New York City in the mid 1800s was run by violent gangs, corrupt politicians, and grifting opportunists who operated with no fear of punishment. It was like a powder keg ready to blow, and all it took to light the fuse, and change the future of law enforcement, was a performance of Shakespeare.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What events led to the Shakespeare Riot?
What's past is prologue. William Shakespeare wrote that line more than 400 years ago for his play, The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1. People have set it on stage and off for nearly half a millennia. It means that the events of the past always set the stage for the future. It's an enduring statement that grows more relevant by the day.
Back in the mid-1800s, New York City was not the international hub of commerce, arts, media, and finance that it is today. It was a place where violent gangs and corrupt political figures ran the city out in the open with no fear of the law.
This is the story of a time when New York City was a powder keg ready to blow, and a simple performance of Shakespeare was all it took to light the fuse and blow up the power dynamics of America. On today's episode, The Shakespeare Riot. This is a twist of history. It's March of 1849 in the Five Points neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York, one of the most notorious slums in the United States.
Chapter 2: Who was John Moore and what was his life like in Five Points?
An Irish immigrant in his early 20s named John Moore walks down the street as the sun sets, and he feels his boots sinking into the ground. Five Points was built on a drained pond, but something must have gone wrong along the way, because water and waste bubble up through the ground constantly. The streets are wet and muddy and the stench is crippling to anyone who isn't used to it.
John lives here though, so he continues down the street oblivious to the smell. As he walks, everyone he passes nervously smiles and nods, because John's a known member of the 40 Thieves, one of the oldest and most powerful Irish street gangs in Five Points. John tips his cap to them and walks past a row of tenement houses, wooden or brick buildings that offer cheap apartments.
But most of these apartments are windowless, dirt floor rooms packed tight with entire families of Irish immigrants. Five Points got its name because it sprung up around a spot where several streets intersect to form Five Points in the road.
But outsiders who visit, including famous writers like Charles Dickens and Walt Whitman, don't talk about this intersection like it's just the center of a poor New York neighborhood. Instead, they describe it like it's the gate to hell. And they decry politicians and wealthy business leaders in the city for allowing fellow New Yorkers to live in such terrible conditions.
But for John and many other young people, Five Points is home, and as run down as it might be, they think it has plenty to offer. John hears shouts and laughter coming from a building on the street, and his face lights up. This is his favorite saloon that sells cheap liquor. He's been working all day, digging roads and ditches in wealthier parts of the city.
The work is brutal, but it puts a little money in his pocket and, tonight, he's ready to spend it. John walks into the saloon and amidst the shouting and laughing, he hears a few older men speaking Irish and someone playing the fiddle in a dark corner. The saloon is a place where Irish immigrants can get together and experience a small taste of the home they had to leave behind.
A few years earlier, the potato famine began in Ireland. Crops had been wiped out and food is scarce. The famine has already killed close to a million people and left far more starving and destitute. Many Irish natives blame the mass casualties of the famine on neglect and poor leadership from the British government that still rules over Ireland at the time.
Regardless of the causes, the famine has led tens of thousands of people, mostly poor Irish Catholics, to flee to America, desperately searching for a better life. But they came without money or formal education, and they've faced mass discrimination because of their heritage and their religion. So many have ended up living in the cheapest, most dangerous American neighborhoods like Five Points.
Inside the saloon, John slaps down a coin on the bar and orders a whiskey. The bartender slides him a glass, and he drinks while he listens to the music and talks to some other young 40 thieves members who are already there.
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Chapter 3: What role did gangs play in 1840s New York City?
The leader of the Bowery Boys is now on top of him. The man jabs his fingers into John's eyes and starts gouging. John screams and tries to get free as blood runs down his cheeks, but the leader isn't done. He opens his mouth and rips off part of John's nose with his teeth. Then he moves on to someone else. John cries and shakes, the pain is unbearable.
And he already knows, even if he makes it through this, his fighting days are over. He hears one of the 40 thieves members shouting to retreat. A fellow gang member picks him up and he stumbles down the street.
John's vision is blurred, but as his gang flees to the safety of their firehouse, he sees the leader of the Bowery Boys' face splattered with blood, shouting commands to his gangs as they fill their barrels and put out the fire. The Bowery Boys have badly beaten their rivals, and now they'll get paid for doing it.
