Local Problem or National Failure? Murder in New York

Eric H. Monkkonen. Murder in New York City. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xii + 238 pp. Notes and index. $29.95.

Patricia Cline Cohen. The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. viii + 432 pp. Notes and index. $27.50 (cloth); $14.00 (paper).

Karen Halttunen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. xiv + 322 pp. Notes and index. $29.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

On August 25, 1836, the Edgefield (S.C.) Advertiser reprinted an editorial from the New York Constitution on its front page. Noting the recent acquittals of several murder suspects, including Richard P. Robinson, on trial for the murder of Helen Jewett, the editorial bemoaned the state of criminal justice in New York City. It approvingly repeated one resident's lament that "with all our boasts about our laws and government, a city is not to be found in the civilized world where there is less security for life, and property, than here," then concluded, quoting the same source, with the ominous query: "how long will it be before every man will have to keep arms in his house to protect himself from the midnight marauder, and about his person when he goes out into the streets?" ¹

Eric Monkkonen's study of homicide rates in New York City demonstrates that the Constitution's fear of a murder epidemic was baseless. Far from being at risk from murderous marauders, throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, New Yorkers had little reason to worry about homicide. Instead, they lived in a singularly safe part of the country; according to Monkkonen, until 1958 residents of New York City ran less risk of being the victim of a homicide than did people in the United States as a whole (p. 9, fig 1.1). While the editorial was correct to suggest that other parts of the "civilized world" were even safer--its readers would have been more secure had they moved to London (p. 173, fig. 7.4), Liverpool (p. 174, fig. 7.5), or some other European city (p. 155, fig. 7.1)--if freedom from murder was their main concern and they wanted to remain in the United States, New York was an excellent place to live. More to the point given the editorial's hints of a rapidly escalating crisis, Monkkonen's data also makes it clear that the Constitution's readers were exceptionally safe in 1836. Murder rates in New York had declined sharply over the 1820s and remained low throughout the 1830s and into the early 1840s (pp. 20-1, fig. 1.6).

Based on Monkkonen's reconstruction of who murdered whom, it is also apparent that it was unreasonable for the Constitution to conclude that the death of Jewett, a twenty-three year-old prostitute, apparently at the hands of her nineteen year-old lover, portended a shift in those trends. Young men like Robinson posed no particular threat to antebellum New York society. In contrast to the situation in the late twentieth century, when males between the ages of 15 and 30 committed most of the city's murders, throughout the nineteenth century men Robinson's age were no more prone to murder than any other group of men between the ages of 10 to 50 (pp. 101-2, fig. 4.2). Viewed as potential victims, the Constitution's Whig readers (presumably middle- and upper-class men) were also quite safe. ² Although the limitations of his data keep Monkkonen from directly addressing the issue of class, his evidence demonstrates that nineteenth-century murderers tended to kill acquaintances (p. 143), and that men in particular typically killed other men of roughly the same age and social status, most often at work or in public spaces (pp. 105-133).Snug in their beds...