In February, a group of the city\u2019s free and enslaved blacks submitted a petition to the Common Council complaining of \u201cyoung gentlemen in this city who call themselves students of the physic,\u201d and who \u201cunder cover of the night, in the most wanton sallies of excess \u2026 dig up bodies of our deceased friends and relatives of your petitioners, carrying them away without respect for age or sex.\u201d The petitioners didn\u2019t ask for a stop to the grave-robbing, only that it be \u201cconducted with the decency and propriety which the solemnity of such occasion requires.\u201d But the petition was ignored; many in the city were willing to turn a blind eye to grave-robbing as long as those bodies were poor and black. However, on February 21, 1788, the\u00a0Advertiser\u00a0printed an announcement saying that a body of a white woman had been stolen from Trinity Churchyard. With that, popular resentment began to boil over.<\/p>\n
There are conflicting accounts of how the riot began, but most place the start outside New York Hospital, where a group of boys playing in the grass saw something that upset them\u2014and then incensed the city. In some tellings, the boys saw a severed arm hanging out of one of the hospital windows to dry. In other versions, one of the boys climbed a ladder and peered into the dissecting room, where a surgeon waved the severed arm at him. In yet other versions, the boy\u2019s mother had recently died, and the surgeon told the boy the arm had belonged to his mother. In this version of the tale, recounted in Joel Tyler Headley\u2019s 1873\u00a0The Great Riots of New York, the boy ran off to tell the news to his father, a mason, who went to the cemetery and exhumed his wife\u2019s coffin. After finding it empty, he marched on the hospital with a group of angry worker friends still carrying their picks and shovels.<\/p>\n
Colonel William Heth, writing in a letter to Governor of Virginia Edmund Randolph, described what happened when the men got to the hospital:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe cry of barbarity and etc. was soon spread\u2014the young sons of Galen [a poetic allusion to a physician in Ancient Greece] fled in every direction\u2014one took refuge in a chimney\u2014the mob raised\u2014and the Hospital apartments were ransacked. In the Anatomy room, were found three fresh bodies\u2014one, boiling in a kettle, and two others cutting up\u2014with certain parts of the two sex’s hanging up in a most brutal position. The circumstances, together with the wanton and apparent inhuman complexion of the room, exasperated the Mob beyond all bounds, to the total destruction of every anatomy in the hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although most of the doctors and medical students fled when the workmen appeared, a handful remained to try and guard the valuable collection of anatomical and pathological specimens, many imported. Their efforts were in vain, and the specimens were dragged out in the street and set ablaze. Bayley and his prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Wright Post, might have been added to the fire too if it hadn\u2019t been for the arrival of Mayor James Duane and the sheriff, who ordered the doctors and medical students escorted to jail for their own protection.<\/p>\n
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