It's an evening in March of 1849, a few weeks after the gang fight at a seedy bar just south of Five Points. 28-year-old Ned Buntline puffs on a cigar, throws back a drink, and listens to a local political leader give an impassioned speech in front of a small crowd about escalating gang violence in Five Points in the Bowery.
Ned's a lot of things, a writer, an adventurer, and owner of a self-published newspaper called Ned Buntline's Own. Ned's also what he would call a myth-maker. He loves creating myths about America and himself.
According to one version of his life story, Ned once survived a gunshot wound, a leap from a three-story window, and getting strung up by a noose all in the same day when he'd run afoul of the father of a teenage girl he'd taken an interest in. Of course, it's difficult to tell if a single part of that story or any story Ned tells is true, because even the name Ned Buntline is a creation.
He was born Edward Judson, and Ned Buntline has become more than a pen name. It's a character, an alter ego who can have any past he wants. But right now, above everything else, Ned's just angry.
The man speaking in the bar is Isaiah Reinders, a leader of Tammany Hall, which is the name people use for the executive committee of the Democratic Party of New York City, and also a political machine that has dominated the city for 60 years, almost as long as the United States has been a country. These aren't just any political influencers.
Reinders and the men of Tammany Hall are known to exploit the mass corruption running rampant in the city for their own gain, paying off powerful people when they need to. They also employ gang members from the Bowery, who can win elections with a knife or gun when they can't be won with a bribe.
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Chapter 4: How did the Bowery Boys and 40 Thieves interact?
It's only been 66 years since the American Revolutionary War ended in 1783 and the American colonies split from Britain to form the United States. And it's just a little over 30 years since the two nations fought on American soil in the War of 1812. Some political leaders still see Britain as a threat, if not militarily, then socially and economically.
They believe the British and their rich American counterparts are just an extension of the old aristocracy and the monarchy, who want to rule over everyone they see as below them. And for Ned, the fact that the British even still have a connection to the United States flies in the face of everything Americans revolted against.
Of course, when Ned spouts his populist, pro-worker, anti-wealth rhetoric in public or in his newspaper, he leaves out the fact that he owns several properties and a yacht, and that his wife is British. Later that night, after spending some time working on his paper, Ned makes his way to the Bowery Theater less than a mile from Five Points.
The moment he walks in, the anger he's felt since hearing the Tammany Hall recruiting speech disappears. Ned likes seeing theater, especially in venues like the Bowery, that cater to young, working-class, nativist audiences. As Ned heads down the aisle, he spots a group of young, well-dressed nativist men he'd hoped to see. These are classic Bowery boys.
They come here to enjoy music, dancing, and plays, but they also know theaters like this are great places to drink and to meet prostitutes. In fact, that's one of the reasons Ned comes here too. But tonight, he's not looking for women. He's at the theater to network.
Before the show starts, Ned mingles with some of the Bowery boys, getting the latest details of their escalating feud with the Irish gangs in Five Points. These young men know and respect Ned because he uses his platform as a writer and publisher to speak up for their cause, the nativist cause, and to argue that Americans are being overrun by immigrants.
For his part, Ned understands that if the American party is going to become a force to be reckoned with, he'll need gangs from the Bowery on his side. Some of the boys tell him how useless the police were in their latest battle. They tell Ned that the Bowery boys pay the police off, so they should have done more. Ned bursts out laughing.
He says the New York police are nothing but glorified night watchmen who couldn't break up a dogfight, let alone a gang war. If some officers will take a bribe and help them out when they need it, that's fine, but he says they don't have any real power.
At the time, Ned isn't the only one who feels this way, because the New York Police Department is still a fledgling organization, just four years old. There are only about 900 officers in a city with a population of roughly 500,000. And there's frequent turnover, so there are constantly new officers who don't have any real experience.
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Chapter 5: What was Ned Buntline's perspective on immigrant influence?
The United States is a young democracy, and he believes connections with Britain could cause the US to slide back into rule by a small group of wealthy men. He even delights in calling the British Redcoats, the name given to British soldiers during the Revolutionary War, as if that war that ended over 60 years ago is still being fought. Now, Ned really wants to get even.
not just at Bennett for printing his article, but at the whole of Great Britain. And as he gets angrier, he decides he wants to do something big, something that in one fell swoop will deal a blow to the British, as well as New York's rich and powerful, and make the American Party a force in national politics.
