On April 13 a group of boys playing on the grounds of New York Hospital in New York City looked up to see a mischievous medical student standing at a window, waving a severed limb. One of the boys found a ladder and climbed up to the third-floor window. Peering inside, he witnessed what a local newspaper later called “a shocking shamble of human flesh”—a gruesome array of cadavers and body parts.
The unsettled child blurted something about his recently deceased mother. The medical student, John Hicks, Jr., picked up an arm and told the boy it was his mother’s. Horrified, the boy fled home and told his father about the morbid incident.
There had been talk of body snatching in New York City. Municipal law made no provision for the legal acquisition of cadavers for study, and the city’s medical students resorted to skulking about on moonless nights, exhuming corpses from fresh graves.
Most students at New York Hospital and Columbia College confined their body snatching to the nearby potter’s field and to the burial ground for blacks. Free blacks and the city’s poor raised some fuss, but outrage did not become widespread until a body disappeared from the respectable Trinity Churchyard.
When the father heard his son’s story, he armed himself with pick and shovel and hurried to his wife’s grave site. There he found an empty coffin. Enraged, the man set out for New York Hospital, recruiting others along the way. The mob had swelled to hundreds by the time it reached the hospital. Doctors and students, including Hicks, fled for their lives. Rioters piled up bones and anatomical specimens for a bonfire.
The tumult continued throughout the next day, though by this time most doctors and medical students had either left the city or been arrested. The mob converged on the city jail, where a skirmish between rioters and the local militia left several men dead and many wounded.
The following year the state legislature passed a law “to prevent the odious practice of digging up and removing for the purpose of dissection, dead bodies interred in cemeteries or burial places.” The new law imposed stiffer penalties for grave robbing.
The task of procuring bodies for dissection eventually fell to professional body snatchers, and New York’s burial grounds became the source of cadavers for most of the nation. The situation remained uncorrrected until the 1854 “bone bill” provided medical schools with unclaimed bodies.
1838 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
The Sirius steamed into New York Harbor early in the morning of April 23. Later that day thousands of curious onlookers thronged the Battery to see the British steamer that had dropped anchor near Castle Garden. Her epochal seventeen-day journey from Cork had halved the typical duration of Atlantic crossings. The era of transatlantic steam service had begun.
Six years before, a London-based American merchant by the name of Junius Smith had endured a monotonous fifty-four-day crossing from London to New York. When he returned to London, he tried to interest backers in the applications of steam power to sea voyages, with little initial success.
Although coastal and inland steam navigation was well established by the 1830s, many experts gravely doubted the practicability of ocean crossings by steam. On the high seas boilers rapidly became encrusted with salt and had to be scoured regularly to prevent corrosion. Oceangoing steam vessels could make only sparing use of their engines and had to rely mostly on their sails.
In 1834 the British inventor Samuel Hall perfected a new type of steam engine that recycled boiler exhaust. Hall’s surface condenser enabled ships to use fresh water in their boilers throughout an ocean voyage.
Two years later Junius Smith finally enlisted the aid of the shipbuilder and African explorer Macgregor Laird and formed the British & American Steam Navigation Company. They began work on the construction of a mammoth, seventeen-hundred-ton steamship to be called the British Queen.
In their wake rival steam navigation companies appeared in England. A group of investors in Bristol hired the engineer lsambard K. Brunei to build a 1,340-ton transatlantic steamer. As Brunei’s ship, the Great Western, raced toward completion, construction delays beset the builders of the British Queen. Determined to be first, Smith and Laird chartered the Sirius, a sailing packet, and converted her to steam.
The Sirius arrived in New York just eight hours before the Great Western, which had weathered a strike by the stoking crew, rampant seasickness among the passengers, and a boiler-room fire that almost killed Brunei, to complete her passage from Bristol—and to set the new record—in fourteen days.
1863 One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
The burdens of war sent food prices soaring in Richmond, Virginia. In early 1863 bacon sold for $1.25 per pound, peaches for as much as twenty cents apiece, and flour was priced at a staggering $28 a barrel, four times its pre-war cost.
On April 5 hundreds of hungry protesters marched down Main Street, shouting, “Bread! Bread!” The demonstration erupted into a full-scale riot, with window smashing and looting.
Suddenly the Confederate president Jefferson Davis appeared. Standing atop a dray, he tossed coins to the crowd.
“You say you are hungry, and have no money. Here is all I have.” The militia arrived as Davis addressed the looters. “We do not desire to injure anyone, but this lawlessness must stop.” The president consulted his pocket watch. “I will give you five minutes to disperse. Otherwise you will be fired on.”
