A Mob for the Dead
by Emmet Stackelberg
In April of 1788, a mob of workers and freed slaves broke into a temporary shelter on the site of the still-under-construction New York City Hospital on Broadway and discovered a collection of preserved dead bodies and body parts. They believed that the bodies, in various states of dissection, had been stolen from cemeteries. They were right, for the most part.
By the late eighteenth century, the creation of a wholly American medical system, one not reliant on British doctors and facilities, necessitated an education apparatus fed by a regular supply of cadavers. In 1788, only five years after the war, this apparatus was still being erected. Columbia College opened its medical school in 1792, ten years after Harvard’s began. As the facilities were getting built and the doctors began taking pupils, the problem of obtaining bodies to dissect found its solution in the grave sites of the city’s poor — especially the Negro Burial Ground, which was created after Trinity Church banned black graves in its yard. It took up about six acres of land just outside the city limits, abutting the muddy northeastern shore of the Collect Pond, an early reservoir for the city. It had been in use for decades, and would continue to be used until a little before New York provided for legal manumission of slaves. (Most slaves continued to serve their former masters as indentured servants, no longer property but still bound to a household.)
The graveyard was convenient for nighttime corpse-hauling runs, just a few steps from the Old Hospital. In the hush of the city’s outskirts, medical students as young as fifteen years old could swiftly reach the burial ground and identify the most recent gravemarkers, which were carved wood, etched with the dates and ages. The bodies had to be fresh; what good was a body whose insides had begun to decay? In winter, the ground was harder, but the bodies stayed fresher for longer. The students dug and struggled and eventually hoisted the corpses out. Then a panting, short walk through the vapors coming off the pond and into the temporary shack at the Old Hospital. This process came to be called Resurrection.
The secret theft of bodies by doctors was made an open one in February of 1788, when an anonymous notice appeared in the New York Daily Advertiser relating that “a number of young men” had recently visited a private gravesite and taken “the corpse of a child out of the grave, and attempted that of an aged person.” It ends with a warning to young, grave robbing men that “perhaps their lives may be the forfeit of their temerity, should they dare to persist in their robberies.” But the robberies continued. The Daily Advertiser noted that “the interments not only of strangers, and the blacks, had been disturbed, but the corps of some respectable persons were removed.” Finally something snapped. The paper reported what happened next this way:
On Sunday the 13th inst. a number of boys, we are informed, who were playing in the rear of the Hospital, perceived a limb which was imprudently hung out of a window to dry; they immediately informed some persons — a multitude soon collected — entered the Hospital; and in their fury destroyed a number of anatomical preparations: some of which, we are told, were imported from foreign countries — one or two fresh subjects were also found — all of which were interred the same evening.
The hospital then was only a wooden shack, a temporary structure until the original building, damaged during the war, could be reconstructed. When the mob finally broke through into the wooden rooms, they acted with swift and blunting rage. The mob was only quelled by the intervention of Mayor James Duane, who placed the students and doctors in the town jail, which sat across from the Commons — now City Hall Park. A crowd which had gathered to search the doctors’ homes were soothed for a few hours by Governor George Clinton and the Mayor, but by the afternoon, had gathered again in a more vicious spirit, this time outside the jail; they wanted the doctors and students. A small militia was called, then another. The members of the second militia had their guns taken right out of their arms by the crowd.
The rioters did what they could to destroy the jail. Provost Prison was four stories of imposing stone, with a small Georgian-style cupola on top. The rioters destroyed the windows and took down part of the jail’s fence. The governor and mayor called in a larger militia, which stood at attention as rocks and bricks flew at them until the commander gave an order to fire. This, finally, scattered the crowd. It also left a handful of dead rioters and a great deal of wounded ones. Doctors peering through shattered windows four stories up would have seen bodies dotting the street, either in agony or in silence.
With the riot now over, and new bodies now in need of resting places, advertisements began to appear in the papers. Charles McKnight, a prominent surgeon, posted notice that “he hath not been concerned, privy to, or promoted the removal of any dead bodies from any church-yard within the city.” His students swore the same in a separate ad. Readers may have spotted a technicality: the Negro Burial Ground was neither a churchyard nor within the city. The city soon assembled a Grand Jury to investigate how the riot, the first since the Revolution, had started. In his address opening the jury, Chief Justice of New York Lewis Morris spoke of the riot’s cause as being “some very indecent and unpious plunder of dead bodies from their graves.” He went on: “If this report is founded in truth, which undoubtedly it is, you will readily account for the resentment that has seized the minds of the remaining relatives of such deceased persons.”
The Grand Jury’s decision, whatever it was, does not seem to have survived, but a resolution was eventually sought through policy. A new act was passed in the state, making grave robbing illegal and the issue faded from memory. Doctors, their reputations bruised and their supply of corpses choked off, turned to a new set of professionalized grave diggers, who came to be known in the nineteenth century as Resurrectionists, or “Sack-’em-up Boys.” Charles McKnight died three years after the riot, at age 41, and was buried just outside of Trinity Churchyard. Presumably, his body was not disturbed.
The Doctors’ Riot of 1788 was, at its core, a violent rejection of medical science’s view of the value of the bodies of the poor. Doctors regarded them as necessary specimens, essential for the training that would spread their science and the research that would advance it; the rioters viewed them as remains of friends and family that deserved an undisturbed resting place. The doctors’ position conspicuously applied almost entirely to the remains of slaves, freedpeople, and the poor — perhaps in their minds the closest thing to criminals’ remains. In death, as in life, bodies delineate difference.
In 1991, construction workers digging through layers of Manhattan infill rediscovered the Negro Burial Ground, and intact graves within it. An exhaustive excavation effort followed. Bodies that were no longer bodies — now only remains — were recovered painstakingly, their names forever lost on the long-decayed wooden gravemarkers. Where they lay, a National Monument now stands, the result of protests and public battles over how such a valuable piece of Manhattan would be used. The visitor’s center on Duane Street, another exhibit, called “Reclaiming Our History” regards the dead not as specimens but as stories. Next door in the Ted Weiss Federal Building, a bronze sculpture by Frank Bender looks out with three faces forensically reconstructed from actual remains. One, a young woman, had been buried with a musket ball stuck deep in her ribcage, but we don’t see this. The sculpture leaves their bodies unseen, except for the hands.
“It Was a Riot” is an occasional series about riots in American history.
Emmet von Stackelberg is a writer living in Cambridge.