vol. 28, no. 2 - vol. 29, no. 1 || patrolmen and peelers: immigration, urban culture, and 'the...

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

Patrolmen and Peelers: Immigration, Urban Culture, and 'The Irish Police' in Canada and theUnited StatesAuthor(s): William JenkinsSource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 28/29, Vol. 28, no. 2 - Vol. 29, no. 1 (Fall,2002 - Spring, 2003), pp. 10-29Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25515425 .

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WILLIAM JENKINS

Patrolmen and Peelers:

Immigration, urban culture, and 'the Irish

police' in Canada and the United States

Abstract Ireland influenced the history of North American policing through two

principal means: ideas forged in experience, and people in the form of immigrants.

Examining these intersections by way of a cross-national study of two cities reveals

a distinction between the Irish Protestant constable in Toronto and the Irish Catholic

patrolman in Buffalo. This essay discusses this distinction with reference to larger themes such as urban political power, immigration patterns, and the construction of urban cultures in these two cities from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

Resume L'lrlande a marque les forces de police de I'Amerique du Nord. Elle a exerce

cette influence notamment a trovers les gens, c'est-a-dire les immigrants d'origine

irlandaise, et les idees, inspirees de leur experience. Une analyse transnationale des

deux villes revele des differences entre le policier irlandais protestant de Toronto et son

homologue catholique de Buffalo. L'article situe ces differences dans un cadre plus

large en examinant le pouvoir politique, les structures d'immigration et la formation de cultures urbaines dans ces deux villes, de 1850 jusqu'au debut du XXe siecle.

I. On the eve of St. Patrick's Day in 1880, patrolman Hoffman of Buffalo's no. 1 precinct was assaulted on

the Michigan Street swing bridge, in the heart of the city's waterfront

district, by Patrick Dwyer and his gang. A heavily working-class and Irish

part of Buffalo, the area's port-centred industries had fostered a rough-and

tumble boarding house and saloon subculture. Ohio Street, leading to the

bridge from the northwest, was lined with places housing young and intem

perate Irishmen who worked mostly in the grain elevators across Buffalo

creek. Crimes and skirmishes, in and out of doors, were a frequent feature

of the social world of an area that was geographically and economically

marginalized from the bustling downtown. In this particular instance,

Hoffman's attempted arrest of Dwyer was responded to by the latter's

companions who egged him on to 'Throw the peeler in the creek.'1 The term

'peeler' was one used widely in the Irish homeland and on this evidence,

became part of these emigrants' linguistic baggage. Though Hoffman was

evidently not Irish, his reinforcements Thomas Haley, Anthony Collins, and

Richard Walsh, certainly were. Dwyer, who had just served a six-month

term, was on his way back to the lock-up.

10 CJIS VOLUME 28 NUMBER 2, VOLUME 29 NUMBER 1



Mil J Mi 1'^mi iJ i1 .MJilWHIlMlIll^^ ^?%i;- Mi^ilv* ^ ^ _ -^ j^gs^^

'Peelers' were so named after Sir Robert Peel (1781-1850), former

Chief Secretary of Ireland and the key figure in modern British policing

history. Another irony of the above story is that, had he lived long enough, Peel would have found little in the organization of Buffalo policing (and

doubtless American law and order in general) that echoed his own grand

designs for the policing of England and Ireland fifty to sixty years earlier.

Firstly, he would have abhorred the enduring link between the often-abrasive

arena of local politics in Buffalo and the composition of the city's police force that engendered high turnover rates and corrupt practices. Secondly,

observing that the police were drawn from their own local communities, he

would have questioned why the state rather than the municipality was not

in charge of the organization and also why officers with emotional roots

that were more distant from the communities they policed could not be

appointed. These American officers were hardly authentic 'peelers.'

Casting an eye across the Niagara River towards Ontario, Peel

would have expected its British imprint to reflect a different tradition of

policing from Buffalo, one that specifically derived from his own initiatives

at the imperial centre. If he had visited Toronto in 1880, he would have

taken heart from the fact that 'ex-peelers' from Britain comprised a signifi cant presence on that city's force. Peel would also have been interested,

and probably amused, by the view of at least one visitor from the Buffalo Courier newspaper to the Canadian city who described, with some praise,

the Toronto constable's appearance as "precisely like a London bobby, or

'bawby' as they delight to call him."2

Buffalo Police parade, May 23,1892. JENKINS PATROLMEN AND PEELERS n



JOHN J. GEARY. JoKN \V. RYAN.

CHARLES V. LYNCH. JAMES R. CARROLL. CHARLES II. \VHITC<>MB.

SERGEANTS OF THE FIRST AND SECOND PRECINCTS.

In truth, though, Ireland looms as large (if not larger) than London

when one considers the origins of Peel's ideas for effective policing and

their geographical dissemination. Seeking to curb radicalism in 'disturbed'

areas of rural Ireland in the early nineteenth century, he established an

island-wide Police Preservation Force in 1814, which evolved into the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) by 1836 (a training depot at Dublin's Phoenix Park

was completed six years later).3 The key characteristic of the RIC, armed

and government-controlled, was that of a semi-military gendarmerie that

represented the authority of Parliament in a colonial setting.4 Learning from

such experiments, Peel introduced the Metropolis Police Improvement Bill

in 1829 that formed the London Metropolitan Police.5 Thus we have two

different models for urban policing, an American one that remained locked

within the democratic framework of urban local politics and a British

Canadian counterpoint that emphasized distance and professionalism.

But mapping the intersections between Ireland and the history of

North American policing requires that attention be given not only to ideas

and practices, but also to people in the form of Irish immigrants and their

descendants. At the annual dinner of the Irish Protestant Benevolent

Society on March 16, 1900 in Toronto, the well-travelled Rev. William

Patterson, a Derryman who was the resident preacher at Cooke's




Presbyterian church in the city, remarked that "If it was not for the Irish,

what would the United States do for their Presidents and policemen?"6 Patterson's presidential reference referred to descendants of Ulster

Protestants such as Andrew Jackson, of course, but it is unlikely that he was

identifying the same group as comprising the burgeoning body of law

enforcers in American cities (though the situation in his own city was quite

different, as we shall see). In fact it was the American Catholic Irish who had managed to

establish a prominent presence on urban police forces, north and south, by the mid-nineteenth century that would endure for many decades.7 Police

work, along with teaching, fire-fighting, and other forms of public employ

ment, all became respectable niche occupations for ambitious Irish

American Catholics. Explorations of the origins and evolution of police forces have potential to yield important insights on how, and from what

sources, socio-political power became generated, used and negotiated in

different locations through time.8 For our purposes, they can also illuminate

how the Irish inserted themselves, or became inserted, into such histories

and geographies. In this essay, I connect the role of the Irish in the policing

story of Buffalo and Toronto from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth

centuries within larger themes such as immigration, religion, socio-political

power, and the making of urban culture.

