Tag: Gambling

First of May in New York

Illustrated magazines are treasuries of forgotten facts of everyday life. From Gleason’s Pictorial in 1851 we learn that May 1 was traditionally moving day in New York City, and it was a day when the most intrepid visitor might fear to set foot in the street. [Addendum: The state legislature had set May 1 as the expiration date for all housing contracts, according to the Historical Dilletante.] The cartoonish engraving shows us a suitably chaotic scene, revealing along the way the rather crude sense of visual humor Gleason’s expected from its audience. Ha ha! The colored fellow got hit in the head with a wagon wheel! That’ll make ’em fall off their chairs laughing. (Black men getting hurt was a never-ending source of mirth in American humorous drawings.) In the background, the American Anti-Gambling Society has moved, to be replaced by a gambling den. Subtle!

The details of the picture, however, also give us some real information about city life that would be useful to historical novelists or anyone else interested in recreating the American city of the middle 1800s. Notice, for example, the prevalence of livestock—and not just draft animals. When people move in New York City, they take their pigs with them. Men losing hats are also here and there throughout the picture, the cheap visual gag reminding us that losing one’s hat was a catastrophe a man had to worry about constantly.

The good people of Gotham seem to possess an irresistible desire to change their residences on the first of May annually, and the ludicrous scenes produced by everybody, and everybody’s furniture, being in the street at the same time, has been the subject of many a humorous poem and laughable prose sketch. Our artist has taken his cue from life, and the mad scene he has given us below is no exaggeration upon the actual truth. Porters, draymen, men, women and children, horses and carts, dogs and pigs, all seem licensed on this day to ran wild and unrestrained; but, to appreciate the picture, one must have been in New York on the first of May, and run the risk of his life, by being run over and trampled upon by the motley crowd of men and animals. In New England now, the first of May is a sort of rural holiday, when people go into the country for a breath of fragrant and pure air, and to join each other in the festivities often of dancing about the May pole as they used to do in olden times, and as we illustrated in our last number. The first of May in the city of New York is a very different occasion.

——Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, July 12, 1851.

The Wicked City of Richmond in 1864

Edward A. Pollard, a die-hard supporter of the “lost cause” (indeed perhaps the inventor of the term), knew Jefferson Davis, and had an insider’s view of the dysfunctional Confederate government throughout the war. In 1869 he published a book with the provocative title Life of Jefferson Davis, with a SECRET HISTORY of the Southern Confederacy, Gathered “Behind the Scenes in Richmond.” The words “SECRET HISTORY” were printed in very large type on the title page, and the book was sold by canvassing agents, who doubtless relied upon the sensational impact of those words to make a sale. The book itself, however, is sober, well-reasoned, and well-informed. Mr. Pollard’s thesis is that the Confederacy, whose cause was (of course) just and noble, had all the resources at its command to conclude the war successfully, and the defeat was due to the vanity and incompetence of President Davis and the men who surrounded him. Here, as Grant moves in on Richmond, the wicked city continues its orgy of vice.

The government of Mr. Davis was not yet alarmed. It had no reason to be alarmed except for the chances of its own mistakes. Nobody in Richmond was alarmed—not even so much as when McClellan, in 1862, had displayed his standards on the banks of the Chickahominy. There was the same recklessness of vice in this city that it had displayed so early in the war, and that had pointed it out as the centre of all the crime and iniquity in the South. There were the same “faro banks,” on Main and other streets, with numbers painted in large gilt figures over the door, and illuminated at night; the same flashily dressed young men with villainous faces, who hung about the street corners during the day, and were gamblers, garroters and plugs at night: the same able-bodied, red-faced and brawny individuals who mixed bad liquors in the bar-rooms, and who held exemptions from military duty as consumptive invalids, or for some reason had been recommended by the Surgeon-General to keep in cheerful company and take gentle exercise; the same men who frequented the innumerable bar-rooms, paying five dollars for a drink of the bad liquors, and who, mistaken for men of fortune, happened to be out-door patients of hospitals, with a daily allowance for stimulants, or government clerks on salaries, the monthly amounts of which, would not pay for a single night’s carousal. The society of Richmond was given over to unabashed vice and revelry, to continue thus until the partial doom of Sodom should overtake it. The filthy and accursed city was indeed a commentary on the administration of Mr. Davis; for that he should have made of his capital such a place indicates his own unworthiness, and, no matter what local or particular excuses are made, men will think how weak and bad must have been the government, immediately around which the moral atmosphere was so impure. It has often been boasted of Richmond, that it never lost its confidence during the war; but we must confess that much of this confidence was a vile recklessness that lived in the twenty-four hours, not all the serious and manly faith which calculates the morrow, and reposes on its superiority to fortune. To the last vice kept open doors in Richmond. For the present it had taken out a new lease of its abodes, as it supposed itself secured by the immediate presence of Lee’s army, and confidently expected for Grant, the sequel of McClellan.

——From Life of Jefferson Davis, with a Secret History of the Southern Confederacy, Gathered “Behind the Scenes in Richmond,” by Edward A. Pollard.