How An 1891 Mass Lynching Tried To Make America Great Again

A light rain fell on New Orleans on October 15, 1890, as Police Chief David Hennessy left the central police station with his colleague and friend Capt. William O’Connor just after 11 p.m. The young chief turned toward Basin Street, heading for the home he shared with his widowed mother. O’Connor went in the opposite direction, up Girard Street. Hennessy rarely walked home alone; for the past three years, he had done so in the company of bodyguards. That night he was alone.

Not far from his mother’s doorstep, Hennessy staggered as gunfire ripped into his side. One of the bullets pierced his liver and settled in his chest, another shattered his right leg. The skin around his wounds cratered with bird shot. Hennessy drew his revolver as he turned to face his assailants and fired three or four times, but they had slipped into the night.

O’Connor, who heard the gunshots from blocks away, turned and ran through the fresh mud and found his friend bleeding to death on the ground. The way O’Connor remembered it, Hennessy called out, “Billy, Billy.” As O’Connor approached, Hennessy said, “They have given it to me, and I have given it back the best I could.”

“Who gave it to you, Dave?” O’Connor asked.

O’Connor said that Hennessy beckoned for O’Connor to bring his head closer, as Hennessy whispered one word into his ear.

“Dagoes,” he said.

David Hennessy

Hennessy didn’t die immediately. He didn’t think he was going to die at all. When his mother joined his bedside at Charity Hospital the next morning at 8 a.m., he told her, “I’ll be home by and by.” His colleagues sent for his priest. By 9, the chief was dead, and by 9:15, mourners were gathering outside the hospital. Police officers, according to press accounts, wept openly as they vowed revenge. Hennessy’s body was removed to his mother’s home, where a stream of mourners clustered.

Hennessy’s funeral was the biggest the city had seen since former Confederate President Jefferson Davis had been laid to rest. Mourners arrived as early as 6 a.m., a line of them had gathered around the block by 10. His casket lay open behind a glass display; his hat, belt, and club lay upon it. Newspapers described an “uninterrupted procession throughout the day,” lasting into the night. A band led the funeral procession to the cemetery, more than a mile long. The city’s fire stations rang their bells in requiem. Steamboats in the harbor flew their flags at half mast.

Although Hennessy had been unable to identify his assailants and O’Connor had arrived after they escaped, the word Hennessy had whispered to O’Connor told Mayor Joseph Shakspeare all he needed to know. At a city council meeting shortly after, Shakspeare declared, “We must teach these people a lesson that they will not forget by all time.”

New Orleans Picayune

“No community can exist with murderous societies in its midst,” Shakspeare said. “A Sicilian who comes here must become an American citizen and subject his wrongs to the remedy of the law or else there must be no place for him on the American continent.” The room erupted in applause.

Within hours of Hennessy’s death, the New Orleans police would raid the Italian colony in the city, arresting hundreds, according to the New York Times, and detaining them at the central police station. According to Richard Gambino, a historian and author of Vendetta: The True Story of the Largest Lynching in US History, a crowd thronged outside the police station “screaming obscenities” and chanting “who killa da chief” at the prisoners as they were loaded into mule-drawn prison wagons to be taken to Orleans Parish Prison. When a largely female group of relatives of the Italian immigrants being detained arrived to call for the immigrants’ release, they were “pushed around, struck, and driven away by the crowd.” One of the suspects, Antonio Scaffidi, was shot in the face by Thomas Duffy, a friend of Hennessy’s who had come to the prison as a witness to identify suspects. Newspapers sympathetically called it an attempt to “avenge” Hennessy.

The press cheered the arrests, repeating Shakspeare’s contention that there was no doubt that Hennessy had been killed as a result of “Sicilian vengeance,” the victim of a mafia conspiracy. The anti-immigration movement of the time saw Italian immigrants as poisoning American racial purity and unfair competition for domestic workers, as dangerous foreign radicals and incorrigible criminals sent to the United States by a hostile foreign government. Religion, economic forces, and terrorism shaped white Americans’ views of Italian immigrants as fundamentally foreign, as unwanted competition for labor, and as carriers of violent radicalism.

America now stands more divided over immigration than it has since the 1920s, cleaved between two nationalisms — one pluralistic, one exclusive — each claiming to represent the country as it should be. These were placed in vivid contrast at the Republican and Democratic conventions, where the Republican nominee vowed to ban Muslim immigration and Democrats introduced the country to the father of a slain American Muslim war hero.

Left to right: Rudy Giuliani, Paul Manafort, and Chris Christie.

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Donald Trump’s entire candidacy has been premised on purging the United States of the foreign enemies within as a means of restoring national greatness. Among his most trusted surrogates are men like Paul Manafort, Chris Christie, and Rudy Giuliani, who now speak of Muslims and Mexicans in the same tone and language that was once reserved for their Italian-American ancestors, targeted by the nativist movement that began in the late 19th century.

