Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (44 page)

The
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
and the
Brooklyn Daily Times
along with the
New York Tribune
and the
New York Times
gave extensive coverage to these riots. They couldn’t all agree on the single event that ignited the violence, but they reported assiduously on the rumors that abounded, all of which raised the usual bugaboos about blacks (and black men in particular): sex, manhood, economic competition, residential integration, and the like. Some claimed that a group of black men had insulted a white woman, others that a black man had bested an Irishman in a fight, “a source of humiliation too grievous to endure”; still others insisted that blacks were willing to do factory work at lower wages than whites or that they were about to move into white neighborhoods; finally, it was noised about that Democratic politicians had incited the Irish to violence.
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What is certain is that on Monday, August 4, a mob of Irishmen attacked Thomas Watson’s tobacco factory, located at the foot of Sedgwick Street in South Brooklyn and adjacent to another factory owned by one of Peter Lorillard’s sons, Jacob, who had followed his father in business. Both factories had been operating for about eight or nine years. Adopting his father’s progressive racial employment practices, Jacob Lorillard hired both white and black workers. Still working in
the Manhattan factory, Peter Ray was not among them, but as a longtime employee he had perhaps recommended some of the black workers to young Jacob. Watson also hired blacks, and the newspapers specified that he had preempted any potential racial conflict in his factory by placing white employees under a white foreman and blacks under a black man. Neither employer had had any problems. When rumors of a riot spread on Monday morning, Watson, Lorillard, and a third tobacco merchant named Charles Kelsey went to Police Headquarters to ask for protection and were promised it. Lorillard’s foreman William Egner, whose name suggests Germanic origins, took precautions. He sent his black employees home, and then bolted the doors and windows to the factory. Watson’s black foreman was not so prescient. While white employees who lived nearby went home for lunch, black workers from more distant neighborhoods remained on the premises.

That’s when trouble struck. About fifty to seventy-five Irishmen congregated in front of Watson’s factory. They threw stones and bricks into the building, attacked their victims with pitchforks, and set fire to the building, screaming, “fire the buildings—burn out the d—d niggers.”
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The defenseless blacks—about five men and twenty women and children—retreated to the second floor loft, where they were eventually rescued. At the end of the day, one black man had been beaten and a few of the officers bruised. Watson was forced to close his factory, leaving his workers unemployed. Lorillard’s black employees were too afraid to return to work. If nothing else, blacks paid a heavy economic penalty.

The subsequent court proceedings detailed in Brooklyn newspapers raise many questions. Who were the police helping, the attackers or the attacked? Amazingly, Brooklyn’s superintendent of police charged his own officers with negligence, but at the court hearing Lorillard, Watson, and Kelsey all came to their defense and praised their efforts. The charges against them were dismissed.

The men accused of rioting had good Irish names: Keenan, Flood, Toole, Spaulding, Maher, Daly, Sullivan, and the like. Were they rioters or not? The lawyer for one of the ringleaders, Patrick Keenan, requested that his client be tried separately. But the judge refused, noting that by law it takes at least three to riot and thus the charge of rioting would
no longer apply to Keenan. Could the rioters be accused of assault and battery? A lawyer maintained that they could not, arguing that these specific charges had not been included in the complaint. He was overruled.
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The trial was postponed repeatedly. Newspapers gradually lost interest and all coverage stopped around August 19. I haven’t been able to locate any court records, so I don’t know the outcome of the trial. I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing came of it.

