NINE
As the Civil War ended in 1865, many of the bodies filling up cemetery plots in the capital weren’t only casualties of battle. A good number of the newly deceased were victims of cruel and often random attacks that epitomized the postwar explosion of violent crime and brutality. Murders, stabbings, and shootings became a daily occurrence,1 and rampant fighting and assaults gave the capital a well-earned reputation for mindless bloodshed and thuggery. Thieves robbed their victims in their hotels or on the streets, con artists and counterfeiters enjoyed a profitable trade, and houses of gambling and prostitution experienced a surge in popularity.2 The District turned from being the cornerstone of the Union to “a perfect Gomorrah of sin, violence, and corruption.”3
The wartime growth and military importance of the capital attracted a range of newcomers: discharged soldiers without jobs, former slaves without homes, army camp followers, vagrants, and troubled youth without any prospects at all. More than a few of these arrivals turned to crime in the absence of work or opportunity, while others came to town for the express purpose of preying on the local citizenry, whether by making a killing off them in thievery or just killing them outright. In later years, some compared the conditions in the capital to the worst corners of the Wild West, with levels of lawlessness as bad as Cripple Creek, Colorado, or Tombstone, Arizona.4
Long, Hard Beats
During the fifteen years that followed the war, Congress expanded the Metropolitan Police force to 238 men, but time and again it refused to provide adequate funding and then salted the wound by cutting officers’ salaries and their already meager benefits. In 1876 policemen went without half their full pay (six hundred dollars per year) for two months, and some of their station houses slid into such a deplorable condition that they actually collapsed.5 In later years, with the District’s growing population, only one cop patrolled the streets for every nine hundred residents, and a beat could stretch for as long as ten to fifteen miles. An 1880 police report, summing up the era, decried “the total inadequacy of the force” to cover a city that had little to no police protection on most of its streets and alleys.6 One police officer walking seven blocks to the Capitol witnessed fourteen fights along the way. Another became exhausted from the endless conflict:
Like the others, I used to spend the entire day in making arrests. As fast as I would return from taking one prisoner to the station-house I would make another arrest, and sometimes I used to leave two or three people calling “Help!” and “Police!” simply because I had my hands full and could not tend to any more. . . . I remember that one night the old Central Guard House contained seventy-one prisoners arrested within a space of six hours for disorderly conduct, fighting, shooting, &c.7
Deep in the Hole
The Metropolitan Police made countless arrests, but just because they took criminals off the street didn’t mean they ended up in jail. Many faced lenient judges or juries at trial, but just as many faced unfair or inconsistent sentences. As an example, David Barnett stole a few hundred dollars and received a year in prison, while Samuel Uber received a five-dollar fine for assault and battery.8 Anyone unlucky enough to go to jail experienced conditions nearly on par with the the Old Capitol Prison. The Washington County jail held twice the capacity for which it was designed in 1830 and stuffed up to ten men into each of its eight-by-ten-foot cells. It had a filthy jail yard and an unsanitary lack of toilets and windows. Each corridor of cells had only a single daily tub of water for washing up. The secretary of the interior himself compared it to the Black Hole of Calcutta and with good reason. Delinquent teens convicted of minor offenses went into the same cells as the worst criminals, which provided them with little rehabilitation but extensive training in other, more savage kinds of crime. They emerged in a state of “precocious villainy.”9
Elsewhere, so-called “workhouses” combined the functions of jails and poorhouses, giving those in poverty the added humiliation of having to share their living quarters with actual criminals.10 Near the Arsenal, the federal penitentiary closed during the war for conversion into a storehouse for military ordnance and ammunition.11 Although some convicts headed north to a state prison in Albany, New York,12 the closure ultimately resulted in an even greater lack of space to house local criminals, inevitably allowing them once more to take to the streets. One police board report charged that no other city in America was so “inadequately supplied with prison accommodations,” yet a congressional bill in 1864 to fund a new penitentiary failed, and many years passed before the legislature even attempted to build a new one.13
Far-Flung Duties
Congress and police superintendents made the work of already overwhelmed police officers even more arduous by piling on extraneous duties. One of the most tedious was upholding strict enforcement of liquor laws even after the war had ended and most of the soldiers—the original targets of the Provost Guard for their drinking habits—had left. Temperance advocates demanded that officials strictly control or else reject liquor licenses. The police brass responded by detailing officers to crack down on illicit saloons and tippling shops, forcing patrolmen to chase down rogue bartenders instead of thugs and murderers.14
The Metropolitan Police continued to take charge of one far-flung duty after another, no matter how far each stood from the primary goal of law enforcement. In a government town with ironically few government agencies, the police often served as the only recourse for fixing problems. The department’s annual report from 1880 provides a detailed list of some of the many tasks—or “incidentals”—performed by officers, who in many cases acted as much as repairmen, utility workers, and social service agents as enforcers of the law:
· • abandoned infants found (26)
· • broken lamps reported (174)
· • dead infants found (47)
· • dangerous holes in carriageways and sidewalks (106)
· • filthy alleys reported (67)
· • hydrants out of repair (123)
· • loads of coal weighed (1,171)
· • lodgers accommodated (7,461)
· • lost children restored to parents (195)
· • owners of insecure buildings notified (13)
· • sewers in bad condition (46)
· • trees and tree boxes broken (1,121)
· • water notices served by police (7,017)15
Age of the Swindle
With the police distracted by their ever more varied assignments, underpaid and exhausted from their labors, and outnumbered by lawbreakers, crime increased in frequency and complexity. In just the category of fraud and thievery, thousands of shady characters concocted schemes to steal goods and money from the public. While pickpockets and shoplifters were a strictly local menace, forgers, con artists, and fencers of stolen goods conducted elaborate operations across state boundaries, sometimes using aliases and disguises. Professional Criminals of America by Thomas Byrnes provides a key look at the assorted thieves in the Gilded Age with whom the urban police in America dealt:
bank burglar: the “intelligent and thoughtful rogue” who invades a bank and attacks its safe with “patience, intelligence, mechanical knowledge, industry, determination, fertility of resources, and courage—all in high degree.”