II. Immigrants from Ireland were conspicuous in shaping the nineteenth-century histories of both Toronto

and Buffalo. By the beginning of the 1880s, the populations of Buffalo and

Toronto were approximately 150,000 and 100,000 respectively.8 In Buffalo,

10,310 Irish-born and predominantly Catholic individuals occupied distinc

tive places in the city's social geography, residing mainly in neighbourhoods close to the central business area and adjacent to the city's industrial water

front landscape of railway yards, grain elevators, and flour mills. The First

Ward, site of the attack by Dwyer and his gang, was a key neighbourhood in

this respect. Most of the Irish there, who had arrived during the Famine era

of 1846-50 and had been replenished by subsequent arrivals, remained well

within the clutches of poverty by the 1870s and 1880s.10 Approximately 44% of first- and second-generation employed Irish household heads in the city were still engaged in unskilled labour by the early 1880s, a figure that under

estimates the large numbers of boarders in the waterfront district.11 German

speakers who were mostly engaged in skilled trades and self-employment moulded their Deutschendorfchen ('German village') on the east side of

Buffalo while ex-New Englanders lived in affluent northern sections, the

spine of their neighbourhood being Delaware Avenue, a thoroughfare renowned for its elegant landscape and rows of mansion-like housing.

The 10,781 Irish-born in Toronto in 1881 differed from their

countrymen across the border in terms of denominational make-up and

neighbourhood geography. Over half of them were split between different

JENKINS PATROLMEN AND PEELERS 13



Protestant denominations (mostly Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian), with the remainder Catholic. The Irish shared urban space with other

imperial subjects from England and Scotland, along with their Canadian

born descendants, but geographical concentrations of any ethnoreligious

group barely endured beyond a few street blocks.12 Famine-era immigrants had formed noticeable clusters in the east and west of the city in the 1850s and 1860s, but these were smaller in scale than the Irish settlement in

Buffalo's First Ward. While these Catholic settlements in Toronto had lost

much of their cohesion thirty years on, few Catholic families were to be

found in the most exclusive areas of the city. Both creations of the opening decades of the nineteenth century,

Toronto and Buffalo possessed exuberant social milieus typical of North

American pioneer towns. The Toronto municipal franchise, controlled by restrictions on property, income, and gender for much of the Victorian period, curtailed the involvement of the less affluent sections of society in the

political arena. In Buffalo, universal suffrage for white males over eighteen

years of age encouraged the political involvement of the lower classes, and

despite the racial and gender exclusions that persisted in the franchise, this

embedding of a tradition of democratic ideology was critical. It brought par tisan considerations to bear within local space and permitted the 'numbers

power' of European immigrants to challenge patrician administrations,

thereby widening the field of participants in public life.13 It also fostered a

sense of working-class ethnic solidarity among the Buffalo Irish as wards

and their role in urban politics occupied a place in the geographical imagi nation of politicians and electorates alike. With Buffalo's ward divisions

superimposed neatly upon its ethnic geography, the city council was

already comprised of German, Irish, and American representatives by the

1850s and 1860s. The Buffalo Irish, as in other cities across the northeast

ern United States, had also become closely aligned with the Democratic

Party and were actively claiming a foothold in its institutional machinery.14 If we are to map out a similar context of 'Irish power' in Toronto, we

must begin with Irish Protestants and the Orange Order. Born in the midst

of sectarian land conflict in county Armagh at the end of the eighteenth

century, the Order was exported to Canada along with Ulster Protestant

immigrants and its fraternal club groupings, known as lodges, established

themselves in Upper Canadian territory from the 1830s on. Put simply, the

passionate loyalties of the Orangemen towards the monarchy, its empire, and Protestantism made them natural Tories and after the failed Upper Canadian rebellion of 1837, Toronto Tories needed their support to contain

the challenge of Robert Baldwin's Reform party. Under these conditions, the

influence and operations of the Order at municipal level in Toronto mirrored

those of American political machines in terms of rewarding loyal supporters and active lodge members with plum positions in civic administration,

franchises, and other work funded from the public purse. Though its origins

14 CJiS VOLUME 28 NUMBER 2, VOLUME 29 NUMBER 1



were Irish, the Order broadened out to embrace significant sections of

Toronto's middle- and working-classes of English and Scottish Protestant

background.15 In terms of urban political power, Orangemen were virtually all over the ward map as party and fraternity meshed.

Irish Catholic political activism in Toronto was, in contrast, short

circuited due to a number of factors. Firstly, the group did not dominate

neighbourhood or ward spaces in such a way as to make a noticeable

electoral difference, and the slowdown of Catholic immigration from Ireland

after the 1860s did little to help this. Secondly, Toronto Catholics, as in

Belfast, fared worst in the city's labour market compared to other denomi

nations and, given a municipal franchise that minimized working-class

involvement in local affairs, this too worked to their electoral detriment.

Although a growing occupational diversity within the group was taking

shape by 1881, and a middle-class was establishing itself, about 34% of

those employed household heads of Irish Catholic birth or ancestry were

still involved in unskilled labour. The overall political climate produced a

third constraint. The recurring rhetoric on 'papists' by the Orange-Tory alliance did little to impress Catholic voters while the Reformers, led by

George Brown, the Presbyterian owner of the Globe newspaper, were

scarcely more sympathetic to Catholic interests with similar articulations

about the 'Romish' menace.16 Small wonder, then, that the city became

known as 'the Belfast of Canada.'17 The long-run effect for Toronto Irish

Catholicism was political apathy, inactivity, and impotence.18 The Buffalo Irish did not have to cope with Orangemen, and along

with their German co-religionists, formed a numerically significant Catholic

bloc within the American city which resulted in a more pluralist and accom

modationist model of municipal politics than in Toronto. Though it was not

the case in all postbellum cities, sectarianism in Buffalo was rather weak; it

was, if anything, little more than the snobbish preserve of a relatively small

number of upper-class American families and their exclusive social world.19

Nonetheless, the effects of these disparities in Irish Catholic power in the

two cities had implications for their representations in public employment,

including appointments to the police force.

