Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [325]
Bedlow was a “fellow citizen” regardless of his private shortcomings or station in life: to convict him just because Sawyer alleged he raped her was to violate an essential distinction between those who were active, useful members of the republic and those who stood outside it. All the more so in this case, the lawyers said, because Sawyer came from the most vicious and depraved class of society. Respectable women learned to tame their wanton passions; laboring women, exposed to the coarsest aspects of life, could not. No matter that Sawyer’s neighbors described her as modest and polite, Brockholst Livingston told the jury. They seemed “an obscure set of people, perhaps of no character themselves,” while she was just another working-class slattern who “had the art to carry a fair outside, while all was foul within.”
When the jury acquitted Bedlow after fifteen minutes’ deliberation, workingmen went on a rampage. The disorders centered around Greenwich, Warren, and Murray streets on the west side of town, home both to mechanics, shopkeepers, cartmen, and laborers and to “the Holy Ground,” the red-light district whose prostitutes and brothels were well known to young men of genteel backgrounds, not least of all those enrolled at nearby Columbia College.
For three days crowds of “Boys, Apprentices, Negroes, and Sailors” roamed through the Holy Ground and its immediate vicinity until chased off by mounted horsemen. The rioters—hundreds strong—focused their attention on Mother Carey’s bawdy house as well as two others operated by Mother Giles and Mother Gibbons. (Bawdy houses, like so many of the city’s boardinghouses, tended to be run by women, often widows.) All three establishments were looted of their luxurious appointments —“petty-coats, smocks, and silks, together with downy couches, or feather beds”—and then, after their roofs were unshingled, the houses were utterly dismantled. There were doubtless other possible targets in the area, but they escaped unscathed, and for good reason. Mother Carey and her girls had testified on Bedlow’s behalf. They were accessories to a system of upper-class sexual exploitation of young working-class women that might yet claim more of the rioters’ sisters and daughters. As anchors of that system in the city’s poorer communities, their house (and those of Mother Giles and Mother Gibbons) had to come down.
What was finally at issue here was not so much the insult to Lanah Sawyer’s honor, or the existence of bawdy houses per se, but whether working-class men or upper-class men would control the bodies of working-class women. The anonymous “Justicia” made this point forcefully, protesting to a local newspaper that the bawdy houses in question had been patronized over the years by the very magistrates who sprang to Bedlow’s defense and scrambled to quell the riots.
Street battles over gender rights thus joined strikes, ethnic tangles, racial tensions, and popular revivals as indications of growing strains in New York society. But the same prosperity that had helped generate these conflicts helped mute their consequences as well. Only a significant downturn in the economy would truly test the depth and degree of civic disaffections, and that was just what onrushing global events were about to provide.
26
War and Peace
One evening toward the end of April 1806, two miles off Sandy Hook, the sixty-gun British frigate Leander spied the American schooner Richard making her way up the coast to New York from Brandywine Creek in Pennsylvania. Leander was searching for deserters from the Royal Navy and fired a shot across Richard’s bow as an order to heave to and prepare for boarding. The American promptly complied, but a second shot followed, and then a third—possibly meant for another vessel nearby—which smashed