Greenwich Village | Page 5

believer in mesmeric influence,"
plied his trade in early Manhattan. He seems to have belonged to that
vast army of persons who seriously believe their own teachings even
when they know them to be preposterous. Perkins made a specialty of
yellow fever, and insisted that he could cure it by hypnotism. That he
had a following is in no way strange, considering his day and
generation, but the striking point about this is that, when he was
exposed to the horror himself, he tried to automesmerise himself out of
it. After three days he died, as Dr. Francis says, "a victim of his own
temerity."
And still the gallows stood on the Field of Sleep, and also a big elm
tree which sometimes served as the "gallows tree." Naturally, Indians
and negroes predominated in the lists of malefactors executed. The
redmen were distrusted from the beginning on Manhattan,--and with
some basic reason, one must admit;--as for the blacks, they were more
severely dealt with than any other class. The rigid laws and restrictions
of that day were applied especially rigidly to the slaves. A slave was
accounted guilty of heavy crimes on the very lightest sort of evidence,
and the penalties imposed seem to us out of all proportion to the acts.

Arson, for instance, was a particularly heinous offence--when
committed by a negro. The negro riots, which form such an
exceedingly black chapter in New York's history, and which horrify our
more humane modern standards with ghastly pictures of hangings and
burnings at the stake, were often caused by nothing more criminal than
incendiarism. One very bad period of this sort of disorder started with a
trifling fire in Sir. Peter Warren's house,--the source of which was not
discovered,--and later grew to ungovernable proportions through other
acts of the same sort.
As late as 1819, a young negro girl named Rose Butler was hanged in
our Square before an immense crowd, including many women and
young children. Kindly read what the New York Evening Post said
about it in its issue of July 9th:
"Rose, a black girl who had been sentenced to be hung for setting fire
to a dwelling house, and who was respited for a few days, in the hope
that she would disclose some accomplice in her wickedness, was
executed yesterday at two o'clock near the Potter's Field."
And in Charles H. Haswell's delightful "Reminiscences," there is one
passage which has, for modern ears, rather too Spartan a ring:
"A leading daily paper referred to her (he speaks of Rose) execution in
a paragraph of five lines, without noticing any of the unnecessary and
absurd details that are given in the present day in like cases; neither was
her dying speech recorded...."
Thomas Janvier declares that she was accused of murder, but all other
authorities say that poor Rose's "wickedness" had consisted of lighting
a fire under the staircase of her master's house, with, or so it was
asserted, "a malicious intent." One sees that it was quite easy to get
hanged in those days,--especially if you happened to be a negro! The
great elm tree, on a branch of which Rose was hanged, stood intact in
the Square until 1890. I am glad it is gone at last!
Old Manhattan was as strictly run as disciplinary measures and rules
could contrive and guarantee. The old blue laws were stringently

enforced, and the penalty for infringement was usually a sharp one. In
the unpublished record of the city clerk we find, next to the item that
records Elbert Harring's application for a land-grant, a note to the effect
that a "Publick Whipper" had been appointed on the same day, at five
pounds quarterly.
Public notices of that time, printed in the current press, remind the
reader of some of these aforementioned rules and regulations. We read
that "Tapsters are forbid to sell to the Indians," and that "unseasonable
night tippling" is also tabooed; likewise drinking after nine in the
evening when curfew rings, or "on a Sunday before three o'clock, when
divine service shall be over."
I wonder whether little old "Washington Hall" was built too late to
come under these regulations? It was a roadhouse of some repute in
1820, and a famous meeting place for celebrities in the sporting world.
It was, too, a tavern and coffee house for travellers (its punch was
famous!) and the stagecoaches stopped there to change horses. At this
moment of writing it is still standing, on the south of Washington
Square,--I think number 58,--with other shabby structures of wood,
which, for some inscrutable reason, have never been either demolished
or improved. Now they are doomed at last, and are to make way for
new and grand apartment houses; and so these, among the oldest
buildings in Greenwich, drift into