III. The replacement of the increasingly obsolete watchmen or 'Charlies' by police forces in North American

cities in the 1840s and 1850s was intimately tied to the patronage practices of their elected officials and party bosses, situated as they were within an

evolving political system. Under such circumstances, Peel's concept of the

apolitical and militaristic constable was a tall order. Illustrative of the demo

cratic spirit, law enforcement in New York was reformed in 1845 by a state

law that established a police organization run by the municipality, one that

incorporated the voice of the citizenry via their ward-based representatives. As Johnson elaborates: "aldermen, assistant aldermen, and the assessors

in each ward controlled nominations...and all nominees had to be residents




of the ward which they would patrol."20 The newly-created forces of

Philadelphia and Chicago had adopted a similar philosophy and structure by

1854.21 The evolving culture of mass partisan politics in the United States was

also characterized by violence and intimidation during the open voting of

elections such that "no party wanted to create a police which would be used

against them to defeat their candidates."22 Irish Catholic immigrants and

their leaders were in the vanguard of these transitions. In 1855, 46% of

New York City's First Ward population was Irish-born, but 59% of that ward's

police were from this background; the citywide figures were 28% and 27%

respectively.23 In Scranton, Pennsylvania, one scare-mongering technique

frequently deployed by Republican leaders during local elections in the 1870s

was raising "the specter of an all-Irish police force" created by their

Democratic opponents.24 Cultural understandings of 'the Irish' by Anglo American urban elites, then, were of a politically aggressive and physically

threatening Catholic group. That this same group could ironically enforce,

and literally embody, principles of American law and order in urban spaces was something that, although feared by some, could hardly be prevented.

Again, these features all stood outside Peel's model of policing. Buffalo provided little exception to these trends. An amendment of

the city's charter in 1853 "allowed the council's majority party two-thirds and

the minority one-third of police appointments."25 Given the balance between

Democrats (Irish and some Germans) and Republicans (old-stock Americans

and some Germans) in the city, such bipartisan agreements helped to stabi

lize political tensions. Even with the temporary absorption of the Buffalo

police into the Niagara Frontier Police District in 1866, "politics played a very

important part...(with) charges...made against the commissioners...in order to

try and change the political complexion of the board."26 The potential for

political wrangling did not disappear in 1871, when a new police department was established for and by the city of Buffalo. The mayor became an ex-officio

police commissioner and had the power (pending the approval of the common

council) to appoint two other police commissioners, one of whom became

police superintendent.27 These commissioners, like the mayor, represented

the major business interests of the city and though the position necessitated

much time away from the regular business, it paid three times the annual

salary of a patrolman and so was something to be taken seriously.28

The power brokers of Irish Buffalo, strengthened by the webs of

socio-political capital that they had spun both within the working-class saloons and workplaces of the waterfront wards and with other actors

beyond it, were not slow to capitalize on these patronage opportunities. By

1859, 25 of the 60 policemen in Buffalo were Irish.29 Despite being heavily outnumbered by the Germans throughout the second half of the century, one historian estimated the Irish to be "the largest single group in the

police force by the start of the 1890s, with the Germans second."30 Though

they also redistributed patronage, language and religious differences, the




lack of a common political experience, and the sizeable proportions of

skilled tradesmen and entrepreneurs among their group tempered the

Buffalo Germans' propensity for pursuing public sector jobs with similar

energy. Efforts to professionalize the city police in the early 1850s (through, for example, the donning of uniforms and badges and the screening of

political appointees' characters, fitness and education levels) met with

resistance in the Irish press who feared the stripping of patronage oppor

tunities.31 Despite the presence of anti-Irish nativism in antebellum Buffalo,

Jacksonian democratic attitudes meant that little could be done to stop the

build up of 'Irish' sections of police forces.

Within the First Ward working-class fiefdom, the hierarchy of net

works, contacts, and personal or kin relationships that linked bosses and

their precinct captains with working-class families was crucial in selecting who would gain public sector employment or franchises. There was a great

deal of political pragmatism about this, and the welfare of constituents was

invariably viewed in local (ward) terms. Not all were 'Irish Democrats'

either. For the Cork-born Republican Jack White and other key Democratic

brokers such as 'Blue-Eyed Billy' Sheehan and Jack Kennedy, "it was the

first ward first and the party later."32 White in particular was an enigmatic

figure. He could apparently "get jobs for his constituents regardless of

which party was in power. During the long period of the 8o's when the

school department was a Democratic political preserve, White managed to

have more teachers on the payroll than any other individual. It was the

same with the police department."33 Central to the pragmatic philosophy of

machine Republicans such as White were cross-party alliances with Irish

Democrats of the same ilk such as Jack Kennedy. Their Irish-American

constituents would not be disappointed even if the Democratic press denounced Kennedy as a "faithful assistant Republican" in 1904.34 Political

labels, then, were not completely sacrosanct.

Being a policeman may not have been a white-collar job, but as an

occupation demanding physical and mental strength, it did command

respect in the eyes of the Irish at home and abroad. Although historians such

as Thernstrom note that the Irish preoccupation with public employment

may have come with the price of not exploring other opportunities in the

private sector, they implicitly assert a positive correlation between nonmanual

labour and social prestige that is not always justified.35 The possibilities of

tenure and pensions appealed to an Irish proletariat, especially those who had

toiled in seasonal back-breaking work on Buffalo's waterfront. The annual

earnings of patrolmen in American cities compared favorably with those of

skilled occupations such as carpenters and stonecutters through the second

half of the nineteenth century.36 Bribes and other forms of corruption also

supplemented income, and patrolmen who had cut their teeth locally in

party politics knew this. Anthony McGowan, who emigrated from Kilmihill,

county Clare, to Buffalo in 1886, started like so many others working as a




grain scooper in the First Ward. After some months, McGowan 'graduated' to

bartending and, upon receiving a raise, was told by the saloonkeeper that "if

I stayed with him that he would put me on the police force and saying this in

the presence of all those men made me a king in their eyes."37

Nevertheless, a tempestuous relationship remained between public

politics and police appointments, often disrupting and derailing the career

trajectories of individuals. The police remained active in ward politics on

behalf of those who had either appointed them or guided them through the

appropriate patronage channels. A history of the Buffalo police notes that

Michael Sammon, captain of the fifth precinct in 1892 had worked his way up

to the captaincy of the first precinct ten years earlier before being removed

in 1883 "through political reasons" and subsequently reappointed.38

Anthony Collins, captain of the third precinct in 1892 had progressed to the

rank of sergeant by 1879 before being removed in 1880 "for political rea

sons" and re-appointed later that same year but as an ordinary patrolman!39

In an article protesting one particular shake-up in the force in 1887, the

Buffalo Courier, a Democratic organ, declared that the department was

"being run as a political machine, and principally for the benefit of the

republicans."40 The paper listed the force's captains, lieutenants, and

sergeants, and to each was ascribed the letters Y or 'd' denoting "political

complexion." Whether or not political considerations were behind these

shake-ups, the endurance of partisan discourse is strikingly clear.

