Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [506]
The Bowery was another gang locus. Here resided the Bowery Boys, O’Connell Guards, Atlantic Guards, American Guards (of nativist bent), and True Blue Americans (Irishmen, whose costume consisted of long black frock coat and stovepipe hat—a send-up, perhaps, of the outfits favored by dandified young merchants and clerks). African Americans coalesced as well, a phenomenon one of Frances Grund’s local informants blamed on Arthur Tappan and his colleagues: “Our black servants are getting worse and worse every day ever since that bigoted scoundrel T*** has commenced preaching abolition,” he fulminated. “Those black devils have always been a nuisance; but now ‘a respectable white man’ can hardly walk up and down Broadway of a Sunday afternoon without being jostled off the sidewalk by one of their desperate gangs.”
Some gangs were pacific and merely took in the theater or circus together, but many were fiercely territorial. They guarded (as the names of many groups implied) particular pieces of city turf or invaded those of nearby bands. Neighborhood frontiers crackled with border wars. Combatants fought with bludgeons and brickbats, clubs and hobnail stomping boots, and occasionally, though still rarely, knives and pistols. At times, local rivals would league together into a giant horde and sally forth to challenge a gangcombine from some other part of town. Such combat was a customary entertainment in Ireland and England but increasingly frowned upon by the authorities over there. Over here, immigrants found, they could indulge in donnybrooks with virtual impunity; indeed spectators massed on rooftops or gathered at windows to cheer the scrappers on.
Gang members also latched onto volunteer fire companies and transmuted their traditional tussles into increasingly nasty confrontations. In 1839 over a thousand men and boys battled with sticks and brickbats. More and more often, such fire fights ended with stabbings or broken skulls. In January 1840 the mayor and Common Council found that “a great excitement prevails in this community, in consequence of frequent breaches of the peace, alleged to have been committed by a large number of dissolute and profligate young men.”
Tribalism provided camaraderie, protection, identity, and also a sense of being in charge, something increasingly hard to come by in the workplace. Many gang members were technically “apprentices” or “journeymen,” but few harbored any hope of becoming a “master.” Jobs seldom gave a worker status or a chance to display skill. And if being a waged employee diminished one’s sense of autonomy and control, being fired devastated it. The panic had made painfully clear that the new economic order could pitch a worker into desperate poverty, virtually overnight.
Security and self-esteem were best pursued elsewhere. After work a butcher, tailor, or cartman could doff his smock, apron, or overalls, don colorful gang regalia, rendezvous with his comrades, and regain at least the illusion of being in control of his life, of being a man among men. Rude lads esteemed precisely those qualities the emerging bourgeoisie devalued: muscular prowess, masculine honor, swaggering bravado, and colorful display. Uptown precincts exalted domesticity and sanctified femininity, but the lower wards were dominated demographically by single young men, most of whom, given their limited prospects, married late or not at all, and there, rowdy masculinity ruled. Women might assist in battle by bringing stones to frontline fighters but were seldom full-scale participants. There were, however, some spectacular exceptions, like the Dead Rabbits’ Hell-Cat Maggie, whose teeth, filed to points, and fingers, embellished with brass nails, made her a welcome companion