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By Root 7584 0

in living arrangements served the same differentiating function: whites received psychic reassurance from not having to share schools, churches, playhouses, or pleasure grounds with blacks. There was, however, a yawning loophole in New York’s system of urban apartheid: neighborhoods were not segregated. Low-waged, or intermittently employed, or widowed, or orphaned, or unskilled whites, could and did easily find themselves domiciled in the same slum quarters as blacks. Living next door to African Americans (occasionally even in the same household) effectively stripped away all the hard-earned badges of racial difference. This was humiliatingly underscored when the gentry—including abolitionists like Arthur Tappan—moved to lily-white enclaves where it was all but certain that any black faces in evidence belonged to domestic servants, not residents. Even this was less and less the case, as Irish domestics replaced African Americans in gentry households and as black women in domestic service opted for living with their own families.

Nothing undermined the separation of colors as rapidly as sexual fraternization, raising as it did the dreaded specter of what the era called “amalgamation.” The growing hysteria over amalgamation was exacerbated by the attenuated patriarchal power of laboring males. Not only were they seldom in a position to govern an independent household, but their generic gender authority had been put in question. Nothing rubbed this in more painfully than seeing “their” women have sexual relations with black men—or worse, bear black men’s children, thus mulattoizing “their” posterity.

Nowhere did these fears flame more fiercely than in the densely integrated Five Points, where interracial sex was a common fact of life. Four working-class wards contained over half the black population and had the highest black-to-white ratios in the city. Interracial liaisons came easily, moreover, in an area where, unlike in gentry enclaves, women like men were constantly out-of-doors. Especially galling was the fact that numerous Five Points saloons and brothels housed both black and white prostitutes, accommodated a mixed clientele, and in some cases specifically featured miscegenational sex; many blacks with leading roles in the city’s vice economy had white wives or mistresses. As had been true since Dutch days, it was in the urban underworld that New York’s races mixed with greatest abandon.

One solution to this blurring of racial borders was to violently reinscribe them. The same Callithumpian bands that roistered through upper-class neighborhoods on New Year’s also paid their disrespects to blacks. They singled out for attack the sites where blacks and whites indulged in common sensual pleasures: brothels, taverns, the homes of interracial couples. They also policed places where African Americans had managed to create community institutions that signaled their aspirations to dignity and demonstrated their moral equality. In 1828 a Callithumpian procession paused at the African Church in Elizabeth Street, where the congregation was holding a “Watch Night.” They smashed the windows, demolished the doors, tried (unsuccessfully) to pull down the building, solaced themselves by beating churchgoers with sticks, then resumed their march. Such assaults weren’t limited to holidays: rowdies routinely disrupted services at St. Philip’s, knowing that unsympathetic magistrates wouldn’t intervene, and butcher boys from the Centre Street Market delighted in setting dogs on students at the nearby African Free School.

Racial anxieties ran particularly high in the city’s Irish-American community. More than any other white group, they lived side by side with Africans. They took on the same jobs—“nigger work”—laboring as degraded apprentices, domestic servants, prostitutes, seamen, and casual laborers. When they submitted (of necessity) to oppressive and despotic treatment, they were derided for “slaving like a nigger.”

The advent of abolitionism, moreover, created particular problems—and possibilities—for Irish Americans. The Irish