Podcast
Questions and Answers
In the early 1800s in New York City, which group primarily enforced law and order?
In the early 1800s in New York City, which group primarily enforced law and order?
- The mayor's sixty marshals
- Night watchmen (correct)
- Sixteen constables elected by citizens
- The New York Kidnapping Club
According to city law in the early 1800s in New York, who had the authority to make arrests under a magistrate's orders?
According to city law in the early 1800s in New York, who had the authority to make arrests under a magistrate's orders?
- Anyone deputized by the mayor
- Any citizen witnessing a crime
- The New York Kidnapping Club and night watchmen
- Only constables and marshals (correct)
Why was it difficult for African Americans to determine if they were being legally arrested in the early 19th century?
Why was it difficult for African Americans to determine if they were being legally arrested in the early 19th century?
- The language barrier between officers and citizens
- The lack of clear jurisdiction among law enforcement agencies.
- Arrests typically occurred at night without witnesses
- Officers did not wear uniforms or badges (correct)
How were officers like Nash and Boudinot compensated for their services in the early 19th century?
How were officers like Nash and Boudinot compensated for their services in the early 19th century?
How did newspapers contribute to racial bias in perceptions of crime in early 19th century New York?
How did newspapers contribute to racial bias in perceptions of crime in early 19th century New York?
What was a notable characteristic of the Sixth Ward (including Five Points) in New York City regarding policing?
What was a notable characteristic of the Sixth Ward (including Five Points) in New York City regarding policing?
What social issue was prominent in Five Points, contributing to its infamy?
What social issue was prominent in Five Points, contributing to its infamy?
What challenges did families in Five Points face due to the living conditions?
What challenges did families in Five Points face due to the living conditions?
What did Walt Whitman's description of New York emphasize?
What did Walt Whitman's description of New York emphasize?
What was considered a focal point of destitution in the 1830s New York?
What was considered a focal point of destitution in the 1830s New York?
What was the primary complaint of the night watchmen regarding their job in early 19th century New York?
What was the primary complaint of the night watchmen regarding their job in early 19th century New York?
What was the Tombs designed to replace?
What was the Tombs designed to replace?
How were the levels within The Tombs divided?
How were the levels within The Tombs divided?
Why was Ruggles targeted by Nash and the Kidnapping Club?
Why was Ruggles targeted by Nash and the Kidnapping Club?
What was High Constable Jacob Hays known for?
What was High Constable Jacob Hays known for?
What was Riker's role in the events described in the text?
What was Riker's role in the events described in the text?
What did Riker express regarding immediate abolition of slavery?
What did Riker express regarding immediate abolition of slavery?
What was the purpose of gathering at Phoenix Hall in 1836?
What was the purpose of gathering at Phoenix Hall in 1836?
Who was Hester Jane Carr?
Who was Hester Jane Carr?
What was William Parker's role in Hester Jane Carr's case?
What was William Parker's role in Hester Jane Carr's case?
What happened to Hester Jane Carr in the end?
What happened to Hester Jane Carr in the end?
What did the frequent return of runaways to their enslavers show?
What did the frequent return of runaways to their enslavers show?
What was the effect of returning runaways?
What was the effect of returning runaways?
What did Black New Yorkers depend on?
What did Black New Yorkers depend on?
Flashcards
NYPD Uniforms in Early 1800s
NYPD Uniforms in Early 1800s
Early New York police officers often lacked uniforms, making it difficult for African Americans to discern legal authority.
How were police paid?
How were police paid?
Lacking regular salaries, they relied on fees from arrests, incentivizing them to target and arrest more individuals, including Black residents.
Media Bias
Media Bias
News reports frequently identified the race of accused individuals, reinforcing prejudiced perceptions of Black criminality.
Disproportionate Justice
Disproportionate Justice
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Five Points Infamy
Five Points Infamy
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The Old Brewery
The Old Brewery
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Crime and Overcrowding
Crime and Overcrowding
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Tombs and Bridewell
Tombs and Bridewell
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David Ruggles
David Ruggles
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Jacob Hays
Jacob Hays
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Brilliante case arrest
Brilliante case arrest
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Deceptive accusation
Deceptive accusation
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Recorder Riker's outburst
Recorder Riker's outburst
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Black Resistance
Black Resistance
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Riker and Kidnapping Club power
Riker and Kidnapping Club power
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Enslaved as example
Enslaved as example
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Hester's Fate
Hester's Fate
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Study Notes
- Danger for African Americans in the early 1800s came from many sources, including the New York Police Department (NYPD).
