Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [405]
Finally a New York legislative committee recommended that public executions, being “of a positively injurious and demoralizing tendency,” should henceforth be conducted in private, where they could not excite “animal feelings.” The legislature concurred in May 1835 and, to forestall objections to “private assassinations,” required that executions be witnessed by at least “twelve reputable citizens.” In 1835 the first such execution was held behind the walls of Bellevue: the hanging of Manuel Fernandez, a Portuguese seaman, went off with satisfying solemnity.
ON TO BLACKWELL’S ISLAND
The New York gentry were proud of the array of institutions they had created. On the day before Tocqueville and Beaumont sailed back to France, the mayor and aldermen, some thirty notables in all, conducted them, as Tocqueville recalled, “with great ceremony to all the prisons or houses of charity of the city.” A cortege of five carriages departed City Hall at ten A.M., headed up to the House of Refuge, where they inspected the premises (at the northwest corner of today’s Madison Square), carried on to the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane (on today’s Columbia University campus); swung over to the Deaf and Dumb Asylum on Fifth Avenue, and then, after an aquatic excursion to Blackwell’s Island, they repaired to Bellevue’s almshouse for a banquet. Tocqueville was appalled by the dinner, which “represented the infancy of art: the vegetables and fish before the meat, the oysters for dessert. In a word,” he sniffed, “complete barbarism.” But on the whole he found the postprandial toasts, given with great solemnity by speakers enveloped in clouds of cigar smoke, accurate enough in their self-congratulatory assessments.
The present, moreover, was clearly mere prologue. So pleased were the city fathers with their various walled compounds that they had decided to expand their initiative. Three years earlier, in July 1828, the Common Council had purchased from James Blackwell the island around which the visiting Frenchmen had just “made two or three charming promenades.” Here the magistrates planned to erect a city of asylums. Many of the recently constructed institutions, for all their worthiness, were already crammed full; Manhattan was surging north toward once bucolic Bellevue; and the success of colossal projects like Sing Sing had led Manhattan officialdom into thinking big. Surveyors had already selected a southerly site for a new penitentiary, to be modeled on Ossining’s pride. Plans were afoot to shift the almshouse to bigger quarters on the island, perhaps in company with a workhouse. A new smallpox hospital was in the offing. And a mammoth lunatic asylum, an intricately designed complex of centers, octagons, and wings, was being discussed. The city’s disordered and disorderly of tomorrow would be transported to Blackwell’s and be aided if worthy, punished if found wanting.
Captivated by this vision of the unruly, ruled, the city’s elite were ill prepared for the emergence of some sharply different diagnoses of New York’s social ills—and some startlingly different proposals for how to cure them.
31
The Press of Democracy
On January 3, 1829, Frances (Fanny) Wright began a series of lectures at Masonic Hall before a capacity crowd of more than fifteen hundred. In her hour-and-a-half-long speech, the rousing orator, garbed in a white muslin tunic, denounced evangelical clergymen for raising tremendous sums for tracts and missions