01.21 McNeur (2011)

Journal of Urban History37(5) 639 660

2011 SAGE PublicationsReprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0096144211407561http://juh.sagepub.com

Articles

407561 JUH37510.1177/0096144211407561McNeurJournal of Urban History

1Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Corresponding Author:Catherine McNeur, Department of History, Yale University, P.O. Box 208324, New Haven, CT 06520-8324 Email: [email protected]

The Swinish Multitude: Controversies over Hogs in Antebellum New York City

Catherine McNeur1

Abstract

In the first half of the nineteenth century, New Yorkers fought passionately over the presence of hogs on their streets and in their city. New Yorks filthy streets had cultivated an informal economy and a fertile environment for roaming creatures. The battlesboth physical and legalreveal a city rife with class tensions. After decades of arguments, riots, and petitions, cholera and the fear of other public health crises ultimately spelled the end for New Yorks hogs. New York struggled during this period to improve municipal services while adapting to a changing economy and rapid population growth. The fights between those for and against hogs shaped New York Citys landscape and resulted in new rules for using public space a new place for nature in the city.

Keywords

environmental history, public space, social conflict, animals, New York City

On Tuesday, April 5, 1825 two hog catchers entered the Eighth Ward of New York City. For the first time in four years, free-roaming pigs were illegal in this northern neighborhood where their owners riots had previously kept the hog law at bay.1 Conscious that disgruntled hog owners might resist their efforts, the citys aldermen prepared accordingly. Four officers, including Marshall Abner Curtis, who had weathered riots alongside dog catchers in the 1810s, accompa-nied the hog catchers.2 By the time the six men reached the upper end of Hudson Street, near Vandam, their cart teemed with squealing swinish captives. Angry men and women had gathered around thema crowd the newspapers referred to as a large mob of disorderly people. With their demands for the return of the livestock unmet, the protestors got violent. Henry Bourdenan Irish laborer who lived in the Eighth Ward with his wife, four children, and likely several pigsgrabbed a four-pound weight, perhaps a brick, and hurled it at the officers. He hit Abner Curtis in the face, knocking him down onto the street. After the crowd had overtaken the hog catchers and officers, they broke open the back of the wooden cart and let loose all of the hogs, who quickly scampered off in different directions.3

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The Eighth Ward was changing. Wealthier residents had moved in and they demanded cleaner streets free of swine foraging among the heaps of garbage. The northwestern suburbs of Manhattan (todays Greenwich Village, West Village, and Tribeca) became especially attractive to downtown residents during the Yellow Fever outbreak of 1822 after the city cordoned off the denser neighborhoods on the southern tip of the island. Even after the restrictions were lifted, many decided to stay and make the Eighth Ward their permanent home.

The working-class hog owners, who had lived in the area for years, felt that interlopers were attacking their neighborhood and way of life. These Irish and African American laborers were barely scraping by, and their livestock were an important source of both income and food. Yet this was of little interest to those who did not own hogs and considered them a nuisance. A month before the hog riot, some of these wealthier residents rallied together and petitioned the Common Council to extend the boundaries of the hog law to include their ward. They planned to polish up their streets, and that involved getting rid of the pigs that blocked their sidewalks. The aldermen eagerly obliged.4

The 1825 hog riot that resulted was part of a larger string of physical and legal battles that helped to shape the landscape of New York.5 The issue of free-roaming swine was divisive, and the battles that ensued exposed a city rife with class tensions. Anti-hogites, or those against the presence of loose hogs, contended that the animals impeded the progress, refinement, and moder-nity of New York. Pro-hogites, however, believed citizens had the right to utilize public spaces as necessary in order to subsist.6 As New Yorks population swelled during the nineteenth cen-tury, these conflicting ideas of how public space ought to be used led to increasingly desperate battles over whose vision should reign supreme.

Scholars have typically portrayed cities as social artifacts, in opposition to their rural or natu-ral surroundings. Lewis Mumford, for instance, wistfully wrote that nature, except in a surviv-ing landscape park, is scarcely to be found near the metropolis.7 Cities, however, are hybrid spaces where human occupants have hardly conquered their environment, let alone separated themselves from it. By examining the ways people fought over the urban environment, historians can get an even fuller sense of the social dynamics that shaped cities. Attempts to remove New Yorks hogs led to fierce debates and violent encounters about the citys character and the rules governing its space. The politically contentious battles that ensued demonstrate how changes to public space can have an extensive economic and environmental impact while also redefining what it means to be urban.8

New Yorkers had been arguing about hogs for centuries. In 1640, the Dutch West India Company complained that they had suffered great injury of cultivation and serious damage to their holdings at the hands (or hooves) of hogs and goats. A decade later, a desperate Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of New Amsterdam, threatened to shoot down any hog found rooting near the fort. The English who succeeded the Dutch also found it difficult to deal with roaming swine and struggled to enforce impoundment laws and organize government-regulated hunting of loose hogs on the streets.9

Hogs became an even bigger problem after the American Revolution. Following the war, the citys population boomed as people moved in from the countryside and overseas. Hogs sub-sisted, for the most part, on the garbage that New Yorkers placed on the sidewalks and streets outside of their homes and businesses. As the human population grew and garbage piled higher, the hog population thrived. One 1820 estimate suggested that there were twenty thousand hogs in the settled parts of Manhattan, or approximately one hog for every five humans in the city.10

By the 1810s, the controversy over hogs had become a hot topic for New Yorkers, revealing friction between wealthier and poorer neighbors. While hogs had been owned by residents of all classes in colonial New York, in the early nineteenth century they were typically the property of


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poorer city residents. Wealthy and middle-class New Yorkers had been able to abandon gardening and raising livestock in exchange for purchasing their food with cash at their local markets. Poorer New Yorkers with smaller wages had a harder time making that transition.11 In consequence, as these issues with swine intensified, they began to reflect growing class tensions in the city.

Hogs role as livestock did not help their situation. They were not coddled or praised as pets such as dogs were. While certainly some of their owners bonded with them, their potential to be eaten or sold probably helped to limit the depth of that bond. Potential bourgeois allies were less likely to sympathize with the plight of the urban hog as they might with other animal wanderers like cats and dogs, since they did not have similar creatures at home to compare. With farms getting pushed further and further from the citys center, hogs increasingly seemed to anti-hogites like an unwelcome presence in what should have been a human-centered environment. At best they were seen as a food source, at worst as stubborn, filthy impediments on streets and sidewalks.

In their anonymous letters to newspapers, anti-hogites of the 1810s and 1820s routinely drew parallels between the pigs and their owners, using Edmund Burkes phrase the swinish multi-tude to describe both populations.12 For these authors, New Yorks urban hogs were as much of an Other as the Irish immigrants and African Americans who owned them. Pigs association with the citys lower classes led to many vicious, tongue-in-cheek poems and letters by critics who saw the animals and their owners as interchangeable.13 When an author described a hog as the filthiest part of the brutes, his disdain for the citys poor shined through.14 Hogs, long con-sidered to be among the lowliest of farm animals because of their ravenous, greedy behavior, were ripe for insults. While wealthier New Yorkers were perhaps hesitant to insult their poorer neighbors directly, insulting their animals provided an outlet for airing class tensions. Through these comparisons, whether drawn in humor or anger, anti-hogite writers emphasized the ridicu-lousness of allowing outsidersbase pigs and their similarly base ownersto run their city.

Yet when Europeans visited the city, their criticism of the roaming hogs condemned all New Yorkers, not just the poor who owned them. When Charles Henry Wilson visited from England in 1819, he found the city to be miserably dirty with innumerable hungry pigs of all sizes and complexions, great and small beasts prowling in grunting ferocity, and in themselves so great a nuisance, that would arouse the indignation of any but Americans.15 Worried about such reactions, anti-hogites pleaded with the Council to refine the city. Discussing a vacant lot of land filled with house rubbish, swine, cattle, and beggars, a neighbor appealed to the city to clean it up: [the Common Councils] interference becomes doubly urgent, in this instance, from the consideration, that the nuisance above mentioned exists in the section of town which is most frequented by our citizens, and by strangers who visit New York.16 The citys image was at stake (see Figure 1). The New York anti-pig constituency frequently referred to the city as being disgraced by the presence of the animals. These residents were concerned about the influence of swine on the identity of their city.17 To visitors and local anti-hogites alike, the hogs symbol-ized all that was backwards in New York. They represented the city governments inability to exact change and promote the progress of the city. When the anti-hogites complained about hogs, they were also in many ways complaining about the undesirable classes living in their city that imposed on their public space and municipal government.18

The hog owners, however, saw these issues more in terms of survival than in terms of moder-nity or progress. Whereas in the eighteenth century laborers lived and ate in the homes of master craftsmen, with the growth of wage labor most of these men had to find separate housing and pay rent.19 Food was rarely cheap and as the decades went on prices became less predictable.20 Jobs for day laborers were hardly stable, often seasonal, and completely dependent on weather and economic conditions. Municipal welfare programs, while helpful in assisting some of the poor with food and fuel, could not keep up with New Yorks ballooning population in the early nineteenth


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century.21 During periods of economic crisis, such as after the War of 1812, alternative sources of income and food were especially crucial.