bank sneak: part of a group of bank burglars, “who stealthily steals behind the counter and robs the cash box or a bundle of bonds.”
confidence and bunco men: those who practice “the safest, pleasantest, and most amusing way for a shrewd thief to make his living,” employing all types of subterfuge, fraud, and gamesmanship “in helping themselves to other people’s money.”
forgers: falsifiers or counterfeiters “of a writing, bill, bond, will, or other document” who “prostitute their talents by imitating the handwriting and workmanship of others.”
receivers of stolen goods: middlemen thieves “extremely careful in their negotiations with professional rogues” in buying purloined “bonds, securities, diamonds or silks,” among other commodities.
sawdust men: operators of get-rich-quick schemes who solicit rubes to purchase bags of stolen or counterfeit money at a discount before switching bags and leaving them with a sack of worthless blank paper sometimes weighed down by sawdust.
sneak thieves or house thieves: “Daring and desperate rascals” known to invade homes by breaking through doors and windows, some of them housebreaking at night “in search of plunder and with masks on their faces and murder in their heart.”16
One of the most notorious operations was the “circular swindle” or illicit lottery. In this scheme, thieves mailed handbills proclaiming the easy money to be had from buying tickets to a random drawing. There was no such drawing, however, and the criminal pocketed the money, changed his or her address, and moved on to the next group of marks.17 More traditional underworld gambling also proved popular and used various methods of cheating either through stacked odds or confidence games. Gambling houses became so pervasive that an 1876 congressional investigation revealed widespread police corruption in protecting such illegal establishments, the detectives either on the payroll or receiving money under the table.18
Murder Bay to Hell’s Bottom
In an era of unprecedented corruption, the White House perhaps appropriately lay near the heart of District crime. Most police arrests, about one-quarter, came in the First Precinct,19 roughly a ten-block arc east and southeast of the White House, which included one of the District’s bleakest neighborhoods: Murder Bay. Here in 1869, a lunatic wielding a club with a glass insulator strapped to it attacked President Grant and tried to smash his head in. After police apprehended the assailant they found a loaded revolver on him.20 (Other unconventional weapons of the era included an umbrella to gouge out a man’s eye, a gas-pipe bomb meant for a judge, a “cheeser” to scourge someone’s flesh, a walking cane used by a rapist, and a “bogus infernal machine” used for God knows what.21The police sometimes responded in kind with medieval-style weaponry, in one case with a nightstick that deployed steel barbs with a turn of its handle.22)
A contraband camp had arisen in Murder Bay during and just after the war, but the area’s material conditions hadn’t improved much since then. Thick with thieves, cardsharps, and pickpockets, it stood within close, uncomfortable view of the White House, roughly bounded by 11th and 15th Streets NW, Pennsylvania Avenue, and the city canal. Murder Bay had its own main street, Ohio Avenue, which paralleled Pennsylvania Avenue to the north—though with a decidedly more dismal aspect: thick with low-rent industries like foundries and industrial works, numerous gambling halls and saloons, and the ubiquitous brothels.23 Looking back on the neighborhood’s worst years, the Washington Post described the area as a place “where life itself was frequently sacrificed on the turning of a card [and] Thieves and unprincipled men and women, as ready to cut a throat as pick a pocket, flourished and walked the streets in certain sections in open daylight.”24
The old “Island” slums stood southwest of the Capitol.