Irish power endured. The plethora of Irish names in the annual

reports of the Buffalo Board of Police testifies to the strong representation of the first- and second-generation Irishmen on the force (Table 1).41 Surname analysis is an imperfect measure of imputed 'Irishness' of course,

since the possibility remains that ambiguous surnames such as 'Brown'

may have belonged to Irishmen. Despite such possibilities of underestima

tion, the table shows an impressive Irish presence at all levels of the force,

and an increased presence both generally (from almost forty percent to

almost forty-five percent) and at the higher ranks over the period.

Table 1: Distribution of 'Irish' police in Buffalo precinct stations, 1890 and 1910

1890 1910

Rank Total Irish %lrish Total Irish %lrish

Captains 4 2 50.0 14 7 50.0

Detectives 20 9 45.0 18 12 66.6

Sergeants 26 9 34.6 46 24 52.2

Lieutenants/Specials 6 3 50.0 31 15 48.4 Patrolmen 330 130 39.4 586 254 43.3

Total 386 153 39.6 695 312 44.9

Source: Buffalo Board of Police Annual Reports, Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.




Machine politics had its opponents, of course. Though the emerging

group of lower middle-class or 'lace-curtain' families had undermined both

the sense of Irish ethnic solidarity in the city and its support for machine

style politics by the twentieth century, their support for 'respectable' Democratic candidates remained intact. Despite also the efforts of Buffalo

Democratic mayor and future U.S. president, Grover Cleveland, and other

middle-class progressive reformers to bring the political machines to heel in

the 1880s and 1890s, they were frustrated not only by the likes of Sheehan

and others but also by the city's business interests.42 The latter controlled

the police commission and their materialistic objectives did not necessarily mesh with those of elite reformers. All this ensured that the corrupt image of

Buffalo's municipal administration would endure until 1914, when structural

reform in the shape of commission-style government finally came to the city.

IV. A patronage system similar to Irish (Catholic) Buffalo operated in Tory Toronto, though this worked to

the benefit of Protestants. Toronto Tories, buttressed by their Orange sup

porters, had relatively few worries about bipartisanship in the governing of

their city during the Victorian period. The mayor, for example, was more

often than not a member of the Order.43 Predictably, the composition of the

Toronto police force followed the same haphazard path as those of

American cities, with partisan Tory councils monopolizing appointments from the ranks of Orange lodges to the chagrin of their Reformist rivals.44

This pattern of recruiting Protestant Orangemen over Catholics certainly did

parallel Belfast where, at the time of its absorption into the RIC in 1864, the

town police force was composed of 156 Protestants and just 5 Catholics,

with the latter comprising one-third of the local population.45 In Toronto, however, this seemingly cosy alliance between patrician

Tories and the plebeian Orange element had its tense moments, manifested

in predicaments such as the policing of Orange crowds by an Orange police force. The 1841 Riot Commissioners, damning of the violent tactics of

Orange malcontents, called for a nonpartisan police force at a time when

Orange membership was "the major credential for a position on the Toronto

police."46 The 1840s witnessed the burning of effigies and tar barrels in

public places, while in the 1850s, Orange parades on July 12 prompted clashes with the nationalistic elements among the city's Irish Catholics. The

fire and circus riots of 1855 were, for some, the last straw.

Reform opposition in the form of George Brown and the Municipal Reform Association paved the way for new initiatives that would cause

Toronto policing to diverge from the American model. The changes in

Ontario municipal administration, introduced by Attorney-General John A.

Macdonald in 1858, resulted in the appointment in the city of a board of

commissioners (mayor William Henry Boulton, recorder George Duggan, and magistrate George Gurnett) to administer nonpartisan recruitment and

enforce discipline within the force. The Catholic Mirror expressed the hope




that "the mayor...will thus be enabled to get at our present partisan police" until "we shall have a more efficient force."47 The force was overhauled and

less than half of its recruits remained in the rejuvenated version, which

included a number of Catholics. George Brown was pleased enough to state

in the Globe that the days when "the police was a mixture of incapacity and

ruffianism" were gone and that now "it is respectable in character and

conduct, and thoroughly efficient in all respects."48 Orange influence was

not so easily displaced, however. That both the police recorder Duggan and

magistrate Gurnett were Orangemen may seem mystifying at first but their

appointments were based on the sense that a realistic compromise between the commission and its financiers, the city corporation, was

desirable.49 A resolution of 1859 that banned members of secret societies

(but directed primarily at the Orange Order) from joining the force was

watered down the following year by Reform mayor Adam Wilson who, when

admitting that twenty Orangemen were still present on the force, argued that rather than imposing an outright ban, the aim was that "so long as

(Orangemen) were in the police force they would not attend the society. The

word of the candidate was taken for it here."50

This was an appropriate time to take stock of policing practice in

Toronto. A local consensus was emerging in which the city's future became

envisioned as commercially prosperous, orderly, and modern. Policing was

seen as crucial to the shaping of a Victorian city where "questions of

efficiency and order won out over partisan considerations."51 A sense of

respectability and order was to be engendered among the citizenry, and the

unruly spectacle of street violence was to be a thing of the past.

Nonpartisanship in policing was part of this urban vision. Attempts at

achieving this through the recruitment of individuals that were not necessarily

representative of local populations therefore drew the shaping of Toronto's

police closer towards the model established by Robert Peel. It was also

responsible for creating an 'Irish police' in the city, though this was not one

with which historians of the American Catholic Irish would have been familiar.

The appointment of the new police chief in 1858, William Stratton Prince,

represented a significant step in this direction. A former officer in the British

light infantry, Prince "introduced military discipline and recruited many members of the force from the Irish constabulary."52 Seen in a wider geo

graphical context, Toronto became one site among others both within Canada

and across Britain's empire, that felt the imprint of Peel's model of policing,

although outright duplication was modified by varied local conditions. The

provincial police of British Columbia (established 1858), the Newfoundland

Constabulary (1871) and the North West Mounted Police (1873) all used the

RIC model, with the first set of uniforms for the 'Mounties' mirroring those of

their Irish counterparts.53 Key officials in all these constabularies had Irish

experience, while the third NWMP commissioner, the Canadian-born A.G.

