The Shirt Tails
Did the Shirt Tails Gang of the Five Points in pre-civil war New York start out as a secret order of the Paramilitary Wing of the Rural Tailor’s Guild?
On one hand it is a wild claim and the temptation to associate the Shirt Tails with the Rural Tailors. There are a number of intriguing aspects to the actual history of the Shirt Tails which make this avenue of investigation even more enticing. All the gangs operating in New York prior to the Draft Riots were in fact social-clubs focusing much of their activity on acts of political “persuasion”. In addition to the usual Dickensonian exploits in street-crime the Shirt Tails motivation came at least in part from a concern to make sure that politicians whose priorities were sympathetic to their own were placed in office. The Kerry Bothers Connection
Legislation effecting the off-loading of textile raw goods by New York dock-workers, the taxation of both raw goods and finished goods, dictation of approved hours of operation for garment retailers, enforcement of restrictions on the qualifications (skill and immigration status) of garment workers and tailors… all of these were of fundamental importance to certain elements of the New York underground.
Historian Tyler Asbinder reports on the subject; “In fact, gangs like the Dead Rabbits and Bowery Boys were political clubs that met at nights and on weekends to promote their candidates. They would fight at the polls and sometimes beat up their opponents, but not just for fun or plunder,”
“So why fight? Nearly every scuffle was designed to help a gang’s chosen candidate into public office. Once there, the candidate would reciprocate, bestowing good, steady-paying patronage jobs and municipal funds on his constituency,”
It is known that the brothers John and Richard Kerry who emigrated from Ireland to New York in the early to mid 1850’s were active in the city in their efforts to bring political pressure to bear in some of these areas of legislation. The Kerry brothers are also widely accepted as having been central to the Rural Tailor’s Guild in Cork, Ireland before fleeing to the Americas. It is even thought that they may have been founding members along with the enigmatic figure, “Young Meagher”.
The Shirts of the Shirt Tails
History records the way that the Shirt Tails gangs styled their clothing as follows:
“The Shirt Tails were a mid-19th century street gang based in the Five Points slum in Manhattan, who wore their shirts on the outside of their pants as a form of insignia and as a sign of group affiliation. Although the Shirt Tails were one of the more violent gangs of the era, they kept their weapons—as many as three or four at a time—concealed beneath their shirts; this discreet measure stands in contrast to competing gangs who flaunted and brandished their weapons in order to intimidate,”
“Never numbering more than a few hundred members, the Shirt Tails, like many other gangs, disappeared shortly before the American Civil War (although they did participate in joining a coalition of gangs under the Dead Rabbits during the New York Draft Riots), with its remaining members dissipating or joining one of the other various gangs.”
There is some speculation that this “insignia” and “discreet measure” served a second function less widely accepted by historians. Namely it served as a not-too-subtle reminder of the gang’s primary source of patronage, the Rural Tailors.
To wear one’s shirt un-tucked was certainly not a style of which the signification was inert. The social, cultural, and esthetic difference between Rural Tailors and their above-ground cousins on Saville Row and other old European city centers would have been dramatically expressed by such a nose-thumbing of “accepted” styles of dress among the aristocracy, the power-elite and even the less sinister but certainly compliant “dandies” of the time.
The Connection to the Welsh Author-Tailor, Daniel Owen
As the Research Group has already reported, there is an additional connection between Owen and murky “out-of-town” tailors who came to meet with Owen under the pretense of performing in a theatrical production in Mold.
Photographs taken of these visiting tailors show a few of them to bear striking resemblance to mug-shots taken of convicted member of New York’s Shirt Tails Gang. This maybe because they are in fact the same men. It may also be because they are close relatives of the New York convicts. At this stage is impossible to determine.
Owen’s expulsion from the Methodist ministry also hints at some affiliation. The “Official” position of the Methodists toward the working of the New York street culture of the day was widely damning and helped to pain a picture that was so extreme and simplistic as to amount to lies and anti-tailoring propaganda.
“The Five Points,” wrote one Methodist reformer, had become “the synonym for ignorance the most entire, for misery the most abject, for crime of the darkest dye, for degradation so deep that human nature cannot sink below it.”
The fact this official church proclamation uses the metaphor of “DYE” to cast aspersion on the community of the Five Points and the operations of political activists like the Shirt Tails Gang amounts to a direct assault on the ethics, culture and values of the Rural Tailors Guild in New York, the Americas, and throughout the world.
In addition it reported by the historian Rebecca Yamin that, “…much of what was written in newspapers, tracts, and books, was colored by religious zeal, a desire to sell papers, or plain-old fear. Middle-class outsiders looked at this neighborhood that was teeming with activity,”
This additional motivation is also the type of thing that the Rural Tailors would have seen as insidiously promoting the new middle-class hegemony being ushered in the Industrial Revolution and ensuring that the world order would marginalize Rural Tailors and sentence them to virtual extinction in the long run.