- By modern standards, the early NYPD was primitive and understaffed.
- Night watchmen were the main enforcers of law and order.
- Daytime police were inadequate for robberies, violence, prostitution, gambling in a city of 300,000 people.
- Sixteen constables and sixty marshals patrolled the disordered and dangerous city.
- The New York Kidnapping Club took advantage of the small force, as well as the power that some members of the force held.
- Only constables and marshals could arrest under a magistrate's orders.
- Individuals used their power to terrorize Black residents, who came to fear the police presence in their neighborhoods.
- Part of the fear stemmed from the fact that some officials did not wear uniforms or badges.
- The familiar dark blue uniforms of the NYPD were not introduced until much later.
- People harassed or arrested by the police could not be sure they were being taken by legal authorities.
- Some officials did not earn a regular salary, so their ability to support themselves and their families came from fees set by state law.
- This required officials to arrest as many people as possible.
- Newspaper accounts of court proceedings almost always noted when the accused was "Black" or "colored."
- The press was complicit in the perception that New York's Black community committed crimes at a much higher rate than their proportion of the population would suggest.
- Every street inhabited by people of color was heavily policed.
- One ward recorded more arrests than virtually any other area of New York.
- Black residents were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned at disproportionate rates in multiple major cities.
- New York City was singularly and virulently opposed to racial equality.
- The mayor of New York City announced he would "cheerfully assume" the cost of new prisons.
- Even as they counted record profits, New Yorkers struggled to deal with the two worlds that emerged from the rapid prosperity of the nineteenth century.
- Wealthy merchants gathered in local taverns amid cobbled streets, well-kept storefronts, and impressive homes.
- Another New York existed of poverty, open prostitution, and violent crime.
- Five Points had gained international infamy, a place so poverty-stricken and dilapidated that visitors came to witness the worst of the human condition.
- Cramped rooms created dangerous conditions, and fires swept through the poorly maintained tenements, killing and displacing families every year.
- New York encompassed extremes in the human condition.
- There were more than forty-five hundred places where New Yorkers could buy liquor.
- More than twenty-five thousand arrests were made each year.
- Nearly fifty thousand people were jailed in a given year.
- Frustrated officers dealt with intoxicated and disorderly residents, while burglaries were compounded by shopkeepers forgetting to lock their doors.
- Most arrests occurred in neighborhoods populated by African Americans and working-class Irish.
- Policing was poorly paid, demanding, and dangerous.
- One night watchman complained that his pay was so low he would soon be forced to send at least some of his children to the poorhouse.
- Low pay was compounded by meager resources, shabby offices, and long hours.
- Officers often earned their jobs through political favors and received little training.
- Captains repeatedly complained about officer absenteeism.
- Officers themselves often complained of fatigue and overwork.
- Officers were under constant supervision.
- Logbooks show that the vast majority of those charged with crimes were listed as laborers.
- As neighborhoods became increasingly overcrowded and poverty-stricken, crime rates rose dramatically.
- Density of people living in one section nearly doubled between 1820 and 1850, leading to a rapid rise in arrests.
- By the eve of the Civil War in 1860, about 10 percent of the city's population had a criminal record.
- This early form of mass incarceration meant large expenses for its prisons.
- By the mid-nineteenth century, two prisons and their overcrowding were notorious throughout the world.
- As a municipal jail built to replace another prison, the first one was built in a swampy and unsanitary area, and prisoners complained.
- The prison complex included city courts and the police headquarters.
- The prison divided its levels according to nature of its inmates' crimes
- Original intent was for prisoner reflection, but incarceration in packed and filthy conditions punished.
- Many victims of the New York Kidnapping Club found themselves in the prisons.
- Ruggles paid dearly for his activism in a case.
- An activist heard a commotion in the early morning hours.
- Officials tried to trick the activist into believing that they approached his home on private business.
- Known to chase down criminals, the police would insert themselves into the middle of riots.
- The community promulgated a legend of him apprehending criminals with some kind of gift of intuition.
- The local official seemed to be in many places at once.
- Armed with a warrant from someone, one person returned to the activist's front door in the middle of the night with his posse.
- Individuals were hungry to punish someone for interference.
