Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [505]
Many city Whigs deserted their party to support Harper’s candidacy—some openly, most tacitly, given Governor Seward’s opposition. With their support, American Republicans swept the spring 1844 elections, placed James Harper in City Hall, and won control of the Common Council.
Harper set out to forge a new civic order. On the Fourth of July, the Mayor banned the sale of alcohol, offering up instead a large basin of iced Croton water in City Hall Park. He enforced tavern laws prohibiting Sunday liquor sales (though he exempted the downtown hotels patronized by more elite clienteles). Foreigners disappeared from the city’s payroll. Apple women and other vendors were driven from the streets. Some salaries were cut, though taxes and expenditures continued to increase. Plans were launched for reforming the almshouse. In the end, however, Harper’s crusade went nowhere: partly because under the charter the mayor lacked real power; partly because his moral fervor was transparently class-partial; partly because he was inept at governance; but primarily because a sequence of shocking events discredited his nativist movement.
In May 1844 word arrived that Philadelphia, which had also been riven by debates about schools and Bibles, had exploded in violence, with frenzied nativists hunting down Irishmen by the light of burning homes and churches. Excitement spread through New York. Some local nativists were eager for combat; an hours-long battle with Irishmen had broken out in Brooklyn a few days before Philadelphia erupted. Now they called for a giant rally on May 9, to greet a delegation of Philadelphia nativists.
Bishop Hughes stationed a thousand armed Irishmen around each Catholic church and told his community to keep the peace but defend their property at all costs. Hughes met with the mayor, who asked if the bishop was afraid for his churches. “No, sir,” he replied, “but I am afraid that some of yours will be burned.” Hughes went on to make it utterly clear to the nativist administration that “if a single Catholic church were burned in New York, the city would become a Moscow.” The authorities, fearing a bloodbath, pressed their Protestant allies to abandon their mass meeting, a request to which they reluctantly acceded a scant few hours before it was to take place.
The riots in Philadelphia and New York’s near brush with Armageddon deeply shocked many citizens. Nativists, now associated with riot and lawlessness, lost sympathy. In the 1845 mayoral election, the Seward wing recaptured control of city Whiggery and refused to back Harper’s bid for reelection. Deserted by their allies, the American Republicans managed to win only a single ward constableship. The Democrats elected respected sugar merchant William Havemeyer Mayor on a reform ticket. Within two years the American Republican Party was dead, and with it, for the moment, nativism as a political force.
ROACH GUARDS AND DEAD RABBITS
Before receding, nativism contributed to an increase in street gangs, many of them ethnically based. “The city is infested by gangs of hardened wretches,” Philip Hone told his diary in 1839. They “patrol the streets making the night hideous and insulting all who are not strong enough to defend themselves.”
Gangs were no novelty in New York City. Citizens had complained of them since the early eighteenth century, and evanescent constellations of rowdy young men had been common enough after 1800. The Chichesters, perhaps the first gang with staying power, had commanded attention during the 1830s boom years, particularly for its assaults on brothels. But during the depression scores of gangs crystallized, each distinctively named and garbed.
The grocery-groggeries in the heart of the Five Points became headquarters for turf-based Irish gangs like the Forty Thieves, Kerryonians, Shirt Tails (from their shirts-out sartorial