By and large the newspapers sided with the black victims, undoubtedly preferring their helplessness to the power of a mob that could not be controlled. They attributed the riot to the brutish nature of the Irish and their unremitting hostility toward blacks due in large part to fears of economic competition. But scrolling through the newspapers on microfilm, I soon realized there were other issues at stake. Next to an article on the riot in the August 6 issue of the
Brooklyn Daily Times
I found a column titled “The ‘Drafting’ Panic.” Dripping with heavy sarcasm, the author castigated “the weak-kneed gentry” who rushed to the City Clerk’s Office to present their affidavits for exemption from military service. “Great, fat, hulking fellows,” he mocked, “make affadavit that they are so weak in the knees that they can’t walk. One has the gout, and another rheumatism. This man has a rupture and that one has lumbago. In short everybody who is badly frightened at the idea of ‘having to face the music’ is affected, if you will believe him, with some grievous malady.”
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Privileged gentry, Irish poor, black victims—these were the three elements that would combine and explode across Manhattan one year later.

The mob attack on the Watson and Lorillard tobacco factories needs to be placed in the larger political context of the pro- and antislavery agitation that soon boiled over into civil war. Like Manhattan, Brooklyn was a hotbed of abolitionist and equal rights agitation. In addition to black activists like Peter Williams Ray, there were white abolitionists
like Arthur and Lewis Tappan who had fled across the river to Brooklyn Heights after the New York riots in 1834 to continue their antislavery agitation.

But the greatest rabble-rouser of all was Henry Ward Beecher, who had moved to Brooklyn in 1847 to become minister of the Congregationalist Plymouth Church. Beecher’s politics were consistently radical and his church was virtually synonymous with abolition, attracting Brooklyn worshipers but also churchgoers from Manhattan who crossed the East River on “Beecher’s ferry” on Sundays. An eloquent speaker, Beecher electrified his audiences with his radical oratory as he condemned “Slave Power,” called for immediate emancipation, and backed disunion as a last resort. As a Lincoln man, he prevailed on the presidential candidate to visit his church. He later gave sermons celebrating Lincoln’s election, welcoming the advent of civil war, and calling for the admission of black soldiers into the Union army.
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Of all the events held at Plymouth Church, the most notorious were Beecher’s slave auctions. As a stop on the Underground Railroad, the church sheltered many fugitive slaves. In the 1850s, Beecher hit on the device of raising money to buy freedom for slaves by holding mock auctions at the church. In response, white racists threatened to “clean out the damned abolition nest at Plymouth Church.”
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So racial animosity in Brooklyn was the norm, not the exception, and the tobacco factory riot of 1862 inevitably created a ripple effect. The
Brooklyn Daily Times
reported that a few days after the violence two black women walking on Court Street were accosted by two young and “partially intoxicated” Irishmen who abused them “using violent and indecent language.” They were promptly arrested. Rumors also spread that a “large body of Irishmen” were planning an attack on Weeksville to “clean the niggers out.” Still “smarting under a suspicion of having been caught napping” during the riot, the police came out in full force to protect Weeksville.
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Nothing untoward occurred.

A year later, in their coverage of the draft riots the New York newspapers intimated that many black New Yorkers sought safety in Brooklyn. It’s certainly true that a number did flee across the East River, but I’m not sure how much of a safe haven Brooklyn proved to be. The
river was not exactly an impenetrable border. Trouble-minded Brook-lynites crossed to New York to take part in the rioting while looters from New York fled to Brooklyn with the merchandise they had stolen from Brooks Brothers and other stores. In Brooklyn itself, the absence of the police, who were in New York helping to quell the riot, was an open invitation to violence. An angry crowd of some two hundred people set fire to two grain elevators in the Atlantic Avenue basin. Mobs assaulted black individuals and homes in nearby East Warren Street and a little farther away around Prospect Street. Fearing for their lives, some blacks sought shelter in police precincts. Others took refuge in Weeksville. When rumors spread that the area was about to be attacked, members of the community organized for armed resistance. The mob never materialized, but when rumors still persisted the next day, frightened Weeksville residents packed up their belongings and left. The safest place of all was undoubtedly Williamsburgh, where members of a German society protected hundreds of blacks in the Turn Verein Hall.
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At the exact same moment of the tobacco factory riots, Peter Guignon and Peter Ray were being subjected to another form of racial violence, which came, not from the lowly Irish, but from elite whites, and not as a physical assault but, as in John DeGrasse’s case, as an attack on their honor as professional men.

