The Cincinnati Courthouse Riot

By Steven J. Rolfes

The true story of three days of violent unrest that exploded in nineteenth-century Ohio—one of the most destructive riots in American history.

In 1884, Cincinnati was wracked by three days of violence. Nurtured by natural disasters, overtly corrupt governments, and politicians jockeying for power—and sparked by murder and a massive miscarriage of justice—the 10,000-person strong riot left more than fifty dead, hundreds injured, and the courthouse burned to the ground. The Cincinnati Courthouse Riot brought an end to one regime and ushered in the rise of the notorious political boss George Cox, who ruled the city in a virtual dictatorship for the next thirty years.

Thorough and insightful, The Cincinnati Courthouse Riot paints a vivid picture of a growing city during the Gilded Age. It examines the 1855 Know Nothing Riot in the city and its impact, the staggering effects of the Great Ohio River Flood, the frenzy surrounding two gruesome killings, and the impact of political machination on the citizens of Cincinnati. The three nights of rioting are discussed in detail, including the role of the militia and their use of the Gatling gun on the rioters. With a deft hand, Steven J. Rolfes weaves together the economic and political forces that erupted in mass violence and changed the face of a city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781455621880

Steven J. Rolfes

Steven J. Rolfes, a lifelong Ohioan, is a freelance writer and volunteer docent at the Cincinnati History Museum. He is the author of nine books on history, including The Cincinnati Court Riot, Cincinnati Landmarks and Cincinnati Under Water: The 1937 Flood, and is coauthor of Cincinnati Art Deco and Historic Downtown Cincinnati. For years, he hosted a radio talk show on the supernatural, Bolgia 4. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife and two children.

Book preview

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Downtown Cincinnati in 1884. (From the collection of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County)

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Chapter 1

Cincinnati and the Gilded Age

. . . Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned . . .

–William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

His friends had told him not to go there, but he just had to see it. This was history unfolding before his very eyes, something that one day he could tell his grandchildren about.

Briggs Swift, pork dealer, strolled up Main Street with one of his friends, unable to believe the incomprehensible sights around them. He felt safe walking here; after all, he lived only two blocks away on Eighth Street. He had walked this street many times in his life—but, of course, never right down the middle of the road.

It was eerie. All of the gaslights had been broken in the violence. Shards of glass from shattered shop windows littered the normally pristine sidewalks. Debris was everywhere. He thought he even saw splotches of blood on the cobblestones, but he could not be sure.

Ahead of him at the end of the street was a sight that he never thought he would see: the Hamilton County Courthouse—the bastion of justice, of order, of civilization—was now just a mass of charred wood and iron beams twisted from the terrible heat. Officials rooted through the debris, vainly searching for records or pieces of evidence in criminal trials. With this fire, civilization in his beloved hometown was gone, burned to cinders through brute force and madness.

Between Swift and the burned-down courthouse was another unimaginable scene outside of strife-torn Ireland or Khartoum. In the middle of Main Street was a cluster of wagons all turned on their sides. These were fortified with barrels, boxes, and planks of wood, whatever the defenders could scrounge up to keep the crowd at bay. Behind the barricade he could see the heads of helmeted policemen, the kepi caps of the Ohio Militia, and a forest of rifles tipped with bayonets.

Sticking out from the makeshift blockade was the barrel of the Gatling gun, the very same weapon that had killed so many people the night before.

Behind him, as it had been for the last two nights, was a crowd. Some were merely curious; some were dressed in their Sunday finery with frightened children holding their hands. But others were drunk, angry, and shouting. Rocks, bottles, and other wreckage were already flying over his head towards the barricades. Things were starting early.

He was so fascinated by the unbelievable sight that somehow he did not hear the people, both from behind him and in front of him, all of them shouting for him to turn back. He had inadvertently crossed an invisible line and now was approaching too close to the defenses.

The militia was nervous. After all, these were not professional soldiers in the regular army but common working men who had put on their uniforms when the governor of Ohio ordered them to deploy to Cincinnati to stop a riot. They had no idea how terrible it would be. None believed that everything would completely fall apart in Cincinnati. If it could happen here, it could happen in their hometowns as well. To make matters even worse, when they learned the reason for the riot, many of the soldiers wanted to throw down their weapons in disgust and join the mob. In fact, one company from Dayton had simply turned around and left.

