The Orange Riots: Irish Political Violence in New York City, 1870 and 1871 9781501721700

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The Orange Riots

THE ORANGE RIOTS Irish Political Violence in New York City, 1870 and 1871 MICHAEL A. GORDON

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2009

Copyright © 1993 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14B5o. First published 1993 by Cornell University Press.

First Printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2009 International Standard Book Number o-&14-2754-1 (cloth) International Standard Book Number o-8o14-8o34-5 (paper) Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 93-g847 Printed in the United States of America

Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the lost page of the book.

@ The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z3g.,.S..1984.

For Michele

Contents

Maps, Figure, and Illustrations Tables Preface Abbreviations

ix xi xiii XV

1.

Contending Visions

1

2.

The Elm Park Riot

27 52

3. Portents of Violence 4· The Eighth Avenue Riot

104

· 5. Judgment

149 188

6. Aftermath Appendixes A. Killed, Injured, and Arrested in Connection with the 1870 Riot B. Killed, Injured, and Arrested in Connection with the 1871 Riot and a List of Property Dainages C. Sources of Biographical Information on Selected Committee of Seventy Member~ Index

221

224

245 251

Maps, Figure, and Illustrations

MAPS 1.

2.

Manhattan, Fifty-ninth to Ninety-fifty streets, west of Central Park 30 Manhattan, Canal to Fortieth streets 84

FIGURE 1.

Approximate parade alignment when militia began firing

114

ILLUSTRATIONS 1.

2.

3· 4· 5· 6. 7· 8. g.

Orange headquarters at Twenty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue on the morning of July 12 g6 Police clubbing spectators on Eighth Avenue 112 Ninth and Eighty-fourth regiments firing on the crowd at Eighth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street 125 Bravo! Bravo! 16o The lesson of the twelfth 162 Religious processions 16g The unconditional surrender 177 Grand turnout of the "Apes" and "Orang-outangs" 184 The American River Ganges: The priests and the children 213

Tables

Birthplace of Eighth Avenue area residents: A sampling from the 1870 census schedules 107 2. 1871 riot: Civilian casualties by source of death or injury 136 3· 1871 riot: Civilian casualties by place of birth 137 4· 1871 riot: Civilian casualties by age 139 5· 1871 riot: Civilian ~sualties by occupation 140 1.

Preface

I became interested in the Orange riots while conducting research on Irish working-class thought and behavior in Gilded Age New York City. What struck me at first about these riots was the great opportunity they provided to learn more about the perceptions of Irish workers. Crises like riots, strikes, depressions, and political upheavals have often sparked much public comment by diverse citizens in the form of resolutions, letters to editors, speeches, newspaper interviews, pamphlets, poems, ballads, demonstrations, and other forms of public discourse. As George Rude and many other students of social disorder have amply demonstrated, however calamitous such events may have been at the time-and the Orange riots surely were-the confrontations and the commentary they provoked give historians access to the thoughts, concerns, and activities of people who in quieter times remain "hidden" from our view. The July 12 riots are no exception. As I studied these events, it became clear that responses to the clashes in New York in 1870 and 1871 revealed much about Irish-American sensibilities and the activities of such Irish-American groups as the Fenian Brotherhood and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. But as I studied the views and activities of the Orangemen and their supporters, I became interested in the class dimensions of this violence and not just in Irish working-class thought and behavior. Many Irish Catholics viewed

xiv

Preface

Orangemen as surrogates for wealthy Protestant New Yorkers and nativists whom they believed threatened to oppress them as industrial workers and to subvert republicanism-much as the Irish had been oppressed under Protestant ascendancy as peasants in Ireland. Their class opponents viewed Irish Catholics as debased papal agents and claimed that they threatened republican institutions. The contending class views shaped the public debate that surrounded these riots and help to explain their causes and consequences. It is difficult to write about such violence. We capture a moment in people's liv«(s in which their passion and anger and concern lead them to consider-and in some cases to take-violent action, overlooking the many other facets of their lives in which they express their thoughts and reveal their gentleness, caring, and humor. By focusing just on their hostility, we learn only a little about who they are. Even so, what we do learn is valuable. Irish Catholic comment about the riots was passionate and infused with historical references that reveal much about Irish historical consciousness. Comments by other participants were equally pointed. I have tried to help the contending sides re-create their debate in this book by including lengthy excerpts from their arguments instead of paraphrasing their remarks and reducing their intensity. By so doing, I have enabled long-forgotten or ignored people to be heard as they expressed their ofteneloquent and compelling concerns about their lives and the future of their nation. For related reasons, I also have analyzed the riot events in considerable detail. It is important to explain what actually happened (as much as the sources allow) in order to understand how and why such violence occurred, to compare our findings with the accounts of contemporaries and other historians, and to assess motivation and culpability. Moreover, a detailed analysis helps us to visualize more clearly the social space in which people lived, worked, and attended to their daily affairs. For example, details about meetings of various Irish-American nationalist and fraternal groups on the eve of the 1871 violence suggest that some Irish Catholics were determined to prevent an Orange celebration. But information about their meeting places and addresses helps to define the world shaped by such workers: we know not just that they perhaps planned to attack Orangemen but that they belonged to flourishing Irish-American nationalist and benevolent groups that were important in their lives and that they discussed public affairs at their workplaces and homes,