Irvine, visited Ireland to study the RIC's operations and administration.54




As with Buffalo, Irish immigrants occupied a prominent place in

late Victorian Toronto's police force. Of the 132 personnel employed in

1881 (aside from the chief and his deputy), 75 (56.8%) were Irish-born, as

were six of the seven detectives.55 A local historian estimated in 1885 that

"the majority...have, previous to their Canadian experience, served in the

RIC, and as they are thus already individually well-drilled and disciplined,

the handling of the force, which is carried out on strictly military

principles, becomes a comparatively easy matter."56 The RIC link was

present at the top with the two chief inspectors, William E. Stuart and

David Archibald, born in Leitrim and Tipperary respectively. While ex-RIC

men were welcomed to the Toronto force, the evidence indicates that

those who did join were mostly Protestant, even though the force in

Ireland had become mainly Catholic by the late nineteenth century. The

absorption of the Belfast town force under the auspices of the RIC, for

example, was accompanied by an increased proportion of Catholics in the

force there, one that ultimately over-represented their presence in the city.

By 1871, their share was 34% of 389 policemen and by 1911, it was 47% of 1,061.57 The RIC files for sixteen members of the 1881 Toronto force were

inspected to reveal all but one of the men to be Protestant, with eleven

born in Ulster.58 RIC veterans in Toronto, then, represented a highly select

denominational group.

Irish Catholic leaders and their press took issue with the poor

showing of their religious brethren in public employment in Toronto,

citing it as key evidence of sectarian discrimination. The Irish-Canadian,

enumerating only 14 Catholics among the 159-strong force in 1885 (barely

9%, with Catholics 18% of Toronto's population in 1881), branded the

city's police department as "a field whose many rich spots are grazed by the 'Protestant Horse' while the few barren patches are nibbled by the

nag who is Catholic."59 Though the paper welcomed the impartial

performance of the force during the papal jubilee riots of 1875, it

nonetheless felt that political channels between fraternalism and the

force, "a refuge...for many whose only credentials are the sign and the

password," were still present.60 Despite the restructuring of the police in

Belfast, the endurance of Orange power and Catholic under-representation

in public employment there probably added some impress to these

utterances by the Toronto Catholic press. In 1886, for example, only five

out of 95 white-collar officials from the Belfast council were Catholics,

earning an average annual salary of 95 pounds compared to the

Protestant equivalent of 168.61

Indeed, Orange lodge membership lists from later in the century confirm that members of the force were present in its ranks.62 The list for

Enniskillen Purple Star listed policemen on its books from the early 1870s. One of these, John Brackenreed from Leitrim, had two years of RIC experi ence in Roscommon and Belfast. Twenty years later, four policemen were




members of the lodge. Other fraternal outlets such as Freemasonry were

available, while the Irish Protestant Benevolent Society, a 'national' society

that acted as a middle-class bastion of Irish Protestant respectability and

ethnic solidarity, attracted police members upon its inception in 1870,

including the future chief inspector Stuart. But in reality, the police author

ities seem to have been more interested in demonstrating the impartiality

and professionalism of appointed constables than in monitoring their

fraternal memberships.

By 1910, the presence of Irish immigrants within the force

declined, with 116 of 484 (24%) born in Ireland (Table 2). The majority

of the force was now Canadian-born, particularly among the younger

ranks of patrol sergeants and constables, though it is possible that

many of these may have had Irish Protestant ancestry. In any case, the

Protestant Irish presence remained among the top-ranked officials,

headed by Chief Inspector Archibald. None of the twelve Protestant

inspectors were Irish-born. Though they had been part of the police

restructuring in 1858, Catholics would remain a marginal group on the

force before their under-representation was gradually pared away after

the turn of the century.63 Eleven Irish-born Catholics were present with

two among the eight Irish-born sergeants. Overall, 52 Catholics (10.7%) were present on a force of 484, most (55.8%) being Canadian-born and

likely of Irish parentage. By 1911, Roman Catholics comprised 13.2% of

Toronto's population, so the discrepancy no longer seemed worthy of

critical public comment. Having said this, Marquis' research suggests that the force remained heavily Protestant during the interwar period.64

While the proportion of Irish-born declined, the 'Ulster element'

endured, as did the fraternal impulse, while Catholic recruitment was

quite sluggish.65

Table 2: Irish-born members of the Toronto Police Force by religion, 1910

Rank Ang. Pres. Meth. RC Other Irish-born Ex-RIC Total

Inspectors 62100 92 12

Sergeants 41021 83 23 Detectives 21000 30 12

Patrol Sergeants 21000 30 21

ist class constables 23 4 10 4 1 42 6 167 2nd class constables 16 7 2 0 1 26 1' 143

3rd class constables 5 13 0 52 25 5" 106

Total 58 29 13 11 5 116 17 484

i Includes one ex-member of the Northern Ireland Imperial Yeomanry. ii Includes one ex-member of the Northern Irish Yeomanry and one ex-member of the Dublin

Metropolitan Police. Source: Annual Report of the Chief Constable of the City of Toronto, 1910, Metropolitan Toronto Archives.




V. Irish Catholic leaders and editors in both the United States and Canada viewed adequate public repre

sentation as a symbolically important measure of social incorporation and

acceptance. Representation on police forces was one element of this. A

summary interpretation of the membership trends presented in this essay

suggests that the Catholic 'Irish-American patrolman' became the Protestant

'Irish-Canadian constable' north of the border. Evidence from other centres

in both French and English Canada where the Irish were present reveals

some variability, however. While heavily Protestant police forces were char

acteristic of Victorian Hamilton and St. John, Catholics and Protestants

shared patronage spoils on the Charlottetown force.66 It seems also likely that the "heavily Irish" presence of Quebec's town police of the 1850s as

described by McCulloch, was a Catholic one, a presence probably facilitated

by the Liberal politician and police committee member, John Maguire.67 Irish-American over-representation on police forces in Buffalo and

other American cities was the norm in the decades before 1900, not the excep

tion. In Toronto, it was not until the early twentieth century that Catholics were

beginning to approach a representation on the force that reflected their local

presence, revealing a key difference between the Irish in the two polities that

was in some way attributable to the propensity of their religious factions to

claim urban political power in each place. Both the Irish-Canadian and the

Catholic Register suggested Orange and other fraternal obstacles to Irish

Catholic progress in public employment, including the police force. But, in the

case of policemen at least, the urban-cultural climate, the ideas surrounding

appropriate selection criteria, and general economic opportunity require closer

discussion rather than simply accepting a narrative of Catholic exclusion.

