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By Root 7773 0

to obtain a license. Applicants had to submit, to a Board of Excise Commissioners, vouchers attesting to their good moral character signed by thirty resident freeholders (those with absolute ownership of an estate), post a bond, and provide boarding facilities and stables. The Herald surmised such requirements would force out of business thirteen of every fourteen saloons in the city, and probably ninety-nine of every hundred in the lower wards where few freeholders lived. The law also banned the sale of liquor on Sunday or election days, further foreclosing working-class access to spirits, and—in a quasi-feminist intervention into hitherto sacrosanct family life—provided that on a wife’s complaint, a husband could be put on a list of known drunkards to be distributed to all liquor dealers.

Republicans, perfectly aware that if enforcement was left to New York’s current municipal leadership (i.e., Mayor Wood) it would swiftly become a dead letter, passed a complementary piece of legislation, the Metropolitan Police Act, which shifted effective control of the force from the (Democratic) mayor to a Metropolitan Police Commission controlled by (chiefly Republican) state appointees. The new law also dropped the requirement that officers serve in the ward where they resided, seeking (as had London) to sever the connections between cops and communities. The new commissioners—whose domain included Kings, Richmond, and Westchester counties as well as Manhattan—were given tremendous powers. Not only had they authority to enforce the Sunday closing laws, but they had complete control over the election machinery of New York and Brooklyn.

This legislative one-two punch produced instant furor. In May 1857 a Democratic mass meeting in City Hall Park attacked the Republican “principle of governing by boards” as despotic. Just the right word, thought the Irish News, which denounced the Republican laws as “specimens of despotic legislation which Louis Napoleon, with his legion of spies, a garroted press and an army of mercenary bayonets at his back, would hardly attempt in Paris.”

Democrats were not alone in their outrage. Harper’s said the laws resembled those imposed “on revolted districts or conquered places.” The Herald evoked city-versuscountry sentiments when it branded the upstate legislators as “archaeological curiosities” who “daren’t trust themselves alone with a loaded pistol, or a gin bottle, or a pretty girl. . . without a good stout law to protect them and keep them in bounds.”

But it was Mayor Wood who emerged as municipal champion. Blasting the excise law as “another of the encroachments upon individual rights for which the dominant party are so much distinguished,” he called for resistance to an insolent state centralism that would make of New York a “subjugated city” and plunge its citizens into a “feeble state of vassalage.” Claiming the laws violated home rule rights guaranteed by the Dongan and Montgomerie charters, Wood ordered all policemen to reject die authority of the new metropolitan commissioners, at least while he instituted legal proceedings to get the law declared unconstitutional. Those who defied him he fired.

To bolster his position, Wood got the Common Council to establish a separate Municipal Police force, composed of all pre-1857 officers, under direct mayoral control. There were now two official departments, and between late May and mid June 1857 policemen of the various wards were forced to choose up sides. In the end about eight hundred cops and fifteen captains stayed with Wood’s Municipals and three hundred cops and seven captains opted for the Metropolitans (splitting more or less on ethnic lines). Each of the rival forces then proceeded to fill up its vacancies (again ethnically, the Mets tending to appoint Anglo-Americans, the Munis leaning toward the foreign born).

Chaos ensued. Criminals had a high old time. Arrested by one force, they were rescued by the other. Rival cops tussled over possession of station houses. The opera bouffe climax came in mid-June when Metropolitan police captain