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Grave Robbing And The Doctors Riot of 1788

December 20, 2016 by Miguel Hernandez 4 Comments

new york hospitalThe origins of this civil disturbance began in early February of 1788 and broke out in mid April of that year. Actually the City’s doctors did not riot as the name implies. However, it had its origins in the illegal procurement of corpses of free blacks and slaves and poor whites by doctors and medical students at an unaccredited surgical training school in lower Manhattan led by Richard Bailey, a Connecticut-born doctor who had studied in London.

Apparently it was expensive and almost impossible for the school to provide corpses for its teaching purposes and the professors and students resorted to stealing them from nearby Trinity Church yard and other local cemeteries including the one for people of color then known the “Negro Burying Ground”

As it happened in early February of 1788, the increased number of corpses being stolen from this place alarmed the black community and on February 3rd, a group of New York City freedmen petitioned the Common Council to take action to stop the desecration of the graves and bodies of their black brethren. The petition was largely ignored, and no effort was made to stop the exhumations.

However, on or about April 16th , a group of white children were playing outside Richard Bailey’s training school which operated out of rented space at Kings College (now Columbia University) where a student named John Hicks, was dissecting an arm. Allegedly, the student, waved the arm out a nearby window, at the children, and told a boy whose mother had recently died that it belonged to her. The boy then ran home to inform his father of this. Upon exhuming his wife’s coffin and finding it empty, he gathered a group of friends and neighbors and led them to the school where they broke in and found several bodies in various stage of mutilation. Eventually, the number of protestors substantially grew. They surrounded the building, attempted to destroy it and attacked the professors and students. At this point, Mayor James Duane and the sheriff, arrived at the scene with a small detachment of municipal watchmen to escort the faculty and medical students to jail where they would be safe from the fury of the mob.

However the next day, an even larger crowd descended on Kings College where they confronted several of the alumni including Alexander Hamilton. He pleaded with the crowd for restraint but was shouted down and pushed aside and the crowd ran into the school, where they searched the entire place for signs of dissection. Finding no bodies, the crowd then marched down Broadway to the jail to get at the medical students and faculty. When they arrived they found Governor George Clinton, Mayor Duane, and other prominent politicians gathered there to urge them to disperse. The crowd’s t refusal forced the governor to call out a company of militia. They had orders not to fire but when Secretary of Foreign Affairs, John Jay, and Revolutionary War hero, General Baron von Steuben, were hit with a bricks and rocks, the militiamen opened fire. Initially, at least three rioters and three members of the militia were killed, but by the time the riot was quelled several hours later the final death toll was estimated at 20.

This is a part of a series about 18th and 19th century racial and ethnic riots in the city of New York. The terms Negro and Black are used here in their historical context.

Illustration: New York City Hospital, extracted from Pen and Pencil Sketches of the Great Riots by HEADLEY, courtesy Wikimedia user Metilsteiner.

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Filed Under: History Tagged With: Alexander Hamilton, Black History, Cemeteries, Columbia University, George Clinton, Medical History, New York City, riots

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. C. F. William Maurer says

    December 21, 2016 at 12:06 PM

    Thank you for a fine article – and something I had never read in about in detail

    Reply
  2. Loren Rhoads says

    July 15, 2017 at 10:15 PM

    What an amazing story. Thank you for sharing it. I’ve heard that there are “leftovers” from the dissection classes buried on the main quad at the University of Michigan, bodies that were robbed from graves to train doctors. Don’t know if it’s true, but it sparked my curiosity about the intersection between medical training and grave robbing in this county.

    Reply
  3. Mercer Langston says

    September 27, 2017 at 2:30 PM

    Mr. Hernandez

    Very much appreciate this article. I have actually been working on a series of poems about the African Burial Ground in general and have written one poem about the Columbia Grave Riots. You have given more detail to my project. I was wondering if you got any of your information for this piece from any New York Public LIbrary resources, specifically from the Schwarzmann building on 42nd street? If you might contact me quickly as I am on a deadline for Friday regarding my poems and might want to explore what you’ve unearthed if it relates to this article and the new york public library.

    Sincerely

    Mercer

    Reply
  4. Martha Robertson says

    September 5, 2023 at 10:59 AM

    Thank you for this article. Dr. Richard Bayley (his name was spelled with two y’s) was also the father of America’s first native-born Catholic Saint, Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton. I am one of his many 4x-great granddaughters. The doctors of this age were met with a conundrum of trying to locally educate physicians (previously they had had to train in Europe), and bodies for teaching anatomy were very hard to come by as religious convictions forbade the donation of one’s body to science. There was no refrigeration, so the decomposing bodies had to be dissected quickly and lessons learned even faster before the body reached a point of degradation where they had to be reinterred. It’s safe to say many bodies were needed and used to teach anatomy and surgery, and sadly, grave-robbing was considered a necessary evil to support the common good.

    Reply

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