New Yorks laboring poor used hogs as a cheap and efficient way to make ends meet. When the hog owners argued for the right to keep their livestock, they insisted that hogs allowed the poor to pay their rents and supply their families with animal food, during the winter. By selling a pig or two, they were able to procure some other articles necessary for their comfort and con-venience. They pleaded that without their livestock, they would be forced to rely on the charity of the city and become a public burden.22

Hogs could be left to take care of themselves on the street, finding free food in the gutters of the city. The streets essentially served as an urban commons. While New York, unlike Boston, lacked an official commons, its residents and their animals had created a de facto substitute. Refuse mainly consisted of food-based items, such as offal and kitchen scraps, so the hogs could essentially find their entire days diet within a few blocks of their residence. These urban forag-ers, who could be summoned by name, would apparently wander home at night to sleep in their owners backyards or near the front stoop.23

The pro-hogites argued in petitions to the city that swine played an important role in cleaning the streets of garbage. Since the city did not have the resources to supply enough street sweepers to collect trash, hog owners contended that sanitation and public health problems actually would worsen without swine to keep them under control. Pigs were our best scavengers, as they instantly devour all fish guts, garbage, and offal of every kind, which is suffered to remain during the summer months, [and] would be very offensive and might very probably be injurious to the health of the inhabitants. Garbage collecting in the poorer neighborhoods was irregular at best, and allowing hogs to forage was one method for removing trash and preserving the health of the most vulnerable residents.24

Figure 1. In this image by a nineteenth-century tourist, hogs are depicted intermingling with pedestrians and traffic on Broadway in plain sight of City Hall.Brodway-Gatan Och Rdhuset i New York, 1824. Aquatint by Carl Fredrik Akrell based on etching by Axel Klinckow-strm (Metropolitan Museum of Art).


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The anti-hogites countered that the municipal government ought to fund and regulate street cleaning more effectively, creating jobs for people, not swine. Many anti-hogites believed that taking care of the streets would solve multiple problems. In 1809, a friend to order and improve-ment wrote to the Republican Watch-Tower pleading with the city to get rid of the trash so that the hogs would disappear.25 If the city would just clean the streets, the hogs would have less to subsist on and the owners would essentially be forced to take them off the street and either give up the hog business or find alternative food sources for their creatures. Critics tied the existence of hogs to a chaotic city where neither the government nor the citizens had control of the situa-tion. With the growth in urbanization during this period, many residents hoped the city would evolve into a more organized, manageable environment. If progress for anti-hogites meant the municipal government maintaining control over its nuisances, pigs stubbornly grunted in resistance.26

Hogs also disrupted city life by making the roads unfit for driving over in wagons and carts due to their constant rooting. They used their snouts to dig up cobblestones and other materials used for pavements, often causing traffic disruptions and accidents, not to mention muddy holes for pedestrians to dodge. In 1812 the Common Council noted that pigs were tearing apart a side-walk near the Battery, one of the more prestigious residential neighborhoods at the time and a popular tourist destination: Every description of filth is there deposited & the swine by rooting up the ground & wallowing there in the mire, make the passage to the Battery from Broadway not only very unsightly but very offensive.27 As the city became more populous, the number of problems and severity of the accidents only increased. Horses would either get scared by or stumble over pigs loitering in the streets, causing their carriages to tip over, often injuring pas-sengers and bystanders.28

Anti-hogites also complained about the danger hogs posed to public health. Swine were closely tied to the filth and unpleasant smells that characterized the streets and public places of the city. Hogs and garbage, after all, went hand in hand. The nineteenth-century medical com-munity generally believed that the offensive smell of the animals, their exhalations, and their environs aided epidemics. After each outbreak of yellow fever and cholera, complaints about hogs increased in number in both newspaper articles and letters to the government. New Yorkers even blamed mundane aches and illnesses on the hogs. It was not uncommon for those suffering from headaches and nausea to accuse their neighbors fondness for swine.29

Anti-hogites saw the threat of these urban hogs to be even greater because they could turn up on their dinner plates. Ham and pork, as well as other porcine products, were staples in the diets of Americansrich and poorin the early nineteenth century. Unlike cows or goats, hogs required little attention from their owners. Butchers and consumers could easily preserve pork through salting and smoking, which was an enormous advantage since refrigeration was both difficult and expensive. Not only were hog owners able to eat their street hogs, they could also sell them to the butchers of the city. Anti-hogites often complained of the potential dangers of eating these walking sewers that regularly consumed the offal and refuse left on the streets.30 One writer for The Evening Post claimed that

when they become diseased, from high feeding on dead cats and the vermin in the gutters, or any other cause, they soon find their way to our butchers stalls. Knowing this may be the case, if in fact it is not, many people of my acquaintance whose stomachs are rather squeamish, would as soon taste a broiled rat as the finest looking griskin or roaster that can be brought to the table.31

For health reasons, many New Yorkers who had the choice preferred to eat the pricier, country-raised hogs from Long Island and New Jersey.


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Anti-hogites found that one of the most effective ways to enrage votersmore effective per-haps than complaining of objectionable meatwas to expose the danger hogs posed to women and girls, a tactic that started to appear in the newspapers in 1815. While boys mischievously rode hogs down the streets and men caned hogs to get them to move, women and girls were more often attacked by the creatures.32 One observer witnessed a bristly invader, in his precipitate retreat across the pavement, upset a lady in full dress for a party, and landed her broad-side in the filth of the gutter! The result was, no bones were broken; but her dress so soiled as to require an entire change.33 The roles of women and girls remained almost constant in the anecdotes used by those pleading for the removal of the swine. Women were thrown off their feet into mud puddles and little girls lives were threatened by angry sows. Through tales that were likely exag-gerated for dramatic effect, authors invited the men of the city and specifically the aldermen to be valiant heroes and make the city safe for genteel women-folk.

Yet pro-hogites would perhaps argue that the women in these stories represented only a spe-cific population of the city. Many working-class women owned and cared for the hogs that were villains of these tales. The hogs contributed to their household economy and female members of the family were likely those who tended the swine when necessary. These women were also actively involved in protesting the laws and rioting when necessary. While anti-hogites might argue that all women were threatened by the quadrupeds, they were not accounting for those who relied on them.34

These arguments between anti-hogites and pro-hogites had fully matured by the mid-1810s when the hogs had become so numerous that their presence could no longer be ignored. Following the War of 1812, the city fell into an economic slump. Facing unemployment or underemployment, many of the poorest New Yorkers scraped by using alternative means of subsistence and income. At the same time, the citys population was growing rapidly and stylish neighborhoods were pushing into the outskirts of town where these working-class New Yorkers lived. This clashing of neighborhoods and classes, along with the rising number of hogs, brought the conflict to a boiling point.35

In November 1816, Abijah Hammond, one of New Yorks wealthiest landowners and mer-chants, rallied a group of approximately two hundred anti-hogites and submitted a petition to the Common Council calling for the removal of all free-roaming swine from the streets.36 The Council considered drafting a law but postponed voting on it twice: the first time because it would oblige the poor owners to kill off their herds before the usual butchering season in the fall; the second because it would jeopardize their own political careers if discussed before the April elections. That May, however, the Council returned to the issue and resolved to finally be done with pigs.37 Hog owners got word of the Councils intentions and united quickly under the leadership of Adam Marshall, an African American chimney sweep. In merely two days, they drew up a petition containing eighty-seven signatures and marks of both men and women, which pled with the city to pity the poor and allow the hogs to remain, as they were a necessary resource for the destitute.38 The Evening Post reported that the petitioners read the remonstrance in such a dramatic fashion that the aldermen felt the need to adjourn for a week.39

Hearing about this display, the anti-hogites belittled the pro-hogite efforts in the newspapers. One author mocked the petition as being signed, or at least marked by the principal master chimney sweeps, who generally keep droves of hogs for our amusement.40 By mentioning the chimney sweeps, this writer intended to tell readers that Marshall and the other petitioners were African American, as chimney sweeping was commonly known to be an African American occupation. Pro-hogites, however, were mainly united by their economic status as unemployed or unskilled laborers, rather than by their race. Hog owners were typically recent Irish or English immigrants, as well as African Americans. The authors invocation of chimney sweeps, how-ever, helped to emphasize the outsider status of pro-hogites. Prior to the 1821 revision of the


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New York State constitution, African Americans had the same voting rights as all New Yorkers. It was typical to find men such as Adam Marshall actively involved in petitioning the Common Council to protect their and other working-class New Yorkers interests.41 Yet, in the eyes of anti-hogites, Marshall and the other hog owners had little right to influence the aldermen and, in doing so, dictate how public space should be used.

