Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [488]
A voice in the crowd bellowed, “To Hart’s flour store!” Over the protests of Loco Foco leaders, the crowd headed to Hart’s, on Washington Street between Dey and Cortlandt, where they found the large brick building barricaded in anticipation of their arrival. Mayor Lawrence arrived to remonstrate with the rapidly swelling multitude. He was shouted down, barraged with stones and barrel staves, and “compelled to retreat for his life,” according to the Post.
A furious assault now carried the building. After entering the counting room, where they smashed desks and scattered papers, rioters hurled hundreds of barrels of flour and sacks of wheat to the street below. There—although a “tall athletic fellow in a carman’s frock” shouted, “No plunder, no plunder; destroy as much as you please”—women (in the words of one hostile account) “like the crones who strip the dead in battle fill[ed] the boxes and baskets with which they were provided, and their aprons, with flour, and ma[de] off with it.”
At dusk, a detachment of rioters marched to the South Street store of E. and J. Herrick, but spared it when a company representative persuaded them the firm had sold off its flour at low prices. The crowd carried on to S. H. Herrick and Son, at Coenties Slip, where it broke in and began a similar process of destruction but agreed to desist when an agent promised to give every barrel in the store to the poor. Meanwhile, the mayor had called out the militia, the marshals and watchmen having proved ineffective. The troops took several hours to assemble, but by nine P.M. they had cleared remaining rioters from the vicinity of Hart’s, and the affair was over.
The flour riot was a throwback to the colonial (and beyond that the English) tradition of crowds enforcing the moral economy by punishing those who profited from economic hardship. It constituted a violent petition to the city’s elites, a demand they act responsibly for the common good. But the appeal fell on ears more attuned than ever before to the ethics and logic of the marketplace. Conservatives, not surprisingly, denounced those who had deluded the “pillaging canaille, the colored people, thieves and Irish” into stupidly trying to lower the price of flour by making it scarcer. But the radical William Leggett concurred with their analysis. With perfect consistency, he denounced unionists who would combine to raise wages “yet attack Capital for raising flour prices.” The crisis was due to a deficient crop and inflated paper money. Violent interference with the laws of trade was useless and indefensible.
The riot did not, therefore, produce a restoration of the assize on bread. What it did do was galvanize those who had been pushing for a strengthened police force. Within twenty-four hours of the riot a hitherto becalmed plan for adding 192 more watchmen sailed into law.
It was clear to at least some of the gentry, however, that repression would not be a sufficient response to the crisis. Philip Hone, foreman of a grand jury investigating the flour riot, agreed it had been an outrageous event. But Hone couldn’t help sympathizing with the “poor devils,” at least in the privacy of his diary. “What is to become of the labouring classes?” he asked himself on February 18. “It is very cold now, if it continues so for a month, then will be great and real suffering in all classes.” Presciently, Hone added the thought that “the present unnatural state of things cannot continue.”
“THE VOLCANO HAS BURST AND OVERWHELMED NEW YORK”
On the ides of March 1837, the granite office building of J. L. and S. I. Joseph and Company caved in with a crash that shook every building on Wall Street. Two days later the firm itself collapsed, frightening the financial district far more than had the tumbling stonework,