But this incident — and the way the accompanying fervor was spread in the national press — helped define the character of Italian immigrants for Americans for generations, providing proof of their fundamental dangerousness for the anti-immigrant backlash that followed.

Before long, the local police would whittle their list down to 19 suspects. By March, 11 of them would be dead, murdered in an act of bloody public rage so massive that weeks afterward, a grand jury would conclude that the entire city was to blame.

At first, Italians came to Louisiana to replace black Americans in the fields. According to historian Paolo Giordano, Louisiana attracted more Italian immigrants than any other state, more than 64,000 between 1860 and 1920, complicating white Southerners’ attempts to enforce the color line in the aftermath of Reconstruction.

A New York Sun article in 1899 described Italians as “a link connecting the white and black races. Swarthy in color the Sicilians are darker than the griffes and quadroons, the Negro half-breeds of southern Louisiana.” Many Italians seemed not to grasp the nuances and rituals of Southern white supremacy, and their willingness to hire, do business, and socialize with black Americans infuriated their white hosts.

The lynching of the 11 Italians in New Orleans is often billed as America’s worst mass lynching. In truth, it was not even New Orleans’ worst mass lynching — 34 black people had been killed in a white supremacist uprising in the city in 1866. (Although Italian immigrants in Louisiana continued to be subject to lynch law after 1891, it was in far smaller numbers than black Americans.)

At the time, the spirit of nativism — hostility to an internal minority based on the belief that it constitutes a foreign threat to the nation’s character — was growing all over the country. Labor unions feared the competition for low-wage labor. Anti-Catholicism, still a strong force in American politics, saw the Catholic Italians as a malevolent foreign force capable of undermining American democracy, while Irish Catholics were suspicious of Italians because the recently unified nation had dispossessed the Catholic Church of its territories during unification. Though the Irish had once been the main targets of American nativists, the story of American nativism is one in which the old immigrants, once objects of hatred, easily become the persecutors of the new.

Italians were also seen as intrinsically violent. “The disposition to assassinate in revenge for a fancied wrong,” remarked one Baltimore newspaper, “is a marked trait in the character of this impulsive and inexorable race.” Following violent labor conflicts, some involving immigrant workers, Americans began to see immigrants as importing a dangerous foreign radicalism. Nativist observers concluded that Italians were unassimilable, because they clustered into Italian neighborhoods.

Circa 1870: The docks of New Orleans, a major port on the Mississippi River, Louisiana.

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As it turned out, Italian immigrants in Louisiana were not content to confine themselves to the fields. If they weren’t exactly white yet, they definitely weren’t black, a reality that gave them freedom to move, to own property, to start and buy businesses that served white customers. According to historian John Baiamonte Jr., “by 1890 the Italians owned or controlled more than 3,000 wholesale and retail businesses in New Orleans,” and the city itself “relied upon the Sicilian-controlled market for a supply of fresh food.”

A labor feud between two Italian factions in the fruit trade would come to define the meaning of Hennessy’s death for New Orleans and the country at large for decades to come.

New Orleans in the 19th century was a violent place, from its culture of “chivalric honor” to the force required to maintain white supremacy, wrote historian Dennis Rousey. Even before the arrival of Italian immigrants, in the 1850s, New Orleans’ homicide rate was eight times greater than that of Philadelphia.

The Irish-American Hennessy was no stranger to that violence. His father, a Union Army veteran turned police officer, was shot dead in 1867 in a bar fight. Gen. Algernon Sidney Badger, the elder Hennessy’s former commander, took David Hennessy under his wing as he took charge of New Orleans’ integrated Reconstruction-era police force, the Metropolitan Police, and made Hennessy a messenger boy. Newspapers later described the young Hennessy as having a “particular aptitude for detective service,” even as a youth.

In 1874, 5,000 members of the white supremacist White League rose in open revolt against the state’s Republican government, successfully engaging the integrated Metropolitan Police in a bloody battle in which more than 60 were killed and temporarily driving the police from the city until federal troops arrived to restore order. Hennessy became a detective in the new force, whose organization was overseen by Gov. Francis Nicholls, a former Confederate general and Democrat supported by the White League.

David and his cousin Michael Hennessy became national heroes in 1881 after helping capture an Italian murderer named Giuseppe Esposito in New Orleans, who had been living in the US under a fake name. Esposito was returned to the custody of the Italian government and tried for murder, but his fate is unclear. Gambino writes that he spent life in prison; an 1892 New York Times obituary states he was executed by beheading.

Being a hero cop didn’t spare Hennessy from the same sort of bloody feuds that took his father from him. Michael and David Hennessy were later acquitted of murder after a fatal 1882 shoot-out with a rival cop. Michael later moved to Houston, where he was shot in the back four times by an unknown assassin in 1886.

David Hennessy resigned from the police department soon after and became a private detective, then was chosen by Mayor Shakspeare to be chief of police in 1888. Though portrayed in the press as a highly religious, straitlaced teetotaler, according to Baiamonte, Hennessy was invested in, and helped provide protection for, brothels in New Orleans’ red-light district, along with Joseph and Peter Provenzano, Italian immigrant businessmen involved in fruit shipping.

In 1886, the Provenzanos lost their contract with Italian-American fruit importer Joseph Macheca for unloading shipments on the docks to a rival Italian firm run by Tony and Charles Matranga. In 1890, a group of Matranga stevedores, including Tony, were ambushed by a group of men with guns. The Provenzanos were prosecuted, but the verdict of guilty was overturned by the judge, who ordered a new trial. Newspapers speculated that the Matrangas killed Hennessy because they blamed him for the Provenzanos’ acquittal, surmising that he had uncovered evidence that would also implicate the Matrangas.

The Matrangas and Provenzanos publicly accused one another of being mafiosi, which provided fodder for press reports concluding that New Orleans was subject to a reign of terror by the mafia. Although the Provenzanos and Matrangas were Italian and involved in a violent feud with one another, historians have noted that it was extremely un-mafia-like for them to violate the code of silence not only by speaking openly about the mafia, but also by seeking to prosecute one another in court.

Nevertheless, Mayor Shakspeare’s public declaration, echoed by the press, that the murder had been an act of “Sicilian vengeance” further fueled the notion that secret societies of Italian murderers had taken control of the city. Macheca had led a group of Italian volunteers known as the Innocenti in violently assaulting black voters in the New Orleans race riot in 1868, and fought alongside the White League in 1874. But that didn’t stop him from becoming a suspect in Hennessy’s murder.

Shortly after Hennessy’s death, Shakspeare appointed a committee of “50 leading citizens” to lead an inquiry into the activities of the mafia in New Orleans. The liaison between the committee and the council was William Parkerson, who, according to Baiamonte, was Shakspeare’s former campaign manager. Belmonte, citing historian John Kendall, describes the Committee of 50 as a “continuation” of the now-defunct White League. Their mandate was, in the words of one council member, to “thoroughly investigate the matter of the existence of secret societies or bands of oath-bound assassins” and to “devise necessary means and the most effectual and speedy measures for the uprooting and total annihilation of such hell-born association.” On October 23, the committee issued an open letter encouraging Italians to come forth with information on crimes involving Italians, warning, “We intend to put an end, peaceably and lawfully if we can, violently and summarily if we must. Upon you and your willingness to give information depends which of these courses will be pursued.”

Chicago Daily Tribune, October 21, 1890

The police soon whittled down the suspect list to 19 men of Italian descent, including Macheca and Charles Matranga, accusing them of organizing a conspiracy to assassinate Hennessy. Even though none of the witnesses had seen the suspects’ faces, historians write that the possibility that Hennessy’s assailants were not of Italian descent was never seriously contemplated.

The crackdown on Italian immigrants in New Orleans terrified Italians across the country. In New York City, the Italian-language daily Il Progresso Italo-Americano excoriated English-language newspapers for assuming the guilt of the accused and tried to raise money for their defense. (English-language newspapers implied that the defense was funded by the mafia.) Italian-American newspapers correctly perceived the events in New Orleans as an attack not on the mafia, but on Italian immigrants.

As to why Shakspeare was so fixated on the Italian community, Gambino locates the conflict as rooted in a battle between two rival factions of the Democratic Party — one associated with Italian immigrants, “The Ring,” and Shakspeare’s faction, identified as “Reform Democrats.” According to Gambino, Shakspeare didn’t want to simply prosecute Hennessy’s potential murderers — he wanted to ruin the political and economic power of the Italian-American community.

“By destroying Joseph Macheca, New Orleans' most prestigious and wealthy Italian, and by persecuting the entire Italian community, the ‘dagoes’ would be put in their place,” Gambino writes. “Many of their motives and interests were camouflaged as they portrayed their actions as a crusade against the ‘mafia.’” It wasn’t just that they hated Italians — it was that they were seen as a threat to the traditional racial and political hierarchy of the city.

Shakspeare’s personal animosity toward Italians, though expressed in the language of concern over crime and assimilation, may have been just the opposite. The problem wasn’t that Italians did not want to become part of American society, to work hard or participate in the political process. It was that they did.

An Italian immigrant family on a ferry from the docks to Ellis Island, New York.

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