When I returned to reread the page of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
where I had found the first reference to the tobacco factory riot, my eyes unexpectedly caught the name of Dr. Peter W. Ray. The headline of the article read: “The Alleged Abortion Case in the Eastern District.” Peter Guignon’s brother-in-law was being charged with the death of a patient as a result of a botched abortion! Finding the article was once again dumb luck. But I wondered whether the presence of the two news items on the same page was just coincidence or whether there was a link between them.

The
Eagle, Brooklyn Daily Times, Brooklyn News
, and to a more limited
extent the
New York Tribune
covered the case in all its gory detail. According to their reports, Ray had a patient named Mary Burns who gave the following statement as she lay bleeding to death:

I do not know my age; my child was born on Monday; Dr. Ray attended me, and some days previous to the birth of the child performed an operation on me with an instrument; I cannot describe the instrument because the Doctor did not let me see it; I paid him four dollars for this operation, and he did it for the purpose of effecting an abortion; he never produced an abortion on me before; I went to him without being directed by any third party; Dr. Ray has called on me since he performed the operation; he furnished me with medicine for the purpose of producing an abortion previous to the operation; I took six bottles at six and sixpence per bottle, but it did not have the desired effect; the operation was performed in Dr. Ray’s office; the colored Doctor is the one I mean, and he lives in South 2d street, corner of Eleventh. The child is now in the out-house where I threw it; I know that I am in a dangerous condition, and have no hope of getting well, and knowing this, the statements I now make are correct.
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Burns died a few days later. In confirmation of part of her story, an empty bottle was found in her room labeled “Put up by Dr. P. W. Ray for Mary Burns; June 18; to be taken three times a day; price six and sixpence.” Night scavengers employed by the city discovered the infant’s body in the rear of the South Third Street house where Burns lived as a servant. Coroner Murphy (note the Irish last name) decided to hold an inquest into the death of Mary and her baby. The proceedings were eerily similar to DeGrasse’s court-martial.

Ray steadfastly maintained that he could not remember any patient by the name of Mary Burns; reading through the lines, it’s evident that she was an unmarried white woman of Irish or maybe Scottish extraction, whom the newspapers guessed to be about forty years old. In an ironic twist on invisibility, it was now the black doctor who could
not distinguish between the many white female patients with whom he came into contact. For reasons not stated, Ray was not allowed to testify in his own defense. So what we have is the testimony of six men—four white doctors, Cornelius Schapps, L. M. Palmer, O. H. Smith, and Nelson L. North, and two colored men, Peter Guignon and his clerk, George E. Francis. Their accounts are confusing, not to say contradictory, as were the circumstances surrounding the case.

Cornelius Schapps was the first witness. He testified that he had performed the postmortem exam, and found the body to be that of a healthy woman who had hemorrhaged to death after delivering a child. In his opinion, the woman’s excessive flow of blood was a result of premature labor having been provoked by “mechanical means”—not drugs—in a futile attempt to save the mother’s life. According to his terminology, this constituted an abortion. The other three doctors offered a different version of events, testifying that they saw no evidence of an abortion having been performed either by mechanical means or by drugs. Hence, they concluded, Mary Burns had bled to death as a result of a miscarriage. Dr. Palmer further stated that he had attended the deceased woman several times for uterine hemorrhage and had prescribed medications, suggesting the possibility of a chronic condition. Dr. Smith gave hearsay testimony that a servant girl employed in the same family had told him Mary Burns had had a miscarriage. But all three doctors acknowledged that they could not tell whether an abortion had been performed or not. “I had no means whatever of knowing the cause,” Dr. Smith admitted; “a skilled man could produce an abortion without leaving any scars and a knife might have been introduced several times. … I do not know that an abortion produced by drugs could be detected by examining the uterus; indeed, I do not know any drugs in the world that will produce miscarriage with any celerity.”
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