Murder Bay wasn’t even the worst of the District’s neighborhoods, though. Some of them were so fearsome that the public didn’t dare venture into them by day nor the police at night. The canal and railroad tracks cut off stretches of The Island from the rest of town and made it an expansive slum, with shanties and crowded tenements home to some of the town’s most pervasive crime.25 Bloodfield near the Navy Yard and Swampoodle north of the Capitol were equally grim, packed with gambling houses and assorted thieves and thugs.26 But the most shameful was Hell’s Bottom.
Located above the major boulevards, at the northern tip of Washington City, this down-at-heel neighborhood sat on low-lying marshy ground that bred malaria and other waterborne diseases and fostered dense criminal activity. It had evolved from a contraband camp at the close of the war to a forbidding enclave ignored by the police and left to the control of criminals preying on the predominantly black residents. In this forlorn place, “Money was scarce and whiskey was cheap.” Fights routinely turned into riots, but no police court existed to try suspects.27 It had little in the way of elementary housing or sanitation, and the local and national governments provided almost nothing in funding or services to alleviate the misery. If highly visible areas like Murder Bay suffered from dreadful crime and poverty, then of course more distant neighborhoods like Hell’s Bottom would be much worse.
Revolving Door
Not confined to just a few dangerous neighborhoods, crime existed everywhere, in areas rich and poor and practiced by criminals of a variety of looks, methods, and backgrounds. The National Archives holds several volumes of arrest books for the Metropolitan Police during the postwar era. Better than any dry statistics, they explain who these suspects were and what they were accused of doing. A few scattered violations concerned rarely enforced laws against abortion and profanity, but most of the offenses related to some form or other of stealing, drinking, and fighting—often in combination. A few of the listings are quite telling for what they reveal about the capital’s standard of law and order, including the following cases from a sample page of the arrest books, during the late summer of 1874:
August 14: Mary Adams (servant), intoxicated and disorderly
Like many of those arrested, Ms. Adams was brought in for being drunk and, we can assume, causing a spectacle or threatening someone. Her case was dismissed, possibly after she spent a night in jail to sober up.
August 14: John S. Mosby (lawyer), suspicion of dueling
Times had changed dramatically in half a century for would-be duelers as the crime drew closer to a capital offense than an “affair between gentlemen.” Mr. Mosby was held on a five thousand dollar bond to await requisition.
August 31: Tom White (thief), grand larceny
The arrest ledger lists Mr. White’s occupation as a thief, so he may have been well known to authorities. Despite being accused of a major crime, he was given only ninety days in the workhouse.
September 6: George Nickens, John Talbert, Richard Queen, Frank Bell (laborers), affray
These four were hauled into the station just before noon for fighting and received the light but not uncommon fine of five dollars each.
September 7: John T. Matthews (merchant), receiving stolen goods; Charles Kennar (servant), petit larceny; William Henry (liquor dealer), obtaining goods under false pretenses
These three suspects were booked consecutively for unrelated crimes of thievery (though the order of their arrest does suggest an air of complicity). As with so many nonviolent criminals at a time when fraud ran rampant, they were not prosecuted, marked as “nolle prosequi” in the books.
September 12: William J. Dees (schoolmaster), insanity
The ledger doesn’t reveal what led police to charge this teacher with madness, but they nonetheless arrested him and sent him to the Insane Asylum, the inevitable repository of the mentally ill.
September 14: Susan Simpkins (prostitute), assault and battery with intent to kill
Unlike the madams and prostitutes occasionally arrested in the sex trade, Ms. Simpkins was accused of a more serious crime and remanded to authorities in Virginia, most likely where the act was committed.28
Of the forty-nine suspects on this page of the ledger—arrested from August 14 to September 16, 1874—only ten faced serious charges of a stint in jail or a later court date. The thirty-nine others either had their cases dismissed or not prosecuted, spent a night in jail, or paid a small fine, usually five dollars.29 It wasn’t that almost 80 percent of these suspects were innocent or deserved only a light slap on the wrist. The beleaguered justice system simply couldn’t prosecute so many accused criminals and had to focus on the worst violators by letting lesser offenders go.
Criminal Trading Cards
The National Archives contain many vivid images of area suspects as well, from steely-eyed murderers to winsome pickpockets, in a series of cabinet cards that police once used to identify persistent wrongdoers. Mostly dating from the 1880s, these pocket-size mug shots resemble criminal trading cards, with the suspect’s image on the front and biographical details, including alleged crimes, on the back.
Police “cabinet cards” identifying alleged criminals. From left to right, starting at top left: Agostino Caliagno, known for his “false pretense.” Charles Leonard, a “suspicious character.” Pint-size pickpocket Ida Prather. William Johnson, “false pretenses.” The swindler George Gardiner. Horse thief Harry Smith. Jack Wilson, aka “Boston Charley,” a suspicious character. Isaac Vail, the very image of a confidence man.