When the Council reconvened on May 27 and avoided the contentious hog law topic, the anti-hogites used humor to criticize what they saw as the impotence of the government. One writer remarked that in battling the government, the hogs and, by implication, their owners had kept their ground, grunting a sturdy defiance.42 The pro-hogites seemed to have the Common Councils ear.

The aldermen waited for the dust to settle before they debated the proposed law a month later. The document stipulated that hogs running at large would be impounded and their owners would pay ten dollars plus costs to recover their property. This was an exceptionally steep fine considering the average artisan earned approximately one dollar per day.43 The law was defeated by four votes only to be considered again that October at the behest of countless anti-hogite constituents. This time the Council passed the ordinance the same day it was proposed, leaving the pro-hogites with no time to assemble and draw up another petition. The aldermen scheduled the law to take effect January 1, 1818. In the meanwhile the anti-hogites celebrated their long-awaited success.44

The pro-hogites, however, fretted about the implications of this new law. Adam Marshall again rallied his hog-owning compatriots to sign a petition calling for the city to repeal the law, but they were less than successful.45 Once more, the anti-hogite press ridiculed the efforts of a black man and chimney sweep to challenge common decency.46 But Marshall was not deterred and tried again on behalf of the pro-hogites, presenting a third petition to the Common Council just a month after the law had taken effect. This document was much more substantial than the petitions they had presented before, containing 140 signatures of only white men, and rolling out to be nearly five feet long. Marshall, though African American himself, likely felt he could be more effective and avoid the predictable ridicule of the press by excluding African Americans and women from the list. The petitioners also responded to the criticism in the news-papers by including only signatures and no marks, which had earlier indicated the illiteracy of some of their supporters. Addressing the especially unfair nature of the law that allowed private individuals to take pigs off the streets in exchange for a reward, the petitioners claimed that Unjust and rapacious men have prowled through several parts of the upper wards, and under colour of this Law seized on the property of the poor, and even appropriated it to their own uses. The city had essentially let loose a swarm of informers upon the defenseless poor.47 After this petition and another were read before the Council, the persuaded aldermen repealed the law.48

Anti-hogites responded in kind, mourning the repeal and calling on voters to oust the alder-men at the next election. One poet, angered by the repeal, mused that the rulers of the city were four-legged. He wrote,

But now the hogs,Those grunting dogs,Have made their sway complete;A voice they haveIn Council grave,And rule in evry street.49

Anti-hogites returned to publishing satirical and humorous pieces in the newspapers ridiculing the governments friendliness toward swine while pleading with the city to reissue a strict hog


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law. The author of the poem again equated the pro-hogites with their livestock, bemoaning the power the poor had in influencing the city government.

Frustrated by the nonpartisan nature of the debates, one critic suggested designating the ticket for aldermen and assistants that contains the names of such as are in favor of the hogs as The Hog Ticket at the upcoming municipal election.50 There were certainly more Republican aldermen voting for the repeal of the hog law than Federalists, but the division was more geo-graphic than political. Aldermen and assistant aldermen from the outer wards typically voted pro-hogite. Representing wards with lower land values, these aldermen counted many hog own-ers among their constituents. In the post-war economy with limited municipal resources for welfare and many constituents struggling, taking away their wards hogs would have probably caused more immediate problems than it would have solved.51

While the aldermen attempted to balance the needs of the citys destitute with the demands of the increasingly vocal anti-hogite faction, Mayor Cadwallader D. Colden considered himself above the fray. Unlike the aldermen, Colden was appointed by the governor rather than elected and therefore not subject to the political pressure of constituents. Descended from an elite New York family, Colden was solidly anti-hog. In 1818, soon after he took office, Colden decided to use his position as judge of the Court of General Sessions to subvert the Common Councils stalemate by calling a grand jury to hear evidence on urban pig-keeping. The jury returned an indictment charging two artisans for the nuisance of keeping hogs on the street.52 One defendant offered no defense and was quickly convicted and charged a nominal fee, but the other, Christian Harriet, declared his innocence and hired lawyers, thereby sending the case to trial.

Mayor Colden hoped The People vs. Christian Harriet would be the legal end for the citys roaming pigs. Harriets lawyers, however, claimed that he had the right to keep pigs in the streets, as it was a practice of immemorial duration and our ancestors had never been troubled with any excessive notions of delicacy on the subject. The attorneys pled with the jury to recog-nize the importance of the pigs, as their exile would cause the poor to be driven deeper into poverty. They argued the case should be dismissed as the Council had repealed the law earlier that year. Mr. Van Wyck, the prosecutor, and Mayor Colden, the judge, argued that despite the absence of a municipal law, the city was still held to English common law precedents against nuisances. Hogs, regardless of their benefit to the poor, qualified as a nuisance, which Colden defined as an offence against the public order and economical regimen of the state, and an annoyance to the public. Apparently Coldens public did not include the hog owners who depended so dearly on these animals. By declaring loose hogs to be a nuisance, Colden was unleashing the authority of the city to limit the hog owners property rights. Nuisance law was one of the primary ways nineteenth-century cities exerted control over private property in order to protect public welfare, however that might be defined.53 Responding to the defenses claim that barring pigs from the streets would injure the poor, the mayor declared, Why, gentlemen! Must we feed the poor at the expense of human flesh? He played on the fears that loose hogs were not only a nuisance but also a threat to the welfare of the citys women and children. With the mayors urging, the jury found Harriet guilty.54

The People vs. Christian Harriet set a precedent that was followed for at least two years after the case. Instead of struggling to pass laws against all pig owners in general, the prosecutors focused on indicting random, individual offenders for their negligence.55 The anti-hogites praised the efforts of the courts in newspaper articles and hoped that the cases would have a significant impact.56 The mayor had used his position as judge to circumvent the Common Councils dead-lock. As one newspaper put it, we must look to our courts for the remedy; it is considered too unpopular for the corporation to meddle with it.57 Mayor Colden found this to be the easiest way to avoid dealing with petitioners and voters who did not support his vision for a pig-free city.


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After three years, it had become apparent that the hog owners had not been frightened into compliance by the threat of indictment. In 1821 a new mayor, Stephen Allen, took office, ready to tackle the hog problem. Realizing that Coldens tactic had been unsuccessful, Allen brought the issue back before the Common Council. The Council then passed a law that required all pigs collected on the street be brought to the Almshouse where they would be served for dinner.58 Though the law was officially on the books, little was done to actually enforce it. A few anti-hogites wrote to the newspapers a month later pleading with the city to take action, claiming that unless [the aldermen] wish to make fools of themselves and expose themselves to the contempt and ridicule of the public, they will cause all their laws to be strictly enforced.59 Determined to make the ordinance effective, the Common Council resolved that it be carried into full opera-tion against the offenders.60

A mere four weeks later, the Council once again ran into problems. The Almshouse Commissioners announced that they had tried to collect the hogs, but the hog catchers had been violently resisted by the owners.61 Mayor Allen called the collectors together a few weeks later and threatened that they either execute the law or forfeit their licenses. When the African American hog catchers resumed their tasks later that week, they were immediately resisted by hundreds of hog owners. Locals assaulted the hog catchers with mud, rotten food, hot water, and broomsticks. A riot had begun.62 The rioters were a diverse group of women and men, mainly made up of working-class Irish and African Americans. One of the possible reasons hog owners resorted to violence was perhaps because a large number of themnamely, the African Americanshad lost the ability to use more customary means of political protest, such as petitioning, with the restriction of their suffrage under the 1821 New York State constitution.63 In response to the riot, the Council limited the hog law so that it excluded the outer wards where resistance was particularly strong.

