Violence

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VIOLENCE

In the years following the American Revolution, society in regions other than the frontier became more violent as a result of several factors. One underlying reason for increasing violence was the increasing overall population of the new nation, from 3 million in 1790 to 31 million in 1860; major population growth especially affected cities, such as New York, which grew from 40,000 inhabitants in 1790 to nearly 1 million by 1860. An increasing disparity between the rich and the poor also contributed to a spike in violence, as did ethnic and religious tensions among foreigners, immigrants (especially Irish Roman Catholics), and more established Protestant groups. Racial tensions were on the rise, as whites feared black competition for jobs, interracial marriage, and the specter of social equality, with blacks retaliating. Another factor was the decline of a paternalistic system of labor; masters now lived with or in close proximity to servants, laborers, and apprentices, thereby weakening workers' sense of their place in an organic social order. As a consequence of changes in the social order, separate upper-, middle-, and working-class cultures arose with separate notions of morality, along with an increasing individualism that gave ordinary folk confidence in their own judgment and self-worth. Thus government's role was altered from an active guardian of the common good, achieved through state regulation to redress injustice and solve economic problems, to a supposedly impartial arbiter that merely existed to protect property and preserve order.

taxes and autonomy

The three most significant episodes of American violence in the late eighteenth century reflected the old colonial notion of corporate violence, which had prevailed before and leading up to the Revolution. In Shays's Rebellion (1787) in Massachusetts, and the Whiskey Rebellion (1794) and Fries's Rebellion (1799) in Pennsylvania, respectable members of aggrieved communities banded together, invoked the principles of the Revolution concerning self-taxation and local autonomy, and staged carefully limited violence against outsiders who threatened to foreclose on their estates or otherwise punish them for nonpayment of taxes. The community members involved in these actions considered themselves "the people" assembled against unjust grievances; only those who suppressed them called them rebels. A small number of men were killed or punished severely as a result of these cases of tax resistance.

ethnic and racial violence

In the early nineteenth century, cities were the most frequent sites of large-scale violence, as novels such as Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800) and Herman Melville's Pierre (1852) attest. There men of all classes representing different ethnic groups lived side-by-side and competed for jobs, political power, and prestige while seeking to demonstrate their masculinity and patriotism in a crowded arena. Some riots were limited to the working class, as when American sailors brawled with Spanish sailors (Philadelphia, 1804) and French sailors (Philadelphia, 1806; Charleston, 1811; Savannah, 1811; New York, 1812; Norfolk, 1813; and New Orleans, 1817—all but the Philadelphia fights leading to deaths). Rioting against Roman Catholic foreigners and immigrants, and against blacks, occurred most frequently; mobs were usually composed of all classes, led by "gentlemen of property and standing" who went unpunished. In 1815 whites attacked blacks opening a new house of worship in Philadelphia, burning the building, and in 1819 they attacked blacks daring to celebrate Independence Day in New York City. White crowds chased blacks en masse out of the cities of Providence, Rhode Island, in 1824, and Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1829.

The worst of these ethnic and racial riots, however, occurred in the 1830s, after large numbers of Irish Catholics arrived in the cities and abolitionists began to push for immediate emancipation of slaves. Crowds opposed to Irish immigrants burned the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts (1834), believing the nuns there kidnapped Protestant girls and threatened to kill them if they did not become Catholics. That same year other crowds devastated New York's and Philadelphia's black communities; burned Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Hall, built by abolitionists to hold interracial meetings (1838); and murdered the abolitionist newspaper publisher Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois (1839). The deadliest ethnic riots occurred in the 1850s, when the Democratic Party, which included many Roman Catholics, clashed with the nativist Know-Nothings, who opposed all immigration, during several elections. The worst occurred in Baltimore in 1856, leaving from 8 to 17 dead and from 64 to 150 wounded. Another major ethnic riot, however, was anti-British; in New York City in 1849, partisans of the American actor Edwin Forrest tore down the Astor Place Opera House where the British actor William Macready was performing; 22 people died and at least 48 were wounded. Baltimore was also the scene of the bloodiest riot during the economic depression of the 1830s: the houses of the mayor and several directors of the Bank of Maryland were destroyed, and order was restored only when volunteers fired into the crowd.

