Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [433]
The issue was decided by the presiding judge, Ogden Edwards. Judge Edwards was a distinguished member of the patriciate, a grandson of Jonathan Edwards and cousin of Aaron Burr. Originally a conservative Tammany man—at the constitutional convention of 1821 he had opposed universal suffrage—Edwards was active in the New-York City Temperance Society. He now decreed that the testimony of prostitutes was likely to be as corrupt as their way of life. The judge instructed the jury not to credit their testimony unless it was otherwise corroborated. Robinson was acquitted in less than ten minutes.
The Sun denounced the verdict as a miscarriage of justice and an affirmation of class privilege. It noted that “an opinion is prevalent and openly expressed that any man may commit murder, who has $1500 to give to Messers Hoffman, Price and Maxwell.” The Female Moral Reform Society’s Advocate of Moral Reform also bristled at the ruling, outraged that prostitutes’ testimony—and lives—were not deemed the moral equal of their clients’. Some elite males were outraged too—Philip Hone called the verdict the “foulest blot on the jurisprudence of our country”—but Robinson’s acquittal pleased privileged gentlemen determined to suppress challenges to their masculine prerogatives.
In the trial’s aftermath, antifeminists grew bolder. When Fanny Wright returned later in 1836 and attempted to renew her speaking campaign, she was met not simply with verbal brickbats—the Courier and Enquirer attacked her “disgusting exhibition of female impudence”—but with outright suppression. On September 23, maddened males at Masonic Hall drove Wright from the stage with hisses, pounding of canes, stink bombs, and a “volley of expressions of the most vulgar and indecent kind.” She soon found the doors of every major public hall in New York City shut against her.
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White, Green, and Black
Just as debauchery, drunkenness, and Sabbath desecration were impediments to fashioning a heavenly city, so too was Catholicism, in evangelical eyes. Popery was idolatrous, theocratic, and despotic, and any further spread of its pernicious doctrines would hinder the Second Coming of Christ. Given the growing presence and power of Catholics in New York City, such a stance resonated widely within Protestant communities. Not only did the evangelicals’ nativist denunciations of immigrant Irish win them plaudits from citizens who in other respects were put off by the pious crusaders, but they touched off violent sectarian confrontations in the streets.
At the same time the evangelicals were stirring up anti-Catholic bigots, they were denouncing slavery as an evil, one America had to purge if it were ever to attain a state of grace. Abolitionism, like nativism, would rouse rage in the city. Those who believed that tampering with the South’s peculiar institution menaced Manhattan took to the streets, hell bent on suppressing antislavery.
THE COMING OF THE GREEN
When Thomas Addis Emmet died in 1828, he was perhaps the foremost lawyer in New York, ranked by many with Massachusetts’s Daniel Webster, and his funeral, by some accounts, was the largest ever seen in the city. Emmet’s death, though deeply mourned within the Irish community, coincided with the waning of support for his ideas and values. Together with the other distinguished middle-class emigres who had arrived in the aftermath of the failed 1798 United Irishmen uprising, Emmet had staunchly opposed religious sectarianism. He, his fellow Protestant attorney William Sampson, and Catholic physician William James MacNeven had organized the Association of the Friends of Ireland in New-York. The group had raised funds and rallied support for Daniel O’Connell’s civil rights movement in Ireland and helped win emancipation for British Catholics in 1829. The Friends of Ireland, however, like the allied Society for Civil and Religious Liberties, was vigorously ecumenical. So was the Shamrock, or Hibernian Chronicle, New York’s first Irish-American