Anti-hogites belittled the riot as a feeble attempt to oppose the execution of this salutary ordinance.64 Feeble or not, the hog owners were successful. By April 1822, the papers noted that the Common Council indulged the hog owners who openly disregarded the ordinance, and set it at defiance.65 The editors of the Evening Post complained that pigs were still found tram-pling through piles of garbage on the streets a year later in 1823, notwithstanding the prohibi-tions against them.66 The law was as good as dead.

When the city tried to reinvigorate its efforts to collect hogs in 1825, the resistance of the pro-hogites remained strong. The hog catchers were so effectively blocked in the Eighth Ward by Henry Bourden and his neighbors that the law was again considered obsolete.67 Thomas F. DeVoe, a butcher, wrote that he had witnessed many scrimmages that year where the negro hog-catchers, and also the officers who attended them, were either cheated out of their prey, or obliged entirely to desist, . . . [and] almost every woman, to a man, was joined together for com-mon protection in resisting their favorites from becoming public property.68 Additional riots occurred in 1826, 1830, and 1832 following the same pattern with several hundred people emerg-ing each time to block the passage of the hogcart by whatever means necessary. While the anti-hogites continued to complain about the citys inability to implement the laws, the pig owners had successfully impeded the city from enforcing them.69

And then in 1832 cholera struck. The city tried to prevent its spread by cleaning up public spaces and minimizing nuisances. In fact, it was just that zeal to purify the streets that led to a sweep through the city to remove hogs in 1832 and a subsequent hog riot, which was hardly noticed by the newspapers amid all of the panic over the disease. Fear of the epidemics return continued to inspire attention to street sanitation during the summers of the 1830s and 1840s, and the roaming hog population slowly began to diminish.70 Tourists would still mock the conditions of the streets, but anti-hogites stopped complaining as loudly and frequently in the newspapers and government proceedings.71 The pigs were beginning to make an exit.


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It would not be until 1849 that the streets in the developed areas of Manhattan would officially be hog-free. After the start of the cholera epidemic that year, the police, empowered by the Board of Healths Sanitory [sic] Committee, went on a campaign to flush the grunting swine out of the densest parts of the city. The captains of the police districts were instructed to remove all hogs to the public pound with twenty-four hours notice.72 Just four years earlier, New York had estab-lished its first full-time professional police force. These men were, to an extent, responsible for dealing with neighborhood nuisances. In the citys past attempts to eliminate its swinish resi-dents, the mayor and aldermen passed responsibility on to departments and institutions, such as the Almshouse, that lacked the ability to successfully enforce the law. The professional police force made all the difference. Though the owners would not let go of their pigs without a fight, the professional police were immediately more effective. After decades of difficulty, the city finally had the ability to enforce the hog law.

The cholera outbreaks had ultimately sealed the free-roaming hogs fate. By June the police had moved between five and six thousand swine into the northern part of the island. Cholera seemed to follow the swine, striking residents of the more rural wards later that summer. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who had recently lost his son to cholera, erroneously blamed the epidemic on the arrival uptown of twenty thousand hogs.73 The first case of cholera that year occurred at 20 Orange Street in the midst of Five Points, a blighted neighborhood where many of the residents owned swine. A building just two doors down from the tenement had a remarkable 106 hogs. The people who first got cholera even had a spoiled ham set out on their makeshift table.74 While contaminated water was at the root of the epidemic, health officials targeted the sanitation issues of the city more generally, including the street-wandering swine.75

The city had become so dense and its municipal serviceswhether water, sanitation, or sup-port for the poorso lacking that epidemics such as cholera could thrive and affect large por-tions of the population. For several decades anti-hogites had been crafting arguments to convince the municipal government to take action and eliminate hogs from the streets, but in the end a public health crisis was actually what made the difference. Too many lives were at risk and though we now know that the pigs had little to do with the outbreak, it seemed very possible to the terrified city dwellers that they were in part to blame. In the hysteria that followed, the laws finally stuck. Municipal officers and police attacked the general sanitation problems in full force. While in the end they were only able to address a fraction of the public health issues facing the city, they did succeed in clearing New Yorks streets of free-roaming hogs.

The fight was far from over, however. In the 1840s, anti-hogites began voicing complaints about the growing number of piggeries, or property with penned hogs, in the upper reaches of the city.76 These establishments existed mainly between 50th and 70th Streets in the center of the islanda rocky area that locals often referred to as Hogtown or Pigtown. The piggery own-ers likely sold their hogs to the large-scale slaughterhouses that were built just to their south in the 40s, as well as to local butchers. These butcher shops served their surrounding communities and were an important source of cheap meat in poorer neighborhoods that were miles away from the public markets.77

Piggeries were owned primarily by Irish immigrants, though Germans and the occasional African American tried their hand at the business as well. While most owners of free-roaming hogs in decades past used the animals to supplement their income, piggery owners made hog fattening and selling their primary trade. There were other ways to make money in this industry too. The piggery owners collected or paid scavengers to collect offal, bones, and swill from slaughterhouses, hotel restaurants, and the streets. They took these materials that were otherwise considered trash and boiled them in caldrons on their property. They then sold the fat to tallow chandlers and soap makers and the bones to sugar refiners, and fed the remaining slop to their hogs. The smells that rose from the offal- and bone-boiling cauldrons, more than anything else,


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enraged the senses of downtown New Yorkers traveling through the northern reaches of the city.78

The land purchased for the creation of Central Park included many of these piggeries. When Frederick Law Olmsted took his first tour of the park in 1857, he complained that the low grounds were steeped in [the] overflow and mash of pig sties, slaughterhouses and bone boiling works and the stench was sickening.79 Most of the complaints lodged against the piggeries had to do with the extensive smells the area produced, scattering the seeds of disease and death. With the development of Central Park came a rush of real estate investors interested in profiting from these once marginal lands. Once again, the swine and their odors would have to go.80

The social status and ethnicity of the piggery owners were not lost on their critics. A writer from the New York Times described the neighborhood as a group of shanties in which the pigs and the Patricks lie down together while little ones of Celtic and swinish origin lie miscella-neously, with billy-goats here and there interspersed.81 The closeness of the animals and their owners emphasized the perceived depravity and savageness of the area and its residents. Descriptions such as these only helped to fuel Nativist resentment of the Irish in New York. Critics and reformers believed the piggeries were inappropriate in an increasingly refined city and their odoriferous threat to public health should have sealed their fate.

Political stalemates led to the continued presence of piggeries in the upper wards. By the 1850s the pro-hogite and anti-hogite constituencies had shifted. Pro-hogites, or piggery owners, were still made up of poorer Irish immigrants, but there were fewer African Americans and more Germans than earlier in the century. In the Common Council, the division between those for and against urban hogs also shifted, reflecting the starker partisan and ethnic divide in the city as a whole. Tammany Democrats routinely sided with pro-hogites while Whigs and Nativists came out against hogs and their Irish owners.

The heated political rancor over hogs was especially evident in 1854 when the Board of Councilmen passed an ordinance prohibiting swine below 59th Street, with a fine of two dollars per day per swine. In a debate about improving neighborhoods and removing piggeries, the coun-cilmen representing the affected wards were defensive. Councilman Bryan McCahill, a Tammany Democrat of the Nineteenth Ward, who depended on the Irish voters,

denounced those who favored such a proceeding as aristocrats, who, when they moved into the Nineteenth Ward were so poor that they were glad to get a residence near a pig-sty. Now, after they had been Aldermen and Councilmen for a year of two, they had become wealthy and their refined noses couldnt stand the smell. He claimed that the Nineteenth was one of the most healthful wards in the City, and that the Board had no right to drive the pigs out of his Ward.

