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 Introduction: The Dark City on the Edge of Civilization A CHICAGOAN, WRITING ON THE EVE OF THE WORLD’S FAIR OF 1893, a portentous event that opened the city to the eyes of the world, nostalgically looked back on a simpler age, a time before the Civil War and the remarkable period of industrial expansion following the Great Chicago Fire that doomed the pastoral village life they had once enjoyed to a collection of fragmented and distant memories. They remembered an earlier era when antebellum Chicago seemed to move at a slower, gentler pace; when the spires of churches soared above the roofline of commercial buildings on Lake Street, and the town seemed more of a summer holiday resort basking under clean, cloudless skies, buffeted by gentle winds blowing off of Lake Michigan, than the polluted city of reeking tenements and smokestacks, with its uncollected horse dung and discarded waste moldering on the cinder-block streets of the so-called modern age. “I wish I could picture to you what to me, was a veritable paradise,” wrote Abby Farwell, the eldest daughter John V. Farwell, dry-goods merchant, silkstocking business leader, city official, and one of Chicago’s most prominent early builders. “Not even New York in the 1870s with her brownstone fronts could equal Chicago’s marble fronts built of white limestone. There was no smoke to discolor them. Around each house was a flower garden and trees also. Oh those marble fronts! How they glistened in the sunshine and in the moonlight shone resplendent in their pale glory. More like a New England village was early Chicago.”1 Late in life, these old settlers who had ventured westward toward the prairie settlement in the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s looked back upon forgotten places and little-known incidents stirring nostalgic longing, but they were saddened by the 1 2 Introduction relentless grind of urbanization, the push of industry and commerce, and the slums, municipal graft, and escalating street crime that consumed the city. John L. Wilson remembered there was “good fishing in the river and far within the present city limits the prairie chicken shooting began, and there were plenty of them. We were almost all young men from 20 to 30, unmarried and full of goshheaditiveness [sic] and all pulled together when anything was up. In short it was more like a large family out here on the edge of civilization and men were virtuous and women happy—what few of them, 28 according to my list, of sweet 16 and over, all unmarried.”2 Unrefined and increasingly bifurcated, Chicago in the antebellum period was a city of puzzling contradictions. On the one hand, its great commercial houses, its halls of justice, and its municipal offices were filled with Northern men and abolitionists scheming and contriving to deliver the state’s favorite son, Abraham Lincoln, to the White House to protect the Union from the Southern hotheads threatening war; but at the same time, the city was awash in “Copperhead” sentiment and rumblings of sedition. Destined to organize a political-criminal enterprise whose underpinnings extended far into the twentieth century, Michael Cassius McDonald drifted into Chicago during the early years of the Civil War in order to strike his fortune as a “sporting man.” The city was full of “bummers” (drifters, cardsharps, bunko operators) and Southern refugees formerly engaged in the Mississippi riverboat trade, until the outbreak of war forced them to flee north to escape conscription in the Confederate Army. In a twenty-five-year period spanning some of the worst era of political chicaneryandwholesalegraftandplunderintheWindyCity ,McDonaldwastarredby Republicans, Protestant clergymen, and the reform press as the unelected ruler of Chicago, dictating to the Democratic Central Committee the nominations of boodlers (elected politicians plundering public monies), cardsharps, and saloon owners personally known to him that could do him some favors—his handpicked coterie anointed for the county and municipal offices—while threatening political reprisals and ruin to reform independents who dared to defy him. As his reputation grew, McDonald was aptly described as “King Mike.” He was clever and cunning and a symbol of “wide open” Chicago, with its reputation as a free-and-easy kind of place: tolerant of newcomers and their imported vices and peccadilloes, less genteel in attitude than the older cities of the East, and more Southern in character and outlook than any other comparably sized metropolis above the Mason-Dixon line. Reports of “gambling hells” cropping up along the lakefront shoreline, escalating street crime...

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