Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (9 page)

But the cemetery also memorialized the violence repeatedly meted out to New York’s black population. In both the Maiden Lane insurrection of 1712 and the Negro Plot of 1741, blacks accused of conspiracy were publicly executed on the Commons adjacent to the burial ground—hanged or burned at the stake. In 1741, two of the dead bodies were chained to posts on a hill overlooking the ground. The conspirators were then buried in the cemetery. Thus, the burial ground served as a cautionary reminder of the punishment awaiting blacks who ran afoul of those who so rigidly controlled their lives. Writing at the end of the
nineteenth century, white historian Frank Moss understood with amazing sensitivity just how this spot embodied the city’s collective memories of racial violence (although he erroneously insisted that such violence was a thing of the past): “The imagination need not be excessively vivid, when, in going through this district, amid its present scenes of wretchedness and misery, we almost hear the death cries of the culprits and the horrible imprecations of the spectators, who gathered in large numbers to witness the tortures of the condemned wretches.”
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Later incidents of violence further undermined the sacred nature of the Negroes Burial Ground. In 1788, black families were obliged to petition city authorities to stop medical students from stealing corpses from the graves of loved ones and carrying away bodies “without respect to age or sex, mangle their flesh out of a wanton curiosity and then expose it to beasts and birds.” Predictably, their pleas went ignored until the student “resurrectionists” began digging up bodies in the Trinity Church cemetery. White New Yorkers then took to the streets in what became known as the Doctors Riot. This time, the authorities listened. The state legislature passed an act banning “the Odious Practice of Digging up and Removing, for the Purpose of Dissection, Dead Bodies Interred in Cemeteries or Burial Places.”
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The demise of the Negroes Burial Ground in 1795 could only have been devastating to the city’s black community. But the men who reclaimed the land as personal property were undoubtedly indifferent to the fact that the bones of a people’s ancestors lay buried there. They were interested only in making money—lots of it. In this, all three Lorillard brothers were spectacularly successful. The first to die, George, left an estate valued at over two million dollars. At his death, Peter was worth many millions more; it was said that he was the first man to whom the term “millionaire” was applied. The brothers’ wealth—and their means of obtaining it—occasioned vitriolic comments. When Peter died, former New York mayor Philip Hone wrote in his diary: “He was the last of the three brothers of that name, himself the eldest—Peter, George, and Jacob—all rich men; he the richest. … He led people by the nose for the best part of a century, and made his enormous fortune by giving them that to chew which they could not swallow.” Even more caustically, one of New York’s leading society figures, George Templeton
Strong, observed: “How many cubic miles of smoke and gallons of colored saliva are embodied in the immense fortune that was his last week.”
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The lots that George Lorillard sold or rented to black New Yorkers on Collect Street were hardly choice property. Quite the contrary. Not only was the land poor: in the process of enriching themselves, the Lorillards and their ilk had created a host of environmental problems that affected all New Yorkers—black and white, rich and poor, but most especially those of little means.

Much of Manhattan’s land was low lying. Drainage was inadequate when rains were heavy, so lots situated below street level became “deep sunk holes, the receptacles of water in the rainy seasons, and the source of many unwholesome and noxious stenches.” Human action further degraded the environment. Sewers were open and became easily clogged. Privies overflowed, emitting nauseating odors. Garbage, consisting of shells, ashes, offal, manure, human excrement, and spoiled food such as putrid meat and dead fish, piled up in the streets and went uncollected for days. In the warm weather these garbage mounds attracted swarms of flies and the odor could be smelled blocks away. The city hired cartmen to remove the garbage, but their work was spotty. They often took the manure, which they could sell at profit, and left the rest. Consequently, many New Yorkers kept up the old practice of allowing hogs to roam the streets to scavenge for garbage. But hogs added to the already foul street odors, rooted up pavements, knocked over carriages, and tried to eat children. Even deaths could not solve matters. Dead animals were simply left on the streets alongside the garbage. One citizen sarcastically wrote about how he had come across “dead horses, dogs, cats, and other dead animals lying about in such abundance as if the inhabitants accounted the stench arising from putrid carcasses a delicious perfume.”
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The activities of merchants and tradesmen compounded these wretched conditions. Those working in the so-called obnoxious trades
were responsible for the many “nuisances” that plagued the city. Among these were the offal and entrails discarded by butchers and fishmongers into the streets as well as the industrial waste created by brewers, distillers, dyers, and soap makers. Most obnoxious of all were the tanneries that, like Jacob Lorillard’s, were located in the Swamp. A contemporary described the area encompassing Vandewater, Rose, and Jacob Streets as “one vast tan-yard.” The vats of standing water attracted mosquitoes, the mounds of uncured skins emitted “noisome smells,” and the tanning pits risked contaminating water from wells.
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The situation of Collect Street, built on what had once been Collect Pond, was particularly appalling. In earlier days many New Yorkers had claimed that “there was no more beautiful spot on the lower island.” But carelessness quickly led to its pollution. One disgusted citizen wrote an open letter to the
New York Journal
in which he complained: “It’s like a fair every day with whites, and blacks, washing their cloths blankets and things too nauseous to mention; all their sudds and filth are emptied into this pond, besides dead dogs, cats, etc. thrown in daily, and no doubt, many buckets [of bodily waste] from that quarter of town.” Some even went so far as to claim that the bodies of murder victims were dumped in it.
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The city finally decided to take action and recommended that the Collect be filled in. Yet in 1812, a grand jury still found “much to complain of; besides great quantities of stagnant water it seems to be made the common place of deposit of dead animals & filth of all kinds, where they are left to corrupt the air and endanger the health of the City.” Despite these warnings, the city proceeded to sell off lots in and around the Collect on which buildings soon arose. Many years later, a newspaper commentator assessed the social evil created by this “made ground”:

This will for ever remain of a very porous nature, and the exhalations arising from putrid matter collected in such places, must consequently be a continual annoyance to the inhabitants, and a prolific source of disease. All these things show how extremely improper, nay, how utterly unjustifiable, was the policy which allowed the entire ground to be covered
with buildings, without the least regard to future consequences, without taking into consideration the health and comfort of a numerous population thus huddled together.