A key question facing the shapers of police institutions in both poli ties was resolving the balance between civil liberty and public order. Buffalo

and Toronto had two different urban cultures in the making. In understanding the shaping of late Victorian Toronto, the concept of 'moral geography' is

appropriate. As Dennis notes, 'moral geography' refers not only to the identi

fication of moral spaces in the city, but also to "the whole geography that

results from a particular value system."68 The cultural project of making

'Toronto the Good' a reality, and with it replacing unenviable monikers such

as 'the Belfast of Canada' and 'Hogtown,' required a police force that aimed

to be not only moral in their nature, but also moralizing in their actions. Peel's

ideas of police professionalism were consistent with these moral visions. The

failure of middle-class Buffalonians to imprint similar visions was ultimately

important in differentiating the police force there from that of Toronto. The

growth of heavy manufacturing in Buffalo and its immigration patterns solid

ified its reputation as a hard-edged and blue-collar Catholic city, where the

'dangerous classes' of poor emigrants, peripatetic sailors, and radical workers

co-existed alongside elite leaders dedicated to profit accumulation.

A culture of moral stewardship was instilled from the top down

within the Toronto force that stressed respectability, sobriety and impartiality,




while subjecting personnel to army-style drilling practices. A contemporary

historian remarked on the Toronto constable's "soldierly bearing" in contrast

to "the anything but martial-looking patrolmen of the American cities."69

George Denison, the Toronto police magistrate from 1877 to 1923 and well

known as a fervent imperialist and author on military topics, described the

training of new entrants as "a survival of the fittest."70 Regulations

concerning temperance and general health, in addition to the presence of

bible classes, were upheld by men like David Archibald, a six-foot and

three-inch Tipperary Methodist who was "well-known as a zealous and

earnest worker on behalf of the temperance cause."71 Toronto's 'morality

squad' of undercover detectives was established under Archibald in 1887 with a mandate to not only root out the vices of prostitution, gambling, and

drugs but also to act in a welfare capacity as a "neighbourhood crisis

intervention centre.72 Installed as "new specialists in state-directed moral

regulation," numerous instances of heavy-handedness in their enforce

ment practices brought them in for heavy criticism in the 1890s with their

arresting of civilians for relatively innocuous offences.73

With respect to the suitability of applicants, Chief Prince declared in

his annual report of 1869 that a policeman should be "far above the class of

labourers and equal, if not superior, to the most respectable class of jour

neymen mechanics."74 Indeed, Toronto constables were drawn from mainly

skilled backgrounds. Of the previous occupations for 26 of the 68 Irish-born

detectives and constables on the 1881 force that could be identified, only six

came from what could be termed 'unskilled work' while the others came

from backgrounds in building, skilled trades, and clerical work.75 Marquis concluded that by the early twentieth century, they had become a "lower

middle-class" group.76 Other class-based condescensions by powerbrokers

against Irish Catholic immigrants and their territories presented them

selves. The memoirs of police magistrate Denison remark of Catholic streets

in Toronto that had "a very unsavoury reputation" with "old wooden

shanties continually becoming more decrepit (and) inhabited by Irish

labourers, carters, woodsawyers etc."77 Two street residents, Jerry and Jack

Sheehan, were "typical Irishmen of the lower class" while their disorderly locales were also seen to possess local traditions of political activism.78

Given these various objectives, and considering the position of

Toronto's Catholics in the city's labour market in the 1860s and 1870s, there

was not much likelihood of them forging a police presence akin to their

co-ethnics in urban America. Links between the force and the Orangemen and Freemasonry, organizations detested by the local Catholic hierarchy, in

addition to the social tensions produced by the Fenian invasion of 1866 and

street clashes during parades hardly made membership of the force an

attractive proposition for qualified Catholics. Some did join, of course, but

with few municipal politicians to canvass for them, working-class Irish

Catholics in Toronto had far less interest in policing and other public




employment than in Buffalo. It was only through the building of a respectable

Catholic image and the arrival of a new Canadian-born generation who cared

far less about the politics of the Irish homeland than their predecessors that

Catholic involvement in the police started to rise appreciably.79 In Buffalo, Irish Catholic involvement in policing was built upon

durable foundations. While sections of Buffalo's First Ward (not least the

notorious Canal Street) kept the police busy, the Irish aldermen there

provided and maintained the channels to public work for favoured locals. The

police force thus came to occupy the same beachhead status for Buffalo Irish

Catholics as it has done for their counterparts in New York, Chicago, and New

Orleans. Decentralized control was in keeping with democratic principles in

Buffalo, as was minimizing distinctions between 'the police' and 'ordinary

citizens,' few of whom were willing to give up civil liberties for crime pre

vention. Besides, the advantage of locally-bred patrolmen was their ready

acquaintance with the streets and inhabitants of their beat. The patrolman,

then, was the surveyor and appraisor of local social geographies, and the

1890 report of the Buffalo police board indicates that the allocation of police men to certain precincts followed the city's ethnic geography. Within precinct number 7 at 455 Louisiana Street in the Irish First Ward district, the

Lieutenant was Irish-born Michael Regan, and of the 24 patrolmen stationed

there, 15 had distinctively Irish surnames. At precinct number 8 in contrast,

located at the heart of the Fifth Ward's Deutschendorfchenf the Lieutenant

was Emil Zacher and of the 25 patrolmen, only 7 had non-German surnames.

The concept of moral geography fits uneasily within the story of

Buffalo during this period, where concerns over urban disorder focussed

not on the ritualistic rioting of fraternal parades (as in Toronto) but on the

possibilities of sustained labour unrest by the growing working-class. Even

peaceful strikes were accompanied by round-the-clock police patrols and

whatever military-style tactics were deployed were more attuned to

concerns of controlling possible riots than developing a sense of profes sionalism.80 With the city controlled by business interests, shaping a moral

tone to urban affairs fell behind efforts to boost commercial growth and

protect the productive landscape.

Understanding the development of 'the Irish police' in these cities

thus requires that attention be paid to the issue of urban power and its

histories and geographies. As we have seen, the power structures and social

relations, fuelled by immigration patterns, that organized urban cultures and

their institutions in Buffalo and Toronto were arrayed differently. Irish

Protestants benefited primarily from one, Irish Catholics from the other.