On the other side of the argument was Councilman John C. Wandell, a commercial merchant representing the Twenty-Second Ward, who saw the pigsties as nuisances: The Twenty-second Ward was improving rapidly, and the people there wished to make it a pleasant residence for those doing business down town. Real estate values were a prime factor in both McCahills and Wandells arguments. As the uptown neighborhoods around Central Park were rising in value, the piggeries were becoming more of an issue. After an hour of fighting, the Council decided to remove the pigs. The ordinance seems to have been barely enforced, however, likely due to a combination of poor funding and pressure from Democratic aldermen who counted piggery own-ers among their constituents.82

In 1859, when Daniel Delavan took office as city inspector, he took direct measures to trans-form the northern wards. He initiated a resolution to ban piggeries, bone boiling, and offal boil-ing south of 86th Street. As soon as the Commissioners of Health approved the resolution, the


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Piggery War began. Delavan seemingly ignored the political strife that had kept previous city inspectors from acting on the piggeries and, in the process, stirred up a hornets nest of politi-cians who warned him to postpone action lest they lose votes from the Irish Democrats in the upper wards. Though Delavan himself was a Tammany Democrat, he nevertheless moved for-ward with his agenda and began the process of full-scale hog removal.83

Delavan sent Richard Downing, superintendent of sanitary inspection, along with fifty-seven inspectors and twenty-nine policemen on a tour of Hogtown. They visited each piggery, ready to confront the notoriously vicious guard dogs and their potentially riotous owners. Instead, they were met mainly by a good deal of loud talk and grumbling . . . accompanied by the deepest bass grunting of the hogs.84 Perhaps the owners saw their removal as imminent or maybe the gang of armed police and inspectors had sufficiently intimidated them. Downing and his men gave the owners three days notice to get rid of their hogs and remove the associated structures (cauldrons, pens, sheds, etc.) before they would return to tear everything down and drive the hogs to the pound. The piggery owners had to act quickly to either relocate their animals or sell them to a butcher.

When the police and health inspectors returned, they came armed with guns, clubs, pickaxes, and crowbars (Figure 2). While residents did what they could to hide the remaining hogssometimes concealing them under beds and linensthe police were persistent and successful. Hogs were driven to the pounds, pens torn down, cauldrons carted off, and the property covered in lime to purify the area of its pestiferous qualities.85

The newspapers used war metaphors excessively, describing the police and sanitary officers as an army of expulsion and their opponents as members of the pork army. They even drew parallels to the recent Crimean War in Europe. With public health arguments on their side and a veritable army of professional police, city officials and anti-hogites no longer felt it necessary to debate whether hogs were a nuisance or a public good. The issue seemed much more black and white since lives were at stake. Journalists portrayed the piggery closures as a battle for the

Figure 2. While the city inspector and police considered the Piggery War to be a success, the process of rounding up the hogs was anything but easy.Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, August 13, 1859.


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protection of the citys health and prosperity. In almost every article, authors described the Piggery War in triumphant terms. The police and health inspectors were equated with war heroes, while the piggery owners were described as backwards, stubborn, and defiant.86 Ironically, it was a war with little violence at all.

Perhaps one of the most defiant members of the pork army was James McCormick, an assistant foreman of a local fire company, who was seen as a leader in the area. He was ridiculed by the New York Times as the king of the offal-boilers and by the New-York Herald as Gen. McCormick, of the pork gentry.87 McCormick threatened the police and inspectors, claiming that he would shoot any man who laid a hand on his property. In the end, though, McCormick removed his hogs and dismantled his pens and sheds before the police had their chance. Instead of fighting the city for his right to keep the animals, it was reported that McCormick, like many of his neighbors, planned to move his business to New Jersey.88 McCormick likely continued to supply New Yorks cheap meat market with pork and ham, just with greater transportation costs.

By September, the Piggery War was mainly over. Delavan declared that they had removed nine thousand hogs, demolished three thousand pens, and confiscated one hundred boilers. While a good number of those hogs were driven to the pound, most were removed by their owners, such as James McCormick, to New Jersey, Westchester, and Brooklyn. The transplantations only increased problems in these areas where local governments struggled to control their own live-stock populations. Hogs brought controversy wherever they roamed.89

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Eighth Ward, where Henry Bourden and his neighbors had fought tooth and nail to keep their hogs in 1825, was nearly devoid of these crea-tures. The only exceptions were the occasional herd ushered from the docks to slaughterhouses or the clandestine hog stowed in someones apartment or basement.90 While a handful of pigger-ies would return to the upper reaches of the city under Mayor Fernando Woods sympathetic administration, their stay was brief.91 For the most part, hogs were no longer a visible presence in Manhattan. The anti-hogites had won.

Hogs had filled an important role in New York ecologically and economically. For a time they kept garbage heaps somewhat under control by devouring what they could in areas often neglected by sweepers. Following the Piggery War, city officials realized the enormous role pigs had played in waste removal when they found themselves struggling to find a place to dump the countless tons of offal that the hogs had once consumed.92 Hogs also helped to keep their owners off the welfare rolls while they struggled with low wages and irregular work in the developing market economy.

The hog controversies exposed a politically active city with growing class tensions. When African American suffrage was limited in 1821 and many pro-hogites consequently lost their ability to effectively petition the Common Council, they took to the streets and fought for their right to use public space. New Yorkers, rich and poor alike, actively pressured the city to protect their interests using whatever means they had available. Swine remained on the streets as long as they did not just because the city government was incapable of enforcing its laws, but also because they were at the center of a dynamic political debate between New Yorkers.

New Yorks filthy streets had cultivated an informal economy and a fertile environment for roaming creatures, and during the first half of the nineteenth century, the municipal govern-ments inability to effect long-lasting change made it possible for the New Yorkers and their animals to continue using the streets as they had before. Despite the anti-hogites litany of argu-ments in petitions and newspapers, their ultimate success came because of factors beyond their control. Cholera outbreaks and the panicked efforts to reform the city in order to prevent similar crises eventually trumped the protests of pro-hogites and led to the hogs expulsion from the city. Left in their wake was a city transformed with a new set of rules for using public space.


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The fights that raged over swine in nineteenth-century New York shaped the landscape of the city. A hog-free New York was marked by parks and promenades, including the celebrated Central Park that was cleared of the piggeries that once occupied its southern end. Olmsted and the Central Park Board of Commissioners quickly passed a set of ordinances banning all live-stock from entering the park and erected two pounds to hold errant animals, whether they were hogs, cattle, goats, or geese.93 Central Park and other public spaces throughout the city were intended for refinement, not for unapproved foraging and grazing. These places were better con-trolled but the battles over their use were far from over. New Yorkers would continue to push the limits and shape the rules governing their public spaces. The controversies over hogs were part of a much longer struggle.94

Nineteenth-century cities, such as New York, wrestled with how to manage public space dur-ing a time of rapid population growth. These were landscapes where the boundaries between urban and rural blurred, and conflicts, such as those over hogs, helped to determine where these lines would be drawn. Cities were and continue to be hybrid spaces, and what it means to be urban is therefore constantly shifting. It is in these contentious moments when decisions are made to incorporate or exclude that the city is ultimately defined.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or pub-lication of this article.

Funding

The author received financial support for the research of this article from the Howard R. Lamar Center for the study of Frontiers and Borders, the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Notes

1. After the city began enforcing the hog law in the summer of 1821, they faced immediate resistance when the catchers went to work. By the summer of 1822 most of the outer wards were exempt from the hog law due to the actions of hog owners and the compromises made by their Aldermen. Hogs in the Streets, New-York Evening Post, June 12, 1821; Extract from the Report, New-York Evening Post, July 12, 1821; Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1784-1831 (New York: Published by the City of New York, 1917), July 21, 1821, 11:722; Hogs Running at Large in the Streets, New-York Evening Post, August 7, 1821; Police, New-York Spectator, August 7, 1821; Minutes of the Common Council, June 10 1822, 12:430; Minutes of the Common Council, June 24, 1822, 12:447; Minutes of the Common Council, July 8, 1822, 12:460-61.

2. Abner Curtis was appointed register and collector of dogs in 1811 and remained in that position for seven years. During his first year on the job, Curtis witnessed the first dogcart riot in 1811. Another dogcart riot occurred in 1818, following the end of his term. With the threat of rabies very real, dogs were another urban animal considered a nuisance when running loose. Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 224-27.