It's May 1st, 1849, at the office of Ned Buntline's newspaper near Broadway in New York City. Ned sits at his desk, poring over a stack of national newspapers and scribbling notes. Ned is still focused on revenge, but he also has a paper to get out. He needs stories that'll excite his nativist readers. He scans the papers, and one story immediately grabs his attention.
It's from a publication out of Cincinnati, Ohio. As Ned reads it, he can't stop laughing. The story is about a famous British Shakespearean actor named William McCready. He's been touring the United States for a few months, performing some of Shakespeare's most famous roles like Hamlet and Macbeth.
But on McCready's opening night in Cincinnati, his performance got completely derailed because some people in the audience threw half of a sheep carcass onto the stage. As a theatergoer, Ned's familiar with MacReady. The man's a legend when it comes to Shakespeare, and Ned enjoys Shakespeare's plays.
In fact, in the 1840s, Shakespeare's plays, which were written in the late 1500s and early 1600s, are wildly popular on both sides of the Atlantic. They're like the Hollywood blockbusters of the time, and some Shakespearean actors like MacReady are celebrities both at home and abroad.
Ned also knows that MacReady is in the middle of an ongoing feud with another famous Shakespearean actor, an American named Edwin Forrest. This feud began years earlier when Forrest went to see MacReady perform Hamlet in Scotland. At some point during the play, Forrest stood up in his private box above the audience and hissed at MacReady.
Forrest went on to say publicly that he hated what he called a fancy dance that MacReady had added to Hamlet for no reason. Forrest grew up poor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He made his bones as an actor performing in places like New York's Bowery Theatre, where working-class audiences hissed and shouted all the time, so his reaction to MacReady's fancy dance didn't seem out of line to him.
But MacReady, a refined English actor, was so appalled that he compared Forrest's hiss to murder, and a transatlantic Shakespeare rivalry was born. Ned is fully aware that this actor feud has escalated over the years.
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Chapter 6: What conflict arose between Ned Buntline and Kate Hastings?
New York City's leaders knew that relying on the military to handle city violence wasn't a viable long-term solution. But they also saw another major problem. Police had rarely gotten involved when nativists and Irish gangs fought each other in Five Points of the Bowery. But if opposing gangs could come together to strike at New York's rich and powerful, something had to be done.
So city leaders devised a plan to limit reliance on the United States military and to ensure that gangs could be crushed. Their solution? Make the police stronger and more intimidating. Following the Astor Place riot, New York decided to expand the police force and institute pay and training policies that would encourage officers to stay on the job longer.
But they knew that would take time, so growth wasn't the key point of their new plans for the police. Instead, following the riots, the city put officers in uniform and gave them badges. These badges were made of copper, and some suggest that's where the term coppers, or the shorter version cops, comes from. But the most significant changes to the force came in the way the police armed themselves.
For the first time, cops would carry metal batons that could inflict far more damage than their wooden ones. And soon, some officers would carry firearms. For years, officials had looked the other way while gangs performed a range of civic duties in slums like Five Points. But now, the police would take that power back.
And to that end, a select group of New York police would undergo special training, where they would learn how to control and combat violent mobs. The techniques employed in New York were quickly adopted by cities across the country, and America would soon have riot police.
Despite joining forces at the Astor Place riot, the Bowery Boys and the Irish gangs in Five Points continued to do battle for years, and the violence between them would erupt in another riot in July of 1857. But New York cops were now far better prepared to deal with the ongoing gang war, because American policing had changed forever.
after a rivalry between two actors fueled violence, hubris, and political manipulation on an epic scale. Like something right out of a Shakespeare play. From Ballin Studios, this is A Twist of History. A quick note about our stories. They're all heavily researched, but some details and scenes are dramatized. A Twist of History is hosted by me, Joel Blackwell.
Executive produced by Mr. Ballin and Zach Levin. Our head of writing is Evan Allen. Produced by Perry Kroll. This episode was written by Mike Federico. Story editing by Mike Federico. Sound design and audio mixing by Colin Lester Fleming. Post-production supervision by Jeremy Bone and Cole Lacazio.
Research and fact-checking by Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Evan Beamer, Alex Paul, Patricia Nicole Florentino, Calvin Riley Holgate, Matt Gilligan. Production coordination by Samantha Collins and Avery Siegel. Artwork by Jessica Claxton Kiner and Robin Vane. Thank you for listening to A Twist of History.
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