New York in Anarchy

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 20, 1872

New York in Anarchy.

What shall be said of our times when such descriptions as the following are justified by the events that transpire? We should shrink back appalled before the picture, and despair of being able to tell what these things mean, did we not know that violence in the land was to be one of the characteristics of the last days.

“The city of New York is under the control of its dangerous classes. Robberies, burglaries, assaults, murders, of all kinds, are rampant in its streets. At all hours of the day its citizens are likely to be attacked and stripped of their money and jewelry. At 7 o’clock in the morning, one man, reading his newspaper in the street-car, is seized by the throat and his watch wrenched from his pocket. The thief escapes, though a policeman chases him, or pretends to chase him, three blocks. The ruffians “go for a feller” whenever they see him alone, and will knock him senseless or kill him, and seem perfectly satisfied if their booty is only sufficient to buy them a glass of beer. The detectives are in league with the thieves and murderers. The police are wholly indifferent. In Brooklyn, the other night, while Palermo was having his brains knocked out, twenty-four policemen were within two blocks of the scene, stuffing ballot-boxes for one of the “Ring” candidates, whose election had been ordered by the powers that be. The hospitals are filling up with the victims of these assaults upon the life and property of the citizens. The coroners hold inquests every day upon a dozen persons who have met with violent deaths. Tammany has reduced the whole police force to a band of thieves and murderers in open or secret league with those who commit thefts and murder. The courts are worthless and rotten. It is next to impossible to convict a criminal, no matter how atrocious his crime. Those notorious for the most heinous offenses, bank robbers and desperadoes of the worst kind, walk the streets with impunity. The prisons are sink-holes of iniquity, and many of the officials are drunken and licentious. The jails swarm with vermin. Innocent witnesses are detained in the filthy cells, half or wholly frozen, while the criminals are abroad. The keepers indulge in orgies of the vilest description. The female prisoners are often debauched and outraged. These criminal classes are well organized. Their leaders and organizers live a luxurious, sensual life, are splendidly dressed, walk and ride about with impunity, and levy tribute on the community. Savings banks are robbed by the managers, and the poor, cheated depositors, made desperate by the loss of their cherished accumulations, in many cases join this horde of depredators, and increase the terror under which the respectable classes of New York are now living. These latter are demoralized. They appear to be incapable of resistance. They are paralyzed with the atrocity and audacity of this secret, terrible Ku Klux which has possession of their city, and has fairly begun the work of despoiling it. Next to Paris, in its days of frenzy, New York is nearer to anarchy than any city ever before reached. What is worse, there seems to be no effort made to save it.” —Det. Post.

And New York is not the only place where such a state of things exists. In many portions of the country, as many crimes perhaps are committed within a territorial area containing as many inhabitants as the city of New York, as are perpetrated there. Here is what the Louisville Ledger of Nov. 27, 1871, says of the condition of society in Southern Indiana:—

“The devil seems to be having it pretty much his own way over in Southern Indiana, if one may judge by the number and atrocity of the crimes recently committed in that section. Hangings, murders, burglaries, and highway robberies follow each other in rapid succession, and good citizens cannot but feel the tremors of fear when they reflect what apparent insecurity there is to life and property. There was the murder of the Woodward family in Orange County, in which four persons were mercilessly butchered with an ax; the attempt to murder an entire family in Lawrence County, a few miles from New Orleans; the butchery of a mother, her little son, and an infant daughter, near Tell City, in Perry County; twenty-five or thirty murders of single individuals; the outraging and murder of an old lady near Clear Spring, in Jackson County; the hanging of two men from a bridge in Orange County; the hanging of the three Renos and Charles Anderson in the New Albany jail by the Seymour mob; the taking of citizens from their beds in Harrison, Crawford, and Lawrence Counties, and beating them nearly to death with clubs and switches; the deliberate grinding of a butcher-knife by a woman, and her subsequent use of it in cutting into tidbits the body of her sister-in-law in Washington County, and dozens of other almost as shocking barbarisms, crowned with the massacre of the Park family in Clark County; and all these would indicate the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Revelator of Patmos, that Satan would be loosed for a season.”