Unlike the spikes and troughs of urban violence and violence between whites, the violence associated with slavery in the early Republic was relatively constant. Violence was integral to the slave system, from the usual practice of whipping disobedient slaves to executing rebels and runaways in frequently horrific ways. Whites on slave patrol policed the South; federal marshals pursued runaways into free states, where they sometimes met with violent resistance from blacks, as in Boston (1819), York, Pennsylvania (1825), and Philadelphia (1835), and, on at least one occasion, death, as in Christiana, Pennsylvania (1851). Slave rebellions in the United States were rare; in the larger West Indies islands and South America, by contrast, the smaller white population and the availability of large, unsettled areas facilitated escape by slaves who formed autonomous Maroon communities. The only rebellions involving large numbers of blacks in the United States were Gabriel's Rebellion (1800) and Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831), both in Virginia, and the Vesey Rebellion (1822) in Charleston, South Carolina. Both Gabriel and Denmark Vesey were betrayed by conspiracy; only Turner's rebellion resulted in white deaths. White violence against blacks was punished on rare occasions when whites openly and outrageously offended communal standards for the treatment of slaves or free blacks.

indian policy

The rules of civilized warfare that the United States, France, and Britain generally practiced toward one another were suspended in dealings with Indians. By the American Revolution, Indians had generally been defined collectively as a distinct (red) race that was temperamentally uncivilized and hostile. The massacre of peaceful Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten in 1782 in present-day Ohio by Revolutionary militia was a taste of the forthcoming century. Even those who wished to protect the Indians, such as Thomas Jefferson, given their belief that frontier expansion was inevitable and government's role limited, could only envision their forcible removal to land too undesirable and distant for whites to covet.

domestic violence

In the antebellum period states and municipalities instituted reforms regarding domestic violence. Influenced by Victorian notions that women were the proper guardians of the home and possessed a nature morally superior to men, by 1850 nineteen states allowed divorce on grounds of cruelty. The intertwined temperance and women's movements were crucial in calling attention to the way drunken husbands abused wives and children. New York was the first city to build an institution to protect abused children in 1825, and by the 1850s most states had done so. But in general beating was considered a masculine prerogative to correct unruly wives and children, and prosecutions were successful only when women's lives or physical well-being were threatened. In schools, too, physical punishment of students was reported in three-quarters of early-nineteenth-century autobiographies.

punishment of criminals

Physical violence in the punishment of criminals decreased in the early Republic, although arguably at the expense of mental torment. Extended periods of imprisonment in penitentiaries and reformatories to induce social conformity rather than whipping or public humiliation became the standard punishments for noncapital crimes. The Eastern State Penitentiary, founded in Philadelphia, which substituted silent labor in solitary confinement, and New York's prison at Auburn, where convicts worked in closely supervised teams, were pioneering institutions. Public execution of criminals declined, with the death penalty carried out more frequently behind prison walls: authorities found that rather than serving as warnings against vice, the open-air spectacles encouraged merriment, riot, and further crime.

a violent society?

Society celebrated violence in other ways. Upperclass enemies, especially but not exclusively in the South, fought duels if they believed their honor was insulted. Although in most cases seconds worked out an amicable accord, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in 1804 and the confrontation between James Stark and Philip Minis in Savannah in 1832, which resulted in Stark's death, were only two of hundreds of incidents that ended fatally. Unlike men in Europe, much of the free male population in the United States owned guns and belonged to voluntary military societies once the required colonial militia system faded. Masculinity was demonstrated through active participation in homosocial associations such as saloons, fire companies, political parties, and the Masons and other fraternal orders. The outer limit of these associations were filibustering expeditions where men organized, successfully in some instances (Florida, 1819; Texas, 1836; Nicaragua, 1855) to take over territories in Latin America, for which they were cheered rather than punished. Although illegal and opposed by reformers and genteel members of the elite, bare-knuckles prizefighting, along with cock- and dog-fighting and bearbaiting, remained popular working-class activities. Unlike the regulated prizefights of the late nineteenth century instituted by a progressive elite seeking to preserve society's masculine, aggressive qualities, those before the Civil War had few rules and no time limits, and went on until losers were dead, unconscious, or had lost an eye or an ear.

Was the early Republic a violent society? In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer and observer of American ways, reported that he could travel through large stretches of America between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River in perfect safety. Nevertheless, in cities and families, on plantations and in schools, in popular culture and the treatment of prisoners and Native Americans, violence permeated American society.

bibliography

Cunliffe, Marcus. Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865. New York: Free Press, 1973.

Daniels, Christine, and Michael V. Kennedy, eds. Over the Threshold: Intimate Violence in Early America. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Franklin, John Hope. The Militant South: 1800–1861. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Freeman, Joanne B. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.

Gilje, Paul A. Rioting in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Hofstadter, Richard, and Michael Wallace, eds. American Violence: A Documentary History. New York: Knopf, 1970.

Masur, Louis P. Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Pleck, Elizabeth. Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Rothman, David J. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, rev. ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990.

Slaughter, Thomas. "Crowds in Early America: Reflections and New Directions." Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 115 (1991): 3–34.

William Pencak

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation