Greenwich Village

								

People who had died from yellow fever were wrapped in great yellow
sheets before they were buried,--a curious touch of symbolism in
keeping with the fantastic habit of mind which we find everywhere in
the early annals of America. Mr. E.N. Tailer, among others, can
recall, many years later, seeing the crumbling yellow folds of shrouds
uncovered by breaking coffin walls, when the heavy guns placed in the
Square sank too weightily into the ground, and crushed the
trench-vaults.
It would be interesting to examine, in fancy, those lost and sometimes
non-existent headstones of the Field,--that is, to try to tell a few
of the tales that cling about those who were buried there. But the
task is difficult, and after all, tombstones yield but cheerless
reading. That the sleepers in the Potter's Field very often had not
even that shelter of tombstones makes their stories the more elusive
and the more melancholy. One or two slight records stand out among the
rest, notably the curious one attached to the last of the stones to be
removed from Washington Square. I believe that it was in 1857 that Dr.
John Francis, in an address before the Historical Society of New York,
told this odd story, which must here be only touched upon.
One Benjamin Perkins, "a charlatan believer in mesmeric influence,"
plied his trade in early Manhattan. He seems to have belonged to that
vast army of persons who seriously believe their own teachings even
when they know them to be preposterous. Perkins made a specialty of
yellow fever, and insisted that he could cure it by hypnotism. That he
had a following is in no way strange, considering his day and
generation, but the striking point about this is that, when he was
exposed to the horror himself, he tried to automesmerise himself
out of it. After three days he died, as Dr. Francis says, "a victim of
his own temerity."
And still the gallows stood on the Field of Sleep, and also a big elm
tree which sometimes served as the "gallows tree." Naturally, Indians
and negroes predominated in the lists of malefactors executed. The
redmen were distrusted from the beginning on Manhattan,--and with some
basic reason, one must admit;--as for the blacks, they were more
severely dealt with than any other class. The rigid laws and
restrictions of that day were applied especially rigidly to the
slaves. A slave was accounted guilty of heavy crimes on the very
lightest sort of evidence, and the penalties imposed seem to us out of
all proportion to the acts. Arson, for instance, was a particularly
heinous offence--when committed by a negro. The negro riots, which
form such an exceedingly black chapter in New York's history, and
which horrify our more humane modern standards with ghastly pictures
of hangings and burnings at the stake, were often caused by nothing
more criminal than incendiarism. One very bad period of this sort of
disorder started with a trifling fire in Sir. Peter Warren's
house,--the source of which was not discovered,--and later grew to