Preface

XV

on streetcorners, in saloons, and elsewhere. Finally, a detailed analysis of the riots helps to restore a time dimension to events that preoccupied thousands of New Yorkers for days. A brief summary could not capture even the salient elements that contributed to the frenzy in Elm Park and the fright on Eighth Avenue. In short, I have dwelled at length on the details of these riots in hopes of conveying the complexity of the drama that unfolded in New York streets in 1870 and 1871. A brief word about sources. Studies of other riots in New York City by Paul Weinbaum, Pa~l A. Gilje, Adrian Cook, and lver Bernstein have made use of such indispensable sources as police, court, and hospital records, coroner's reports, and state and federal military records. I was able to locate only a few such sources for the 1870 and 1871 riots. Much important information is missing. I especially regret not :finding more police and court documents, the records of New York's infamous Eighty-fourth Regiment, and membership lists and other records of local Orange lodges, the American Protestant Association (APA), and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. City records would have yielded more details about the identities of people who were arrested, killed, and injured. Muster rolls and membership lists would have helped me construct a social pro:file of local Irish groups, troops, and nativist organizations and to test allegations made by many Irish Catholics after the 1871 violence that members of the Eighty-fourth belonged to the APA. The absence of such sources forced me to rely on local newspapers, which published details about the riots, its victims, and the arrested, as well as the official military reports and the coroner's :findings. Because most newspaper reporting of the time was anti-Catholic, relying so heavily on such sources is risky. I have tried to substantiate accounts as best I could. In some cases, I have quoted newspaper accounts of events, even when I could not substantiate them, not to relinquish interpretive authority to the papers but rather to reveal the papers' class and ethnic biases. It is a pleasure to thank in print the many people who have helped me over the years. I much appreciate the help of conscientious staff members of the University of Rochester Library's micro:film and interlibrary loan departments, Indiana University's microforms department, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's interlibrary loan department. I also thank the staffs of the American Irish Historical

xvi

Preface

Society, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society Library, and especially Thomas J. Dunnings, Jr., the society's curator of manuscripts. Years ago, Herbert D. Roistacher, then Chief Clerk, Criminal Branch, of the New York State Supreme Court's First Judicial District, and Sidney Barkan, then a clerk in Roistacher's office, tried to help me locate pertinent riot records that were housed amid the falling plaster in Boss Tweed's old courthouse in downtown Manhattan (they have since been moved, and the building has been restored). Idilio Garcia-Peiia and Evelyn Gonzalez also diligently searched for court records and other sources in New York's Municipal Archives and Records Center. Both shared my frustration in not finding more. I also thank Arthur J. Hughes of St. Francis College in Brooklyn; John Concannon, the Ancient Order of Hibernians' National Historian; and Walter C. Wilson, Supreme Grand Secretary of the Loyal Orange Institution of the United States of America, for their help in locating needed sources. I am grateful for generous research support provided by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Graduate School and Mark Levine, Director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Urban Studies Programs. Many relatives, friends, and colleagues have contributed support, encouragement, and comments. It would take many pages to thank them individually, so a general acknowledgment must suffice. I hope I have told each of them how much they have meant. Yet a few deserve special notice. Robert H. Wiebe first sparked my interest in history, at Northwestern University, and has continued his encouragement ever since. Over the years, John O'Brien, David F. Noble, Virginia Shaw, Jerry Lembcke, and especially Paula J. Gordon have read and commented on my work and helped in other ways. I am especially grateful to Douglas V. Shaw and Kerby Miller, who made excellent suggestions for revising an earlier version of this book and from whose own work I have learned much, and to my colleagues Margo Anderson, Michael Dintenfass, and Carole Shammas. A special note of thanks is due to Roger Haydon, my editor at Cornell University Press, for his interest, encouragement, and sound advice, and to Janet Mais for her excellent copy editing. Like so many others, I regret that Herbert G. Gutman and Edward Magdol are no longer alive to share their intelligence, spirit, and humor with us. I was fortunate that they took so much of their time to share these and other qualities with me while they were