The crowd broke up immediately. Davis, fearing the consequences that news of such rampant discontent would bring, asked the press to “avoid all reference directly or indirectly to the affair.” One Richmond paper did mention the incident, referring to the rioters as “a handful of prostitutes, professional thieves, Irish and Yankee hags” who had broken into “shoe stores, hat stores and tobacco houses and robbed them of everything but bread, which was just the thing they wanted least.”
1888 One Hundred Years Ago
Coney Island’s eroding shoreline threatened one of its principal attractions, the famed Brighton Beach Hotel. “During the past two years,” noted Harper’s Weekly, “the ocean has been dashing wildly under the hotel itself, a large part of which perilously rested upon piles.”
The Brighton Beach Company decided upon a novel solution: move the entire hotel several hundred feet north, toward Sheepshead Bay. Workers jacked the four-thousand-ton structure onto flatcars on two dozen parallel sets of railroad tracks. An elaborate system of blocks and hawsers evenly distributed the pulling force of six steam locomotives across the hotel’s four-hundred-foot width.
The locomotives made their first tentative tug on April 10 at 8:45 A.M. “The six engines,” reported Harper’s, “with full head of steam on, began to move. The cables, stretching out fanlike from the engines to all parts of the hotel, quickly tightened; the engines for an instant seemed unequal to the task; but it was only for an instant, as the mammoth structure was already in motion.” On the first day of its journey the Brighton Beach Hotel crawled some 117 feet as crowds of Brooklynites and New Yorkers gathered to watch the spectacle. By the following week the hotel had traversed the remaining 500 feet to its new, dry resting place, where it stood until it was demolished in 1923.
1913 Seventy-five Years Ago
Woodrow Wilson broke more than a century of custom by appearing before a joint session of Congress on April 8. Thomas Jefferson had abandoned the practice of addressing Congress in person because it smacked of monarchy, and succeeding administrations had followed his example.
Congress bridled at Wilson’s departure from precedent. “I am sorry to see revived the old Federalistic custom of speeches from the throne,” said Sen. John Sharp Williams of Tennessee. “I regret all this cheap and tawdry imitation of English royalty.”
“I am very glad indeed,” said Wilson in his opening remarks, “to have this opportunity to address the two houses directly and to verify for myself the impression that the President of the United States is a person, not a mere department of the Government hailing Congress from some isolated island of jealous power.”
Wilson’s subject was tariff reform. Tariff rates had grown monstrously high during the previous sixteen years of Republican rule. As a Democratic gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey, Wilson had blasted the infamous 1909 PayneAldrich Tariff Act. The bill was originally aimed at moderating tariffs, but in the hands of the Republican-controlled Senate it became wholly protectionist in character.
Now President, Wilson was thoroughly committed to reversing the protectionist trend. “We must abolish everything that bears even the semblance of privilege. … The object of the tariff duties henceforth laid must be effective competition, the whetting of American wits by contest with the wits of the rest of the world.”
William Jennings Bryan raised eyebrows, but not glasses, when the tee-totaling Secretary of State declined to serve alcohol at a dinner in honor of the retiring British ambassador James Bryce on April 21. Religious fundamentalists and prohibitionists toasted Bryan’s policy of “grape juice diplomacy,” while many observers abroad were appalled. Commented the London Daily Express: “W. J. Bryan not only suffers for his principles and mortifies his flesh, as he has every right to do, but he insists that others should suffer and be mortified. This would be well enough if Mr. Bryan were a private citizen, but he is a minister of State, his guests are the diplomats of foreign embassies, and official invitations must be accepted lest continued refusal involve some suspicion of international discourtesy.” Another London newspaper lamented, “Official life in Washington under the Wilson-Bryan regime holds out little prospect of gaiety.”
1938 Fifty Years Ago
The United States Mint unveiled its design for the new Thomas Jefferson five-cent piece on April 21. Felix Schlag’s winning entry, depicting Jefferson in profile on one side and Monticello on the other, replaced the twenty-year-old Indian-head nickel. Except for minor modifications, the coin’s design remains unchanged to this day.
From 1942 to 1945 the nickel contained no nickel, as a result of a wartime metals shortage. The U.S. Mint substituted a mixture of copper, silver, and manganese for the traditional copper-nickel alloy that had jingled in America’s pockets since 1866.
1963 Twenty-five Years Ago
The Navy suffered its worst peacetime disaster on April 9, when the nuclear attack submarine Thresher sank off the New Hampshire coast during routine sea trials. Diving to a thousand feet, the sub developed a small leak in her hull. The leak triggered a short circuit, shutting down the submarine’s nuclear reactor. Powerless and unable to blow her ballast tanks, the Thresher plunged into an eighty-four-hundred-foot ocean abyss called the Wilkenson Deep. Mounting pressure crushed her hull, killing all 129 crew members.