- Under a hat was a small handwritten note of authorization to seize someone as a slave.
- A crewman agreed that the individual had ended someone's existence and would never interfere again.
- The activist went to City Hall to see someone himself.
- Was grabbed and jammed against one of the marble pillars of City Hall, and was told, "I was after you tonight."
- Before the city magistrate, someone was charged.
- Convicted that the ultimate goal of the kidnapping club was to sell him into southern slavery, a suspicion strengthened by knowledge of the city.
- An individual was eventually released, and the arrest only fortified his will further.
- "I take fresh courage", one person wrote, "in warning my endangered brethren against a gang of kidnappers."
- The city's conservatives relished the possibility that the radical troublemaker might be chastened by the arrest and imprisonment.
- Some people felt no fault entirely, that another had instilled a conviction that they are an injured and oppressed race.
- Yet another did not intend to give his conservative critics the satisfaction of retreating from his now-famous vigilance.
- Officials were trying to arrest someone, and their employers suggested that they go willingly with the officers and that they would help straighten the matter out.
- Police in pursuit of fugitive slaves often initially accused Black New Yorkers of minor crimes so that they would not put up a fight.
- Authorities knew that accused runaways would risk their lives to avoid capture.
- In less than three hours after his arrest someone was bound in chains, dragged through the streets. presumably someone was sold into southern slavery.
- The activist fired off letters, reminding the Black community that "we are all liable; your wives and children are at the mercy of merciless kidnappers."
- Self-defense is the first law of nature, and that anything is worth avoiding slavery.
- Some were beginning to lose patience with any peaceful approach to ending the abuse.
- When faced with abduction, Black people would use violence to resist when necessary.
- The recorder seemed more troubled than usual when it came to sending a man into slavery.
- Officials had discovered one of his absconded enslaved men had fled and settled in a city.
- The case was not the exception, nearly all such cases focused on the identity of the accused.
- Was someone Collier? Or was this a case of mistaken identity?
- Riker and other judges had to rely on paper documentation and witness testimony.
- Black witnesses testified that they had lived in the same house with Gosler.
- Men agreed with others that they had been living and working in the city long before he was supposed to have escaped.
- One man of color stood up and yelled "It is a damned lie!"
- People from the collier farm testified that they had known someone since a given time.
- On the stand, one lawyer asked another lawyer on the stand whether someone was present in the courtroom, and he dramatically turned and pointed to Gosley.
- Some witnesses from another location became rowdy and "behaved with the greatest insolence during the trial."
- By the idea that had taken root in the area that Black rights supersede those of whites.
- An official, usually a stickler for decorum in his courtroom, did not dress the men down, much to the surprise of other observers in the courtroom.
- Black attendees agreed that Riker was bending over backward to appease the white southerners.
- With conflicting witnesses, Riker turned to paper documentation.
- Free official written documents indicated their status as people.
- In the midst of the trial, Gosley produced free documents.
- There was one major problem: the man claiming to be Gosley was at least three inches taller.
- A lawyer was called to what he was doing, and said his body was in the right stance.
- "would no doubt do him justice, and set him at liberty; for they were fully as tenacious of the liberty of colored people as any Judge here could be."
- There was absolutely no evidence to support this stunning claim, and the Black community was flabbergasted.
- As Gosley was handcuffed in court to be several Black men created a commotion, surrounded the officers, and yelled threats at the police.
- Authorities were charged with trying to obstruct justice by freeing Gosley.
- After had been at the center of a number of New York fugitive slave cases, Riker let the criticism boil over.
- A judge remarked it "was an ill omen of what might be expected as the consequence of immediate abolition of slavery."
- "What must be expected if two millions of slaves were at once let loose upon society?"
- He did not stop there, declaring that the end of slavery "would be such a scene of anarchy, confusion and bloodshed."
- "reminding the courtroom that abolitionism would 'annihilate our commerce, and rend asunder that Union which our forefathers cemented with their blood."
- Leaders, with the accusation made publicly of what he sowing seeds were, caused comments to be made. said an article by A called Immediatist. One individual said he "was like the Greeks, or the Poles."
- People knew that "our city is infested with kidnappers."
- Black community gathered to make additional moves on the continual action of the issue.
- Yet what power did they have?
- They could gather.
- One area worked to wrestling victims from the authorities.
- People were acting independently, and as coordinated groups.
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