Salutary and Well-Intentioned Violence: The 1858 Quarantine Fires in Staten Island

Abstract

Salutary and Well-Intentioned ViolenceThe 1858 Quarantine Fires in Staten Island Andy McCarthy (bio) In September 1858, residents of Tompkinsville, a village in the town of Castleton in Staten Island, set fire to the buildings of the nearby New York Marine Hospital, which was known as the Quarantine. The hospital had been operating in the neighborhood for sixty years, receiving sick passengers from incoming vessels to New York Harbor. Newspapers called it “The Quarantine War,” “The Quarantine Riot,” “The Staten Island Arson,” “The Burning of the Quarantine,” “The Staten Island Rebellion,” and “The Quarantine Imbroglio.” Local citizens feared the spread of yellow fever and were enraged by the perceived lack of empathy shown by city and state officials, while Quarantine health officers argued that local property owners used the threat of yellow fever as an excuse to eradicate the hospital in order to simply increase neighborhood real estate values. The people justified the violence as a civic duty. The state identified the fires as acts of lawlessness, and Governor John A. King declared that Staten Island was in a “state of insurrection.”1 The Quarantine fires were consistent with a polarizing and politicized derangement that characterized the American masses in the late 1850s. In New York City and elsewhere in the United States, the justification for acts of violence by citizens increasingly reflected the brinksmanship of a complex moral and civic duality that would climax in the Civil War. For example, when John Brown raided the military arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, anticipating an uprising of the enslaved population of the South, Brown and his raiders took hostages and murdered five locals. While Brown and his devotees believed he was a crusader for freedom, U.S. authorities apprehended the Kansas Free-Soiler and hanged him as a terrorist. “He was already more than a man; he was a legend. In fact, there were two competing legends.”2 “It is well known,” wrote a reporter for Harper’s Weekly, “that at bottom politics had [End Page 123] much to do with the burning of the hospitals . . . their continuance was a source of pecuniary gain to the political party to which the governor belongs, and their abatement a cardinal point with the democracy.”3 In its time, the Quarantine endured an ongoing pattern of mass paranoia, misinformation, and threats of destruction. The circumstances of its burning were schismatic, prescient, and ironic, and constitute a revealing example of how justice and democracy were interpreted by Americans in the decade before the “War between the States.” Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. “Attack on the Quarantine Establishment, on September 1, 1858,” Harper’s Weekly, September 11, 1858. courtesy of the new york public library picture collection. Origins Between 1791 and 1807, yellow fever was reported to have caused the deaths of five thousand people in New York City.4 From August to November 1798, an outbreak in Lower Manhattan [End Page 124] killed 2,086 inhabitants.5 The following year, the New York State legislature passed the Quarantine Act, “to provide against infectious and pestilential diseases,” including punishments against doctors and ship masters who failed to report sick passengers to the Quarantine hospital, which at the time located on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor, between Manhattan and Staten Island.6 The state had used the right of eminent domain to obtain title from the Church of St. Andrew to thirty acres on the northeast shore of Richmond County. Then, Staten Island was a thinly populated county, with 4,564 inhabitants enumerated in the 1800 U.S. Census.7 By rowboat or sailboat, a trip to Manhattan from Staten Island might take from two to five hours.8 The new Quarantine was located just north of the Narrows of New York Bay, an area described in 1805 by the city inspector as “in a situation as airy and salubrious as any that can well be conceived.”9 At the entrance was the St. Nicholas building, a three-story brick structure in which quarantined individuals were housed.10 Atop the entrance was a wooden statue known to the locals as “Sailor Jack.” Over the next five decades, the operation...