ten or twenty years, even as the rich grew more clannish and disdainful of laboring people, laboring people grew more conscious of themselves as a class with markedly different interests, values, and social practices.

WORKING NEIGHBORHOODS

In the 1790s the streets of the East Ward, hard by the East River waterfront, were home to watchmakers, printers, bookbinders, tailors, hatters, and other skilled craftsmen who catered to an affluent clientele. Typically, they lived and worked under one roof—as did silversmith Daniel van Voorhis, who resided above his workshop and retail store on Hanover Square, along with his wife, Catherine Richards, their children, and some of his journeymen and apprentices. But Van Voorhis and his kind were a vanishing breed. Artisans in the capitalizing and competitive trades, caught between rising rents and declining incomes, found themselves obliged to adopt new living arrangements. One downtown shoemaker bundled both his family and his workshop into the household’s first floor, then rented out the upstairs to a Scotch journeyman carpenter and his family. The carpenter’s wife, in turn, took in boarders to meet the rent, and two immigrant nailmakers moved into the attic along with three of the carpenter’s sons.

Even with this additional income, the shoemaker found himself squeezed out of the wharf district and pushed uptown. With other priced-out artisans, he trekked to the northern wards, especially the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Tenth, which together formed a broad band across Manhattan. Anchored on the west by Trinity’s Church Farm along the Hudson, this plebeian belt ran through the mid-island area dominated by the slowly disappearing Fresh Water Pond and its swampy tributaries, and on into