While these citizen-soldiers sympathized with the rioters and their cause, they also saw many of their own number and quite a few policemen injured; some, like the militia’s Captain Desmond, were even killed. They were nervous; they did not want to hurt anyone walking so close. Some shouted and waved their arms, ordering Swift and his companion to go back.

Most of the militiamen could see that Swift was just a spectator. After all, they had been running off sightseers all day long. Still dressed in their Sunday clothes, whole families had come downtown from church to gawk at them as if they were a circus act.

One soldier from behind the barricade, undoubtedly young and frightened, let his nervousness get the better of him. He pulled the trigger.

Swift felt the bullet enter his body. He convulsed in shock as he suddenly found himself lying on his back on the street. There was shouting. Someone ordered officially, Cease fire! Another voice called out, Don’t shoot! He felt strong arms pick him up; he could see a white handkerchief tied to a stick. He was given a piece of cloth to hold over his wound as he was literally tossed into a passing hack. 57 West Eighth, someone told the driver, directing him to Swift’s residence.

Oh yes, Briggs Swift would definitely have something to tell his grandchildren!

••

Undeniably, nothing in history ever stands alone. All major historical events are the result of often ostensibly unrelated, minor forces. Once set into motion, these seemingly random components inevitably lead to some defining event. For example, a world war might be the result of the assassination of a nobleman, which in turn is the result of a poorly-conceived plot, which itself is the result of economic discrimination and national subjugation. And said assassination is made possible when a chauffeur makes a wrong turn in a narrow street.

Cincinnati’s Courthouse Riot was in no way a spontaneous event, although it seemed so at the time. Pressure had been building up like a tea kettle, finally boiling over in a frenzy of violence and bloodshed. Historic events are like the gears of a clock: everything must come together perfectly for it to strike the hour. A cursory reading of history only tells us that in March of 1884, Cincinnati broke out in one of the most violent riots in the history of the nation. In the midst of protests against judicial corruption, the Hamilton County Courthouse was burned down, and order was established only after a Gatling gun was unleashed on the mob. On the surface, this makes no sense. Why would a rational community such as Cincinnati degenerate into such bloody violence overnight?

The truth is that it did not. One cannot comprehend such a bewildering occurrence without first considering the stage upon which this horrific drama was played out.

It was the time known to history as the Gilded Age (1866-1914), a phrase derived from the title of a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Warner. It was a transitional time in American history, a period in between the wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It followed the violence of the Civil War and preceded the unthinkable bloodshed of World War I. It was a time of relative peace, save for a series of conflicts with Native Americans and the Spanish-American War, which did not even last four months.

Characterized by restless progress, the Gilded Age was a time of great economic expansion and turmoil, of growth and depression, of immigration forcing a nation to redefine what it was to be an American. The United States had been following its manifest destiny, moving ever westward, settling its own open spaces, and battling native inhabitants for control of the prairies. When this was done, the nation moved toward imperialism, following Europe’s example of planting colonies in distant lands.

Technical advancement fueled great economic growth. Railroads connected a nation eager to expand. Men like Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, Nikola Tesla, and many others broke new ground in the fields of science and engineering. A Pennsylvania engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor greatly increased production at Midvale Steel Works factory and helped to create a modern economy through the use of automation.

Taylor’s innovation propelled an aggressive world of big industry. By 1903, one of Edison’s engineers, Henry Ford, forever changed America with his assembly-line automobiles. This was the age when powerful businessmen such as George Pullman, J. P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and others had become the new royalty.

Marching alongside the upswing of big business was the rise of organized labor. The Gilded Age was the incubator for the modern labor movement, marked by conflicts that sometimes resulted in violent and bloody strikes. The 1877 Railroad Strike was only ended when President Hayes sent troops into rioting cities. The notorious Haymarket Riot in Chicago brought down the labor organization Knights of Labor, while the Pullman Strike, another nationwide railroad strike, also required the intervention of federal forces.