In conclusion, he placed full blame on the “avarice” of a “certain class of people.”
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It’s little wonder that in the mid-1820s George Lorillard successfully petitioned to have the street renamed Centre Street, hoping to erase the sad history of Collect Pond.

As the newspaper commentator noted, New York was fertile breeding ground for disease. In addition to the constant presence of tuberculosis and venereal disease, epidemics of yellow fever plagued the city in the decades after the revolutionary war; later years would bring cholera. The worst outbreaks of yellow fever occurred during the summer months of 1795, 1798, 1805, 1819, 1820, and 1822. In 1798, 714 people were reported dead; in 1805 the number declined to 270, and then to 166 in 1822. Those who took sick came down with a fever and suffered from related symptoms such as nausea, clamminess, headache, weak pulse, and a yellowish cast that covered their skin. They often died within the day, sometimes within hours, of the onset of the disease.
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Although it seems obvious to us that environment and lack of sanitation were at the root of epidemics like yellow fever, the debate over their causes raged among New York’s doctors, health officials, and citizens. In the colonial period, most New Yorkers saw disease as a form of divine intervention over which they had no control. By the following century, they had come to associate disease with human behavior, moral or immoral, and believed that individuals were responsible for their own personal health. Such attitudes worked against New York’s most vulnerable population, namely the poor, both black and white. They inhabited the lowest lying land, including the newly made ground. They lived crowded together in narrow streets filled with standing water, contaminated by uncollected garbage and open sewers, and lacking free circulation
of air. They huddled together in ramshackle dwellings, several families often occupying a single structure. The more fortunate lived on the upper floors, the less fortunate in cellars. Both areas, but especially the cellars, suffered from dampness and poor ventilation.
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New York health officials began speculating that perhaps disease was caused by negative environmental conditions, infecting individuals who then passed it on to others. They determined to pass laws regulating the sanitary conditions of the city. Quarantine had long been a favored method of control, but now increased attention was devoted to sanitation. The Common Council passed ordinance after ordinance to take care of “nuisances,” problems posed among others by “deep damp cellars and filthy sunken yards; unfinished water lots; public slips; sinks and privies; burial grounds; narrow streets; sailors boarding houses and tippling houses; the digging up of made ground; putrid substances, whether animal or vegetable; water.”
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Health officials acknowledged that commerce and speculation were the life blood of the city. So they tried to find ways to prevent disease “without interfering with the privileges of the citizen, the disposition of private property, and with the domestic economy.” Despite these concessions, New York’s citizens, especially its merchant class, protested the efforts to place their public affairs—commerce, housing, public health, and so on—under increased regulation. They complained about much of the new legislation, arguing that quarantine was economically too costly and that preventive sanitation methods interfered with their property rights.
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True to their class interests, the Lorillard brothers resisted the new public health regulations, despite the fact that they were among those responsible for implementing them and setting an example to the rest of the citizenry. Although they were not prominent municipal leaders, they did participate in city governance, Peter as a fireman and assessor, Jacob as assistant alderman and then as member of the Common Council. It was there that he found himself in the rather uncomfortable position of having to consider legislation that went against his interests, those of his brothers, and those of New York’s business community.

The brothers did not always get what they wanted. With steady
regularity, the Common Council demanded that all three Lorillards correct “sundry nuisances” on the properties they leased or owned. These ranged from letting a privy overflow to allowing garbage to pile up to storing leather hides during the summer months.

But the brothers often got just what they wanted. All three actively pushed to build up Lower Manhattan in order to increase the value of their property and businesses. More often than not, they used their considerable muscle to cajole the Common Council into making improvements that would benefit them—getting sewers installed, water granted, lots filled in, crosswalks built, streets paved.
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Men like the Lorillards were clearly not sufficiently concerned about the fate of less fortunate New Yorkers to change their business practices. Blacks especially were vulnerable to disease, dying in numbers disproportionate to their presence in the city. In 1821 they represented 15.5 percent of total deaths, although they accounted for only about 8 percent of the city’s population. By 1825 their death rate was three times as high as that of whites. It was commonly believed that blacks suffered to a greater extent from respiratory illnesses but were more resistant to yellow fever and malaria. A report on the 1820 yellow fever epidemic suggests otherwise. It noted that in one single street 14 out of 48 blacks, all of whom lived in cellars, died, whereas not one of the 120 whites living in the apartments above contracted the disease.
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It’s hardly surprising that so many men of New York’s black elite—Peter Guignon and Philip White among them—would choose professions that would enable them to alleviate their community’s suffering.

Yet as a large and highly visible segment of the city’s poor, blacks were held most responsible for the presence of disease in the city. White New Yorkers accused blacks of spreading contagion and compromising the health of all by indulging in risky behavior such as drunkenness and sexual promiscuity. But they readily overlooked the fact that it was blacks who, attracted by the high wages, did much of the street sanitation. In 1800, blacks took on the task of cleaning out all privy pits and sinks on the East Side. Exposing themselves “to the effluvia of human ordure,” they came down with such symptoms as “catarrhs and redness of eyes, nausea, vomiting, pains in the belly, bloody stools, and fevers.”
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