While Catholic Irish Torontonians experienced occupational mobility over the

period surveyed, this occurred mostly within the private sector.81 Such occu

pational shifts occurred in Buffalo as well, but the spectrum of possibilities there included public sector work and also saloon-keeping, an activity that

the Toronto authorities sought to regulate as part of their moral vision. While




an 'Irish advance' remained a noticeable feature of urban politics in many

American cities well into the twentieth century, Irish-Canadian Catholics in

Toronto kept their heads down and cultivated a church-centred culture

founded on piety and respectability. The church and its publications encour

aged such lifestyles and the group's options, aided by increased levels of

education, wealth, and social incorporation, gradually broadened in such a

way that Catholic Irish America's preoccupation with public work did not

materialize to the same extent among their Canadian counterparts.

Notes

I would like to thank David Wilson, Minelle Mahtani, and two anonymous referees for

their helpful criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper. Andrea Bolla and Brad Chin You

aided in the retrieval of documents from the other side of the country, and to them I

also express thanks. This research was aided by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research

Council of Canada. The usual disclaimer applies.

1 Buffalo Daily Courier, March 17,1880.

2 Buffalo Courier, October 4,1891.

3 Jim Herlihy, The RIC: A Short History and Genealogical Guide (Dublin, 1997), 29-43. Herlihy notes (43) that they became 'Royal' in 1867 following the sup

pression of the Fenian uprising.

4 Richard Hawkins, "The 'Irish model' and the empire: a case for reassess

ment," in David M. Anderson and David Killigray (eds.) Policing the empire: government, authority and control, 1830-1940 (Manchester and New York,

1991), 24-28. See also Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America 1860

1920 (Cambridge, 1981) 38.

5 David Taylor, The New Police in Nineteenth-Century England: Crime, Conflict, and Control (Manchester and New York, 1997), 21.

6 Toronto Mail and Empire, March 17,1900.

7 For example, Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (New York, 2000),

238-29, notes that in 1964,41 out of 72 of the highest administrative posi tions in the Chicago Police Department were held by men of Irish ancestry, and that 21 out of 35 police commissioners appointed up to that point of the

century were held by men of similar background. See also Dennis C. Rousey, "'Hibernian Leatherheads': Irish Cops in New Orleans, 1830-80," Journal of Urban History, vol. 10 (1983), 61-84, where he argues that Irish over-repre sentation on southern urban police forces was the rule rater than the excep tion. While his data do not include religion, his New Orleans evidence indi cates that most, if not all, were Catholic.

8 John C. Weaver, "Trends and Questions in New Historical Accounts of

Policing" Urban History Review, vol. 19 (1990) 79-83.

9 The Buffalo figure refers to 1880, the Toronto figure to 1881. The Toronto

population figure includes the contiguous villages of Yorkville, Brockton, and Parkdale. See Census of Canada 1880-81, vol. 1 (Ottawa, 1882), and Report on the Social Statistics of Cities, Part 1 (Washington, 1886), 491.

10 William Jenkins, "In the shadow of a grain elevator: a portrait of an Irish

neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, in the nineteenth and twentieth cen

turies," Eire-Ireland, vol. 37 (2002), 14-38. See also David A. Gerber, The

Making of an American Pluralism: Buffalo, New York 1820-65 (Urbana and

Chicago 1989), 121-62.

11 "Unskilled labour" here refers to the occupational census manuscript entries for "labourer" in both the Canadian and American manuscript census returns. For a more in-depth discussion of these samples, see William




Jenkins, "Social and geographical mobility among the Irish in Toronto,

Ontario, and Buffalo, New York, 1880-1910," (PhD dissertation, University of

Toronto, 2001), Chapter 2.

12 William Jenkins, "Between the lodge and the meeting-house: mapping the

identities and social worlds of Irish Protestants in late Victorian Toronto," Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 4 (2003), 75-98. See also Mark G.

McGowan, The Waning of the Green: Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in

Toronto 1887-1922 (Montreal and Kingston, 1999), 16-28.

13 Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Nineteenth Century America

(Cambridge, 1977), 522-44. See also Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and

Social Structure (New York, 1968), 127.

14 For other examples, see John R. McKivigan and Thomas J. Robertson, "The

Irish-American worker in transition 1877-1914: New York City as a test case/* in Ronald Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (eds.) The New York Irish

(Baltimore, 1996), 301-20; Thomas O'Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political

History (Boston, 1995); Reginald Byron, Irish America (Oxford, 1999); William

A. Bullough, "The steam beer handicap: Chris Buckley and the San Francisco

municipal election of 1896," California Historical Quarterly, vol. 54 (1975),

245-62.

15 Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical

Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto, 1980), 102-111.

16 Michael Cottrell, "Irish Catholic Political Leadership in Toronto 1855-1892: A

Study in Ethnic Politics," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Saskatchewan

(1988), 112.

17 According to McGowan, (316, note 1) this comparative nickname first sur

faced in the late 1860s. Two generations later, it remains in Hector

Charlesworth, Candid Chronicles: Leaves from the Note Book of a Canadian

Journalist (Toronto, 1925), 57.

18 See McGowan, op. cit, 212 on this point. He also (5-8) uses reactions to the

visit of radical Home Ruler William O'Brien to Toronto in 1887 to expose the

divisions among Irish Catholics in the city.

19 Mark Goldman, High Hopes: The Rise and Decline of Buffalo, New York

(Albany, 1993) confirms this point, noting that the nativist American

Protective Association, had little success in Buffalo.

20 David R. Johnson, Policing the Urban Underworld: The Impact of Crime on

the Development of the American Police 1800-1887 (Philadelphia, 1979), 26.

21 Interestingly, the mayor of Chicago initially had to consult a police commit

tee on appointments, reflecting the nativist council's distrust of too much

'democracy' of immigrant voters. However, the increased role of the Irish and Germans on the city's council over the course of the century gave them

greater influence over appointments. See Johnson, op. cit., 38-39.

22 Ibid., 13.

23 Wilbur R. Miller, Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and

London, 1830-1870 (Chicago, 1977), 30-31.

24 Samuel Walker, "The police and the city: Scranton PA, 1866-1884, a test

case," American Studies, vol. 19 (1978) 87.

25 Gerber, op. cit., 341.

26 Mark Hubbell (ed.) Our Police and Our City: The Official History of the Buffalo Police Department (Buffalo, 1893), 97.

27 Ibid., 116.

28 Sidney L. Harring and Lorraine McMullin, "The Buffalo Police 1872-1900: Labor Unrest, Political Power and the Creation of the Police Institution," Crime and Social Justice, vol. 4 (1975), 8-9.