3. Quotes from Hog Law, New York Spectator, April 8, 1825. Regarding Henry Bourdens role in the riot: Court of Sessions, Weekly Commercial Advertiser, April 19, 1825; People vs. Henry Bourden, New York City Court of General Sessions Records, New York Municipal Archives, Roll 11. Henry Bourden is likely the Henry Borden listed in the 1830 and 1840 U.S. censuses, living in the Eighth Ward. 1830 United States Federal Census, New York Ward 8, New York County, New York, Roll 97, 273; 1840 United States Federal Census, New York Ward 8, New York County, New York, Roll 302, 334.


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4. Hog Law, New York Spectator; Minutes of the Common Council, March 14, 1825, 14:365; Minutes of the Common Council, March 28, 1825, 14:410-11.

5. New Yorks hogs have been the subject of a handful of articles and chapters. In The Road to Mobocracy, Paul Gilje places the hog riots of the 1820s and 1830s in the context of a string of popular riots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and argues that the battles over hogs show a growing divide between lower-class needs and middle-class sensibilities. Hendrik Hartog uses the prosecution of a hog owner to show the ways municipal powers and legal arguments were transforming during this period in both Public Property and Private Power and Pigs and Positivism. In A Delicate Balance Howard Rock shows how artisans used hogs as part of a larger informal economy to make ends meet during tough economic times. Finally, John Duffy repeatedly reminds readers how hogs were a constant pres-ence in the antebellum city and a reminder to residents and historians of how inadequately New York dealt with public health issues. This article builds on the work of these historians to reveal how these political, economic, and public health struggles came together to shape public space and the urban environment. Through this it is possible to understand more about how public space was used and ulti-mately controlled. Paul Gilje, Road to Mobocracy; Hendrik Hartog, Pigs and Positivism, Wisconsin Law Review (July/August 1985): 899-934; Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870, Studies in Legal History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 139-42; Howard B. Rock, A Delicate Balance: The Mechanics and the City, The New-York Historical Quarterly 63 (April 1979) 93-114; John Duffy, A History of Public Health in New York City, 1625-1866 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1968).

6. Anti-hogite and pro-hogite are terms that I have coined as shorthand for these two competing interests. 7. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), 252. 8. Urban environmental historians increasingly are challenging the idea that cities are exclusively social

artifacts. Authors such as Ari Kelman, Matthew Klingle, and Michael Rawson, among others, have written about cities in ways that challenge the nature/culture dichotomy and invite readers to consider the presence and influence of nature on cities as well as the reverse. Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). See also Christine Meisner Rosen and Joel Arthur Tarr, The Importance of an Urban Perspec-tive in Environmental History Journal of Urban History 20 (May 1994): 299-310.

9. For the Dutch, see I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909 (New York: R. H. Dodd, 1915-1928), March 15, 1640, 4:92; June 27, 1650, 4:121; November 15, 1651, 4:124-25; July 28, 1653, 4:140; November 15, 1651, 4:24-125; Duffy, A History of Public Health, 11-2. For the English, see Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1675-1776 (New York: Dodd Mead & Company, 1905), March 23, 1703, 2:258; July 20, 1708, 2:358; October 14, 1758, 6:152; November 22, 1770, 7:244. Virginia Anderson looks at the havoc hogs and other livestock wreaked in the British colonies of New England, though she does not dwell too much on urban animal issues. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

10. Jane Allen, Population, in Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 920-24; The People vs. Isaac Baptiste, New-York Daily Advertiser, August 16, 1820; Charles H. Haswell, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian (1816-1860) (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1896), 86.

11. Rock, A Delicate Balance, 134; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Seth Rockman looks at a similar transition in early republican Baltimore. Seth Rockman, Scraping by: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2009).



12. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke, a conservative Whig politician in Britain, referred to the French masses as the swinish multitude when he warned readers of the perils of allowing the lower classes to gain political power. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York, Penguin Classics, 1982). The phrase was consequently picked up by critics and reappropriated by laborers and radical writers. Its notoriety made it a well-known phrase in antebellum America and elsewhere. Surely the New York writers reveled in the way they were able to apply it to their particular situation.

13. For more on the ways hogs have been used symbolically in politics and writing, see Carl Fisher, Politics and Porcine Representation: Multitudinous Swine in the British Eighteenth Century, LIT 10 (2000): 303-26; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 45-59, 147-48; Brett Mizelle, I Have Brought My Pig to a Fine Market, in Scott C. Martin, ed., Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America, 1789-1860 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 184; Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The Eng-lish Pig: A History (London: The Hambledon Press, 1998), 1-28.

14. Address of the Swine, New-York Evening Post, February 21, 1818.15. Charles Henry Wilson, The Wanderer in America, or Truth at Home (Thirsk, England: Henry Masterman,

1824), 18-9. Many American cities, such as Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Baltimore, as well as many smaller cities, had roaming hog populations. One traveler, who referred to hogs as Americas favorite pet, declared that he had not yet found any city, county or town where [he had] not seen these lovable animals wandering about peacefully in huge herds. Ole Munch Raeder, Correspondent from the Homeland, in Oscar Handlin, ed., This Was America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 217. See also Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, Travels in the United States, Etc. During 1849 and 1850 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851), May 16, 1849, 13. Ironically, despite these trav-elers claims that hogs were a unique problem to New York or the United States, many Europeans cities also struggled with their own roaming hogs, though to a lesser extent. Malcolmson and Mastoris, The English Pig, 40-4.

16. New York City Common Council Papers, 1670-1831, City Inspector Petitions, Municipal Archives Collections, Roll 65, 1818.

17. Horses make an interesting comparison to hogs, as they were equally, if not more, present on the streets of the city, yet they rarely got the kind of negative attention that hogs received until much later in the century when they were being replaced by automobiles. Not only were regal horses a status symbol for wealthier New Yorkers, they were considered living machines, as Clay McShane and Joel Tarr have termed them, and useful for rich and poor alike. They were much less divisive than hogs. Examples of authors complaining about the disgrace brought on by hogs include: Hogs in the Streets, New-York Evening Post, April 27, 1819; Swine, New-York Evening Post, November 3, 1819. On the role of horses in the urban landscape: Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Clay McShane, Gelded Age Boston, New England Quarterly 74 (August 2001): 274-302.

18. For more on the middle-class and wealthy American quest for refinement, see Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1993). There are many compari-sons to be drawn between the way anti-hogites perceived lower-class New Yorkers as wrongly imposing on public spaces and the way conservationists saw locals as desecrating the National Parks in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. See Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 2003); Louis S. Warren, Hunters Game (Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press, 1999); Theodore Catton, Inhabited Wilderness (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); and Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

19. See Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 44-71; Wilentz, Chants Democratic.


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20. Until 1821 the Common Council controlled the cost and weight of bread sold within the city limits with a bread assize. Politically volatile, the debate over the bread assize lasted for over two decades and led to bakers strikes and many disputes. The prices of other provisions not traditionally controlled by the city continued to rise and fall, but mostly rise, making it difficult for many of New Yorks destitute to purchase much at all. What E. P. Thompson and other historians have called the moral economy was gradually disappearing and the poor had to devise new ways to deal with erratic pricing of basic needs. New York (N.Y.) Common Council, Laws and Ordinances Ordained and Established by the Mayor, Aldermen, and Commonalty of the City of New-York, in Common Council Convened (New York, T & J. Swords, 1817), 51-6; Assize of Bread, New-York Herald, March 15, 1815; The Poor . . . New-York Herald, March 18, 1815; Bread, New-York Evening Post, for the Country, March 5, 1822; Rise of Milk, New-York Herald, November 30, 1816; Milk, New-York Herald, December 7, 1816; Soup House in Frankfort-Street, near the Arsenal, New-York Herald, February 19, 1817; Society for the Prevention of Pauperism in the City of New York, Plain Directions on Domestic Economy (New York: Printed by Samuel Wood & Sons, 1821).