Further complicating matters for the struggling labor unions was a massive influx of immigrants more than willing to work for low wages. Earlier waves of immigrants had come from northern and central Europe. Starting in the 1850s, many Irish flocked to American cities fleeing oppression and the devastation of the Potato Famine. Despite facing prejudice and discrimination, life was better for them in America than in their beloved homeland. In their wake, similarly being forced out of their lands by prejudice, wars, and poor economic prospects, were waves of Jewish, Italian, Greek, and Slavic immigrants. By and large, these newcomers flocked to the big cities of the industrial North. In the West, Chinese men were brought in to construct the railroads, but until 1950 they were denied the rights of full citizenship.

As these immigrants clustered together in ghettos of large cities, crafty politicians who gained the trust of these communities were certain to receive mass blocks of ethnic votes. This helped to create and sustain one of the most distinctive features of the Gilded Age: the political machine.

These groups issued patronage positions and favors to their supporters, including lucrative government contracts. Bribery, corruption, and backroom deals were commonplace. The most famous of these organizations was the New York Tammany Hall machine, a Democratic powerhouse run by the talon grip of William Boss Tweed.

Cincinnati’s neighbor to the north, Cleveland, was under the thumb of Marcus Alonzo Hanna, known as the Red Boss. Thomas Pendergast had control over Kansas City, while nearby Col. Ed Butler controlled wards in St. Louis. Louisville, Kentucky, was run by one of Gen. John Hunt Morgan’s men, John Henry Whallen (who had been educated in Cincinnati). A film was made based on the life of Boston political boss James Michael Curley (John Ford’s 1958 The Last Hurrah starring Spencer Tracy). Out West, Abe Ruef, boss of San Francisco, went to prison, as did New York’s Boss Tweed. Down in Dixie, Theodore Bilbo was not content with a mere city but ran the entire state of Mississippi. Nearby, Kingfish Huey Long had similar clout in Louisiana.

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Cincinnati in the Gilded Age. (From the collection of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County)

By 1883, with the Gilded Age in full swing, a massive eruption of the volcano Krakatoa near the Indonesian island of Sumatra caused thousands of deaths and altered the climate of the world. Few people realized that another volcano was brewing much closer to home, this one in Cincinnati.

At this time, Cincinnati was only five years away from celebrating its grand centennial. Founded in 1788, the new settlement on the northern bank of the Ohio River grew rapidly as it was protected by the presence of Fort Washington. The decision to locate the fort there, thus creating a city out of a small village, was based on its strategic location. It was a conflux of waterways, being directly across from Kentucky’s Licking River.

As fortune would have it, the settlement was also located midway between the origin of Ohio River at Pittsburg and the Mississippi River. The fledgling settlement, originally known as Losantiville, grew quickly. As the commander of the garrison was a member of the Cincinnatus Society, the city’s name was dutifully changed to Cincinnati in 1790.

Prior to the time of the Civil War, Cincinnati was the sixth largest city in the nation, topping both St. Louis and the Windy City, Chicago. It proudly referred to itself not only as the Queen City but also as the Paris of America. It was all due to the river, but in time even that would change.

Geographically, the city is like a bowl: a large basin area surrounded by extremely steep hills. For nearly a century, these hills kept growth of the new city confined as horses pulling wagons had great difficulty ascending the peaks.

However, in 1872, the Mount Auburn Incline opened for service, with thousands of people standing in line, waiting for hours to ride a railroad-type car up the side of the hill. Four other inclines quickly followed. Now the hillsides were no longer insurmountable, with new neighborhoods sprouting up above the smoke and crowds of the city basin.

There was one very unique feature to Cincinnati’s landscape: the Rhine. Before the Civil War, the Miami and Erie Canal was constructed, linking the Great Lakes to the Ohio River. This manmade waterway proceeded south towards the city; then just to the north of downtown, it made a sharp turn to the east, emptying to the Ohio in the bottoms area below the hillside community of Mount Adams. The crowded neighborhood just north of this waterway was soon filled with immigrants from Germany, many of whom were fleeing the social upheavals of the failed revolution of 1848. The canal was soon dubbed the Rhine, and the German residents were known as living Over-the-Rhine, as one had to take a bridge over the canal to reach the community. This soon became the name of the area.