29 Gerber, op. cit., 342.

30 Brenda K. Shelton, Reformers in Search of Yesterday: Buffalo in the 1890s (Albany, 1978), 6.




31 Gerber, op. cit., 363-64.

32 Buffalo Times, June 27,1933.

33 Ibid.

34 Buffalo Daily Courier, March 17,1904.

35 Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the

American Metropolis 1880-1970 (Cambridge, 1973), 167.

36 Johnson, op. cit., 101. This comparability probably held in the Canadian

context as well: for an example from Hamilton that suggests as much, see

James L. Sturgis, "'Whisky detectives' in town: the enforcement of the

liquor laws in Hamilton, Ontario, c. 1870-1900" in Anderson and Killigray,

op. cit, 205.

37 Quoted in Stephen Powell, Rushing the Growler: A History of Brewing in

Buffalo (Buffalo, 1996), 19-20.

38 Hubbell, op. cit., 335.

39 Ibid., 329. Collins was also one of the reinforcements who aided in the re

arrest of Patrick Dwyer on the Michigan Street swing bridge.

40 Buffalo Courier, March 18,1887.

41 Table 1 was compiled from a list of police officers of varying rank at each

precinct station in the annual reports from the years 1890 and 1910. Officers

at headquarters and others who worked in clerical positions are not counted.

42 Shelton, op. cit., 80.

43 See, for example, the work of Gregory S. Kealey, Toronto Workers Respond to

Industrial Capitalism 1867-92 (Toronto 1980), 98-123 and Houston and

Smyth, op. cit, 157-62.

44 Nicholas Rogers, "Serving Toronto the Good: the development of the city

police force 1834-84," in Victor L. Russell (ed.) Forging a Consensus:

Historical Essays on Toronto (Toronto, 1984), 116-119.

45 A. C. Hepburn, A Past Apart: Studies in the History of Catholic Belfast 1850 1950 (Belfast 1996), 126 and 247-8.

46 Gregory S. Kealey, "Orangemen and the corporation: the politics of class dur

ing the Union of the Canadas," in Russell, op. cit, 50.

47 Toronto Mirror, April 2,1858.

48 Globe, December 24,1859.

49 See the discussions in Kealey, "Orangemen," and Rogers, op. cit.

50 Globe, January 31, i860.

51 Michele Dagenais, "Urban governance in Montreal and Toronto in a period of

transition," in Robert J. Morris and Richard H. Trainor (eds.) Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750 (Aldershot, 2000), 90.

52 Kealey, "Orangemen," op. cit, 73.

53 Herlihy, op. cit, 59.

54 Greg Marquis, "The 'Irish Model' and Nineteenth-Century Canadian Policing," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 25 (1997), 209.

55 Corporation of the City of Toronto Minutes 1882, Appendix 12. The actual

variable listed is 'nativity' which it is safe to say means 'birthplace.'

56 C.C. Taylor, History of the City of Toronto and the County of York (Toronto,

1885), 305.

57 Hepburn, op. cit, 248. He computed these figures from the Census of Ireland for 1871 and 1911.

58 The names of the Irish-born from the 1881 list were checked in the list of RIC officers compiled by J. Herlihy in The RIC: A Register of Recruits (Dublin,

1999) to obtain the numbers contained on microfilms housed at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast.

59 Irish-Canadian, 12 November, 1885.




60 Compare Irish-Canadian 6, 20 October, 1875 and 12 November, 1885.

61 Hepburn, op. cit, 124. This situation scarcely improved with the creation of

the Northern Ireland civil service after partition. See also D.P. Barritt and C.F.

Carter, The Northern Ireland Problem (Oxford, 1962,1972), 96.

62 See membership lists contained in the Loyal Orange Lodge collection (L 35), Series X (Enniskillen Purple Star, LOL 711) and Series V (Boyne, LOL173), Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library.

63 Rogers, op. cit, 126.

64 Greg Marquis, "Working Men in Uniform: The Early-Twentieth-century Toronto Police," Histoire sociale

- Social History, vol. 20 (1987), 259-77.

65 Ibid., 263-64.

66 John C. Weaver, "Social Control, Marital Conformity, and Community

Entanglement: the Varied Beat of the Hamilton Police, 1895-1920," Urban

History Review, vol. 19 (1990), 119; Greg Marquis, "'A Machine of Oppression Under the Guise of the Law': The Saint John Police Establishment, 1860

1890," Acadiensis, vol. 16 (1986) 62; "Enforcing the Law: the Charlottetown

Police Force" in Douglas Baldwin and Thomas Spira (eds.) Gaslights,

Epidemics and Vagabond Cows: Charlottetown in the Victorian Era

(Charlottetown, 1998) 86-102.

67 Michael McCulloch, "Most Assuredly Perpetual Motion: Police and Policing in

Quebec City, 1838-58," Urban History Review, vol. 19 (1990), 106. My view of

Maguire as a probable channel of patronage, although speculative, is based

on McCulloch's description of him (103) as "the representative of Champlain

ward, the violent and largely Irish quarter. In addition, he sat on the Police

Committee from 1850 to 1854."

68 Richard Dennis, "Morley Callaghan and the moral geography of Toronto," British Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 14 (1999), 36.

69 Taylor, op. cit, 305.

70 George T. Denison, Recollections of a Police Magistrate (Toronto, 1920), 36. For an entertaining discussion of Denison, see Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867-1914 (Toronto,

1970), 12-22.

71 Taylor, op. cit, 306.

72 Greg Marquis, "The Police as a Social Service in Early Twentieth-Century Toronto," Histoire Sociale

- Social History 25 (1992), 336.

73 Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo, Making Good: Law and Moral Regulation in

Canada 1867-1939 (Toronto, 1997), 81.

74 Quoted in Rogers, op. cit, 126.

75 Those in building were two carpenters, a bricklayer, and a 'builder', those in

skilled trades were two shoemakers, one baker, and one tinsmith, while

those with clerical experience included three salesmen and one messenger. The 'unskilled' were three porters, two labourers, and one watchman.

76 Marquis, "Working Men in Uniform," op. cit., 260, 270-72.

77 Denison, op. cit, 179.

78 Ibid., 213. Denison also mentions, for example, the political ructions and

activist traditions of the Irish Catholic settlements at King and Bathurst (182

185 ?

known as 'Claretown'), Stanley Street (179) in the 1860s and 1870s. The 'Irish Catholic' flavour of these settlements was in decline by the end of

the century, however.

79 McGowan, op. cit., 291.

80 Harring and McMullin, op. cit., 11.

81 See, for example, McGowan, op. cit., Chapter 1, and Jenkins, "Social and geo

graphical mobility," op. cit., Chapter 5.




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