21. Raymond Mohl in Poverty in New York, 1783-1825 deems this first quarter of the nineteenth century to be a transition period for American cities. The city was growing and its prosperity increasing, but the municipal services were not developing at the same rate. The city corporation which served the compact, stable community of the eighteenth century no longer met the needs of many thousands of immigrant and native newcomers spread over a more expansive urban community. These services expanded in a haphazard fashion, in response to emergencies and immediate pressures. Peter Gluck and Richard Meister accentuate that the growth that occurred after the Revolution due to an increase in life span, fertility, and immigration resulted in a certain level of instability that the government agencies had to account for when developing institutions and defining their role. At the same time, this period saw a growing division between what was urban and rural, physically, economically, and culturally. Complementing these studies, Seth Rockman tracks the controversy over urban welfare systems and the important yet insufficient role they played as a safety net for laborers in Baltimore during the early Republic. See Mohl, Poverty in New York, 3-13; Peter R. Gluck and Richard J. Meister, Cities in Transi-tion: Social Changes and Institutional Responses in Urban Development (New York: New Viewpoints, 1979), 3-9, 36-43; Rockman, Scraping by.

22. Remonstrances against Law to Prohibit Swine from Running at Large, New York City Common Council Papers, Municipal Archives, Box 60V, Folder #497 Flat, May 19, 1817.

23. It is difficult to determine how New Yorkers were able to identify their own hogs based on available records. Unlike in cities or towns where hogs were legal, there do not seem to be any ear mark registers associating owners with specific symbols imprinted on their animals ear. The behavior of hogs going home at night is recounted by Charles Dickens in the 1840s. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, in Park Benjamin, ed., The New World (New York: J. Winchester, 1842).

24. Remonstrances against Law to Prohibit Swine from Running at Large; The Petition of the Sub-scribers Inhabitants of the City of New York, New York City Common Council Papers, 1670-1831, February 2, 1818, Roll 67.

25. To the Mayor and Corporation of the City of New-York, Republican Watch-Tower, June 13, 1809, 3.26. For the Public Advertiser, Dirty Streets, No. 1, Public Advertiser, April 11, 1810, 2. For an overview

of urban American sanitation, see Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, 1880-1980 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981), 13-20.

27. Minutes of the Common Council, May 18 ,1812, 7:146-47; see also, Minutes of the Common Council, November 14, 1814, 8:84

28. See, for instance, Minutes of the Common Council, June 1, 1818, 9:668; Communication, New-York Evening Post, June 29, 1819.

29. New York, May 15, 1799, Daily Advertiser, May 15, 1799; Correspondence between Peter Burtsell and John Pintard, Inspector of Health, January 20, 1806. New York City Common Council Papers, 1670-1831,



Roll 29; Minutes of the Common Council, May 28, 1810, 6:209; Public Health, New-York Evening Post, August 12, 1825; Cholera Statistics, New York Mercury, August 15, 1832; City Intelligence, New York Herald, May 18, 1849; Isaac Candler, A Summary View of America: Comprising a Description of the Face of the Country, and of Several of the Principal Cities (London: T. Cadell, 1824), 22-4.

30. Quote of Ole Munch Raeder, a Norwegian lawyer who lived in New York in 1847. Ole Munch Raeder, Correspondent from the Homeland, 217; Health of the City, New-York Daily Advertiser, October 29, 1819.

31. Griskin is the lean part of a hogs loin. The Swinish Multitude, New-York Evening Post, October 10, 1816.32. For examples of boys riding hogs and getting into trouble, see The People v. Christian Harriet,

in D. Bacon, ed., The New-York Judicial Repository (New York: Gould and Banks, 1818), 262-63; Swine, New-York Evening Post, March 17, 1818; More Serious Accidents from Hogs, New-York Evening Post, October 29, 1818. For descriptions of victimized women and girls, see A Congratulation, New-York Evening Post, December 31, 1817; The People v. Christian Harriet, in The New-York Judi-cial Repository, 262; Communication, New-York Evening Post, June 26, 1819; New-York May 28, 1810, The New-York Evening Post, May 29, 1810; To the Editor of the Evening Post, The New-York Evening Post, June 28, 1819; Yesterday Afternoon, New-York Columbian, July 1, 1820.

33. Mr Stone, Northern Whig, August 1, 1815.34. For more on women and household economy, see Jeanne Boydston, Home & Work: Housework, Wages,

and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Rockman, Scraping by, 158-93; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

35. Allen, Population; Charles Lockwood, Manhattan Moves Uptown: An Illustrated History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976), 50-71.

36. The Common Council had been debating the wording of a new law respecting free-roaming swine in the months before Hammonds petition, but progress came to a standstill on October 21, 1816, when it was laid on the table. Hammonds petition may have been an attempt to break the deadlock and get the ordinance passed. Minutes of the Common Council, November 5, 1816, 8:670; May 17, 1817, 9:130. The archivist at the Municipal Archives of New York was not able to locate the original petition. Rock makes reference to the fact that the petition was signed by about two hundred names in A Delicate Balance.

37. The Swinish Multitude, Evening Post, May 26, 1817. This article traces the history of the proposed hog laws from 1816 through May 1817, accounting for the possible reasons for its delay. The Common Councils motives for tabling the ordinance are not mentioned in their minutes. Minutes of the Common Council, May 17, 1817, 9:130.

38. Remonstrances against Law to Prohibit Swine from Running at Large.39. The Swinish Multitude, New-York Evening Post, May 26, 1817.40. Common Council, New-York Evening Post, May 21, 1817; Howard Rock and Paul Gilje, Sweep

O! Sweep O! African American Chimney Sweeps and Citizenship in the New Nation, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser. 51 (July 1994): 507-38. For more on the free blacks of New York City, see Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); and Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Approximately half of the petition signers were African American, based on New York State census records: Alice Eicholz and James M. Rose, eds., Free Black Heads of Households in the New York State Federal Census, 1790-1830 (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1981).

41. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 116-18; Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850: The Shadow of a Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 88, 217-18.

42. Humor remained an important way for the anti-hogites to address what they saw as an embarrassment to the city. It served as an entertaining and artful means for criticizing the city while also wooing poten-tial anti-hogites. The Hogs and the Corporation, New-York Evening Post, May 27, 1817; The Hogs and the Corporation, New-York Herald, May 28, 1817.


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43. Minutes of the Common Council, June 23, 1817, 9:215-16; Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy, 225.44. Quadroped Toleration, Intolerable, New-York Columbian, July 23, 1817; The Yankee in New-York,

Exile, July 26, 1817; Dogs and Hogs, Albany Argus, August 22, 1817; Communication, New-York Evening Post, September 13, 1817; For the New-York Evening Post, New-York Evening Post, September 3, 1817; Minutes of the Common Council, October 7, 1817, 9:310; Swine, New-York Herald, October 11, 1817; A Congratulation, New-York Evening Post, December 31, 1817; A Law Respecting Swine, New-York Columbian, January 15, 1818, 9:3.

45. Minutes of the Common Council, December 15, 1817, 9:393.46. Repeal of the Law Prohibiting Swine Running at Large, New-York Evening Post, December 29, 1817.47. The Petition of the Subscribers Inhabitants of the City of New York, New York City Common Council

Papers, 1670-1831, February 2, 1818, Roll 67. The race of the signers was determined by checking them against New York State census records: Eicholz and Rose, Free Black Heads of Households.

48. Minutes of the Common Council, February 2, 1818, 9:462.49. Hogs, New-York Evening Post, February 16, 1818. Anger at the repeal can also be seen here: Repeal

of the Swine Law, New-York Columbian, February 10, 1818; Swine Once More, New-York Evening Post, February 21, 1818.

50. Swine Once More, The New-York Evening Post.51. Information about the party affiliation of the aldermen can be found in D. T. Valentine, Manual of the

Corporation of the City of New York for 1854 (New York: McSpedon and Baker, Printers, 1854).52. Mayors during this period served as judge of the Court of General Sessions as part of their position as

mayor. Correspondent, New-York Evening Post, December 7, 1818; New-York Judicial Repository, 258-59.

53. William J. Novak, The Peoples Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 60-71, 191-233. In addition, nuisance law and its use in the judicial system is discussed in Melosi, The Sanitary City, 21-2.

54. New-York Judicial Repository, 264, 269. For a more detailed analysis of this case from a legal historians perspective, see Hartog, Pigs and Positivism; Hartog, Public Property and Private Power, 139-42.

55. One other such case includes the indictment of Isaac Baptiste, following the complaint of a grocer who had a run-in with Baptistes hogs. The article discussing this case makes reference to the fact that at least twenty such cases had been heard prior, all ruling hogs to be a nuisance. The People vs. Isaac Baptiste, New-York Daily Advertiser, August 16, 1820.