Here we see long-forgotten figures like the portly and goofy “swindler” George Gardiner and his walrus mustache; Harry Smith, an ancient horse thief who looks barely able to steal a pencil, let alone a draft animal; the cane-bearing, top-hat-wearing Isaac Vail, a dapper confidence man; the sullen figure of pickpocket William Johnson; the surly Italian immigrant Agostino Caliagno, who “can’t speak English” but is notorious for “false pretense”; and little Ida Prather, a petty thief only five-foot, four-inches tall but who “carries herself erect.” Numerous figures are listed as “suspicious character,” a catchall term for criminals clearly up to something or otherwise familiar and notorious to law enforcement. Some of them do indeed look suspicious, especially Charles Leonard with his “long thin fingers” and freakish eyeglasses and Jack Wilson, aka “Boston Charley,” with a face like an Old Testament prophet.30
Especially telling is the line for “Color” on the back of the cards. For most African Americans, it records a highly specific shade. Some of the descriptors are quite inventive and include anything from “bright yellow,” “copper,” and “dark copper mulatto” to “dark ginger” and “gingerbread.”31 Such adjectives, for all their vagueness today, could be useful to nineteenth-century police in recognizing a suspect, but of course no comparable descriptions exist for Caucasian suspects, such as “milky,” “eggshell,” or “ivory.” Instead, the line simply remains blank.
Racial Conflict Redux
The majority of suspects during the war were either Irish immigrants or African Americans, but, as the years went on and the number of black residents increased in the capital, so too did their arrests, up to half of all District arrests in 1888.32 Statistically black crime was no greater than white crime, but African Americans received most of the blame, especially when Reconstruction was winding down and segregation and Jim Crow laws were increasing. The Washington Post even blamed blacks for a “reign of terror” involving murder, rape, thievery, and arson, seeing them as the primary culprits for all crime in the capital.33
In fact, blacks more often fell victim to crime than perpetrated it. Violent criminals attacked them in their own neighborhoods knowing that police would turn a blind eye. Angry mobs still targeted them even years after the abolition of slavery and the Black Code. In one example, in the summer of 1865—after the war had ended—the soldiers of the army’s 20th corps descended upon blacks on The Island. After guzzling “bad whiskey,” smashing doors and windows, and assaulting citizens, the soldiers had free rein to destroy as much of the slum as they wanted until a different group of soldiers interceded and arrested them.34 Four years later, almost to the day, another mob attacked black voters on Election Day. The police almost quelled the disturbance, but soon the crowd swelled and erupted in an antipolice riot, hurling rocks and wielding sticks at officers until the cops fired on them. The only person killed in the melee was black.35
A New Class of Officers
Despite police inability to protect African Americans from the fury of racist mobs or from opportunistic criminals in their neighborhoods,36 one point had changed. Blacks had joined the force itself. A month after the 1869 Election Day riot, the Metropolitan Police swore in its first black officers, Charles Tillman and Calvin Caruthers.37 However noble the move may have seemed, it had less to do with the open-mindedness of local officials than with the difficulty that white officers had in patrolling minority neighborhoods and the need to find any policemen who could.
The new class of officers faced great hostility at times. Many residents in minority districts—who of course had reason to distrust all police—didn’t accept them. The amount of crime in their precincts was overwhelming, and newspapers and public officials chastised them for being too lenient when they arrested black suspects and for being too firm when they arrested white ones. Within the department, they faced discrimination from their peers, rarely received promotions, and sometimes were forced to quit the force altogether.38
An early group photo of Metropolitan Police, including several black officers.
Nonetheless, despite these drawbacks and challenges, it was a significant step that African Americans entered the force. Beginning in 1869, their presence as enforcers of the law dramatically reversed the grim situation of just a decade earlier, when the Auxiliary Guard rounded up blacks after dark and whipped them when they broke the rules or were thought to be disobedient. African Americans had become agents of executive authority, not just objects of it, and were expanding their roles beyond the servants, cooks, drivers, and laborers of the prewar years. That they met strong, often violent opposition on the streets and hostility within the department was perhaps inevitable, but their status as members of the police force—an arm of the national government—ensured that they had achieved a small but critical foothold on power in the capital.
Indeed, the hiring of blacks for the police force and the federal government’s control of that force gave a clear sign that the old Washington City was changing. The war had introduced the most dramatic transformations—the expulsion of the pro-slavery elite, the rise of Republican power, the martial efficiency—but the threat of backsliding remained. At any time, the city could slip back into the shadows of a poor, benighted village underfunded by Congress and ignored by national politicians. The creation of the Metropolitan Police attempted to push the changes forward as these officers of the law, with all their thankless duties, tried to remake the capital into a modern, functional city, even as they patrolled a landscape almost feudal in its violence and poverty.