On April 29, 1853, the people of Cincinnati had no idea that in the crowded tenements near the intersection of Sixth and Plum Streets a king was born in their midst. This was the birth of George Barnsdale Cox, a man who would someday become one of the greatest and most powerful political bosses in the entire nation. His reign would be ushered in by the 1884 Courthouse Riot.

Cox’s father was an immigrant from England who arrived in 1846. He worked hard as a common laborer, trying desperately to support his wife, George, one other son, and two daughters. The strain was too much, and he died when George was seven years old.

It is interesting to note that the first year of George Cox’s life was to coincide with a riot—and that this riot, just like the Courthouse Riot that would usher him into power, was connected to Christmas.

A few blocks away from the Coxes’ small apartment sat the Catholic cathedral St. Peter in Chains. During the Christmas of 1853, Archbishop Purcell was hosting the papal nuncio Cardinal Gaetano Bedini. The cardinal was extremely unpopular with Protestants; his presence had infuriated the anti-Catholic sentiments in a number of cities. On Christmas Day, a mob of Protestants, most of whom were German, marched on the cathedral, intending to lynch the cardinal. It took more than a hundred policemen and some extremely vicious fighting to disperse the mob.

Chapter 2

Dress Rehearsal for a Riot

While the 1884 Courthouse Riot was a turning point in Cincinnati history, it was not the first to take place in the city. Twenty-nine years earlier, in 1855, the Basin Area of the city erupted in out-and-out civil war that could be quelled by neither elected officials nor the militia.

It was the clash of two groups that hated each other. North of the Miami and Erie Canal, in the crowded neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine, was the German faction. This was the first generation of 48ers, those who fled Central Europe when their Nationalist Revolution was crushed by the mighty Prussian military machine.

In the election of April 1855, the Germans favored their candidate for mayor, James J. Faran on the Democratic ticket. A Cincinnatian educated at Miami University, Faran had been a member of the Ohio legislature and was an editor of the pro-immigrant Democratic newspaper the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Faran’s opponent for the office of mayor was James Pap Taylor. Taylor was also a journalist, the inflammatory editor for the Times newspaper. Closely aligned to the Know-Nothing Party, he was outspoken in his denunciations of Catholics, immigrants in general, and Germans in particular.

The Know Nothings were members of a secret society who received their bizarre name from the practice of responding to questions from outsiders with the response I know nothing. The party was violently anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant. Rising out of New York in the 1840s, their first targets were Irish. The conflict in Cincinnati was with both the Irish and the Germans.

Cincinnati was only one of several cities to experience violence from this movement. In the very same year, twenty-two people died in Louisville, Kentucky. Baltimore experienced riots in the next three years. Fr. John Bapst, who built the first Catholic Church in Bangor, Maine, was tarred, feathered, and ridden out of the town of Ellsworth on a rail.

The Cincinnati Know-Nothing Riot concerned the possession of a cannon. Admittedly, most American cities were able to conduct mayoral elections without the use of field artillery—but this was Cincinnati.

The description of the incident given in the Cincinnati Daily Commercial would apply to many Cincinnati elections in the nineteenth century: Several people were cut slightly, and quite a number are about this time afflicted with the headache, occasioned by a ‘rush of brains to the head’ incident to the application of hard wood to the skull.¹

In the Fifteenth Ward, Councilman Andress, one of the judges stationed at the poll, was embroiled in a heated argument with a voter. The dispute was settled when the esteemed councilman pulled a pistol on the man. Meanwhile, down on the river, the steamboat Daniel Boone pulled up to the dock and unloaded three hundred people from other cities all ready to have a few drinks and vote for Taylor and the Know-Nothing ticket. In the Fourth Ward on the eastern edge of the city, people were being threatened with violence if they even dared to attempt voting.

While this type of headache may have been standard operating procedure for all Cincinnati elections, voters were fully charged for this particular event. Groups of men from either the Know-Nothings or the German fraternal groups began to arrive at the polling stations around 3:00 a.m. to assure their presence, protect their constituents, and intimidate voters for other candidates. When dawn came and the polls officially opened, the turnout was very heavy; by noon, three-quarters of the people who slipped by the unofficial security squads had voted.

The trouble erupted in the Eleventh Ward, the western half of Over-the-Rhine which extended