56. Hogs Running at Large in the City, New-York Evening Post, July 1, 1819; Hogs, New-York Daily Advertiser, April 7, 1819; Hogs Avaunt! New-York Columbian, January 7, 1819; Hogs in the Streets, New-York Evening Post, April 27, 1819; The People vs. Isaac Baptiste, New-York Daily Advertiser.

57. Salutary Conviction, New-York Evening Post, June 9, 1820.58. Minutes of the Common Council, April 30, 1821, 11:600; Proceedings of the Common Council, New-York

Evening Post, May 1, 1821. Permission from the state legislature to seize privately owned pigs for the Almshouse was requested on January 8, 1821: Minutes of the Common Council, January 8, 1821, 11:444. The law was passed on April 30, 1821, and reported in the newspapers immediately following: Minutes of the Common Council, April 30, 1821, 11:600; Proceedings of the Common Council, New-York Evening Post, May 1, 1821.

59. The Law Respecting the Running of Swine, New-York Spectator, June 1, 1821; Hogs in the Streets, New-York Evening Post, June 12, 1821. Issues with the enforcement of laws were typical during this period and complaints frequent in the newspaper. The problems stemmed from a combination of insuf-ficient funding, lack of municipal services, and poor organization of the police force.

60. Minutes of the Common Council, June 25, 1821, 11:704.61. Minutes of the Common Council, July 21, 1821, 11:722.



62. Hogs Running at Large in the Streets, New-York Evening Post, August 4, 1821; Police, New-York Spectator, August 7, 1821; From the Daily Advertiser, New-York Evening Post, August 4, 1821.

63. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 133. Harris argues that it was at this point that a division grew between middle-class and working-class blacks over acceptable means for political activism. In Road to Mobocracy, Gilje contextualizes these hog riots as being part of a larger set of public demonstrations in nineteenth-century New York. He attributes the growing violence of riots in the 1820s and 1830s to the increasing economic disparity and transforming ideas of public good. Perhaps restriction of suffrage rights also impacted the changing tenor of these events.

64. New-York Spectator, August 7, 1821.65. In Proceedings of the Corporation . . . , New-York Evening Post, for the Country, April 5, 1822.66. Cleanliness, New-York Evening Post, for the Country, July 15, 1823.67. Haswell, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, 130; People vs. Henry Bourden, New York City Court of

General Sessions Records (NYCCGSR), Municipal Archives Collections, April 9, 1825, roll 11; People vs. Allaire & Allaire, NYCCGSR, April 9, 1825, roll 11; People vs. Thompson and Phalen, NYCCGSR, April 11, 1825, roll 11.

68. Thomas F. DeVoe, The Market Book: Containing a Historical Account of the Public Markets in the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Boston (1862; New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 482-83.

69. If the Laws . . . , New-York Evening Post, September 8, 1826; Hog Law, New-York Evening Post, September 8, 1826; Where Is the Hog Cart? New-York Evening Post, February 27, 1827; DeVoe, The Mar-ket Book, 482-83; New-York Evening Post, July 2, 1830, quoted in Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 5:1693; Gilje, Road to Mobocracy, 231; Hog Thieves, New-York Evening Post, February 20, 1829.

70. Communication, New York Mercury, August 1, 1832. The New York State census for 1835 put the hog population of New York County at 11,903 and the 1845 census logs 8,591. The numbers have decreased significantly since the estimate of twenty thousand in 1820. Of course, it is difficult to trust these censuses wholly, as most New Yorkers were breaking laws by keeping hogs on the streets and likely not eager to admit their holdings to the census takers. It is possible that the census takers were counting the hogs kept legally in pens. Even if that is the case, the number of complaints about hogs in the newspapers and city documents declined significantly during this period, likely reflecting a diminishing number on the street. New York State, Census of the State of New York, for 1835 (Albany: Printed by Croswell, Van Benthuysen & Burt, 1836); New York State, Census of the State of New York, for 1845 (Albany: Carroll & Cook, 1846).

71. Some of the more famous tourists who mocked New Yorks hog problem during this period include Charles Dickens and Henry David Thoreau. Dickens, American Notes; Henry David Thoreau, in Walter Harding and Carl Bode, eds., The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 112.

72. New York (N.Y.) Board of Health, Minutes, 1798-1896, [microform]. NYC Municipal Archives. Roll 7, May 17, 1849.

73. Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 62. For more discussion of uptown swine, see Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 113; New York by Sun-LightThermometer 90 in the Shade, New York Herald, July 12, 1849; Twelfth-WardCholera Incitements, New-York Daily Tribune, August 6, 1849; The Cholera Report of Last Week, New York Herald, August 6, 1849; Health of the CityThe Cholera Report of Last Week, New York Herald, August 13, 1849.

74. The Cholera in Orange-St., New-York Tribune, May 18, 1849; The Epidemic, New-York Tribune, May 19, 1849; The Cholera, New-York Tribune, May 21, 1849; City Intelligence, New York Herald, May 18, 1849; Our Cholera Sermon, New-York Daily Tribune, August 3, 1849; Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 105-06.


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75. Those in the medical profession argued over whether quarantines or sanitary solutions were best for preventing epidemics such as cholera. More on these debates can be found in Rosenberg, The Cholera Years; and Duffy, A History of Public Health.

76. Practical Lesson in Politics, New-York Daily Tribune, August 21, 1845; Board of Aldermen, New-York Daily Tribune, June 22, 1847; The Cholera Report of Last Week, New York Herald, August 6, 1849; Health of the CityThe Cholera Report of Last Week, New York Herald, August 13, 1849; EmigrationPublic Health, New York Herald, April 29, 1850.

77. Helen Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

78. The Bone Boiling Establishments of New York, New York Herald, July 20, 1859.79. Frederick Law Olmsted, Passages in the Life of an Unpractical Man, in Charles E. Beveridge and

David Schuller, eds., The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: Vol. III Creating Central Park, 1857-1861 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 84-94. Hogtown was just south of Seneca Vil-lage, which was mostly populated by free African Americans. The Present Look of our Great Central Park, New York Times, July 9, 1856; Rosenzweig and Blackmar, The Park and the People, 59-91.

80. Practical Lesson in Politics, New-York Daily Tribune, August 21, 1845; Results of the War upon the Piggeries, New York Times, September 20, 1859.

81. Metropolitan Nuisances, New York Times, June 5, 1858.82. Common Council Proceedings, New York Times, July 3, 1854; Common Council Proceedings,

New York Times, August 11, 1854; Municipal, New York Times, November 27, 1855. The city was paying for Central Park through special assessments made on the property surrounding the park that stood to gain in value. Real estate values and nuisances that could bring them down were therefore a big issue for those bearing the cost of this public works project. Robin Einhorn discusses a similar political situation in Property Rules. Robin Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

83. Affairs of the City Inspectors Office, New York Times, July 7, 1859; News of the Day, New York Times, July 7, 1859; The Bone Boiling Establishments of New York, New York Herald, July 20, 1859. City Intelligence, New York Herald, July 26, 1859.

84. Further Particulars of the Hogtown War, New York Herald, July 29, 1859; The Storming of Hogtown, New York Herald, July 27, 1859; City Intelligence, New York Times, July 7, 1859.

85. The Storming of Hogtown, New York Herald.86. The Offal and Piggery Nuisances, New York Times, July 27, 1859; The Storming of Hogtown,

New York Herald; The News, New York Herald, July 27, 1859; Another Raid upon the Piggeries, New York Times, August 9, 1859; The Public Health, New York Herald, August 13, 1859.

87. The Offal and Piggery Nuisances, New York Times; Further Particulars of the Hogtown War, New York Herald, July 29, 1859.

88. City Intelligence, New York Times, July 28, 1859.89. Removal of the Up Town Piggeries, New York Herald, September 5, 1859; Condition of the Streets

The Right Men for the Right Places, New York Herald, August 16, 1859; Down with the New York Piggeries in Our CityLet Inspector Delavan Keep His Hogs at Home, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 9, 1859; The News, New York Herald, August 15, 1859.

90. Pigs remained on the minds of the citys lawmakers when the first Tenement House Act was passed in 1867, forbidding any horse, cow, calf, swine, pig, sheep or goat from being kept in a tenement or lodging-house, or, in other words, a poor mans residence. Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem: Including the Report of the New York State Tenement House Com-mission (New York: Macmillan & Co, 1903), 308.

91. General City News, New York T

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