xvii

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alive. I think of them often, as I do of my father, the late Ben W. Gordon, who would have loved to see this bbok in print. My father and mother, Edith Simon Gordon, always supported and encouraged my studies. Like their parents, Michael and Rachel Gordon and William and Lena Simon, they also provided a setting that eventually kindled my interest in the history of immigrants. My father and grandparents emigrated from Lithuania, but I have often thought of them and my mother as I studied the lives of other immigrants and their families. Finally, my wife, Michele Sumara, has been an excellent copy editor and a patient and understanding comrade. Her love and encouragement have helped to sustain me and this project as we both adjusted to the arrival of our daughter, Isabel, and the birth of our son, Samuel, within a year. Michele and our friend, Sophie, have doggedly seen to it that this book was finished. MICHAEL

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

A.

GORDON

Abbreviations;

Evening Post Herald Freemen's journal Star Sun Times Tribune World

1

New York Evening Post New York Herald New York Freemen's journal and Catholic Register New York Star The Sun New York Times New York Daily Tribune The World

The Orange Riots

1

I Contending Visions

Violent clashes between Irish Catholics and Protestants tore New York City apart in 1870 and again in 1871. On July 12 in both years, members of the Loyal Orange Institution paraded through the streets celebrating the victory of Prince William of Orange over King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 16go. Outraged Irish Catholic objections to these public commemorations of Protestant ascendancy left the nation scarred by some of the deadliest violence in its history. Eight people were killed and many were injured in the 1870 melee in and around Elm Park at Ninety-second Street and Ninth Avenue. The violence was worse in 1871. News of an impending Orange parade down Twenty-eighth Street to Cooper Union on the Lower East Side forced a crisis on the city's Democratic leaders: Irish Catholics demanded that officials ban the parade, while wealthy Protestants insisted that Orangemen should have "equal rights" and public protection. The furor coincided with the first newspaper disclosures in early July of how William Marcy "Boss" Tweed and his Democratic cronies had defrauded the city of millions of dollars. Worried that a riot might hasten the collapse of Democratic control, Mayor A. Oakey Hall ordered police superintendent James J. Kelso to ban the Orangemen's parade, but he was overruled by Democratic governor John T. Hoffman, who called out the National Guard to protect Orangemen.

2

Contending Visions

On July 12, guardsmen and hundreds of police tried to prevent another riot. Crowds along Eighth Avenue below Twenty-ninth Street pelted parading Orangemen and their guards with bricks and paving stones. Suddenly, members of the Eighty-fourth National Guard Regiment panicked and opened fire along the east side of the street. The shooting and other violence caused more than sixty deaths and one hundred injuries. The riots both reflected and added to the city's seething ethnic and class divisions that had exploded eight years before into the horrific draft riots. Those divisions, the 1871 riot, and the Tweed Ring's corruption led wealthy New Yorkers and nativists to forge a reform coalition that soon forced local Democrats from power. Contemporaries and historians of these riots have focused on the 1871 violence because of the great loss of life and the impetus it gave to city reform movements that had begun even before the exposures of fraud by the ring. Although the memoirs and studies are useful, no one has yet analyzed the riots in detail or explored the motives and beliefs of the participants. This neglect has led to some distortions about Irish thought and behavior and about the riots themselves. Disgusted contemporaries claimed that the riots merely reflected how Tammany Hall had turned over the city to the "wild Irish." One notable example is found in Joel Tyler Headley's The Great Riots of New York, 1712-1873, first published in 1873 at the peak of the city's early reform movement. Dedicated to the "Metropolitan Police" for their "Unwavering Fidelity and Courage in the Past," Headley's book discussed eleven "Great Riots" but focused on the 1863 draft riots that left 119 dead and scores injured. A Know-Nothing New York State senator and secretary of state in the 185os, Headley's politics changed little over twenty years. He believed his book provided "a sort of moral history of the vast, ignorant, turbulent class which is one of the distinguishing features of a great city" and hoped it would encourage New York to adopt policies "to protect itself from that which to-day constitutes its greatest danger-mob violence." He attributed the "Orange Riots" to "old religious feuds." His 1870 account was taken almost verbatim from the New York World; the 1871 analysis came from the Tribune. So did much of the contents of a sensational anonymous pamphlet published shortly after the 1871 riot, called Civil Rights: The Hibernian Riot and the "Insurrection of the Capitalists." Intended to rally the city's wealthy Protestants to overthrow Tweed, the pamphlet claimed that the Eighth Avenue riot

Contending Visions

3

revealed once again that "the