The Holy Ground, the seedy red-light district where Valentine works, has its shared of macabre and sensational violence. For instance, an April 1776 riot, referenced in a surgeon’s journal and Washington’s orderly book, was reportedly the result of discovering two Continental soldiers murdered, with one castrated. (Unfortunately, the victims are not named.)
The violence went both ways, however. According to Alexander Rose’s Washington’s Spies, “in the local taverns, ‘fireships’—prostitutes known to have venereal disease—were set alight as punishment.”
This description is mind-bogglingly cruel and frightening, so I had to look into it further. Rose’s citation is Carl Abbott’s excellent “The Neighborhoods of New York, 1760–1775” in the New York History journal, which does mention this incident, only in less sensational terms: what actually occurred was something not so different from modern day femicide, if the depositions are accurate.
I’m basing this off the May 13, 1773 issue of the New York Journal and General Advertiser, which summarized the inquest into this death as follows:
At the corner of Robinson and Broadway streets were clustered two “not altogether reputable” houses (to quote The Iconography of Manhattan Island). One was a tavern owned by John Dowers, with the sign of King George III outside. The neighboring house was kept by Mrs. Mary Harvey, and since she later testified to supplying a man whose name she didn’t know with wine, it seems she also kept some sort of public establishment that was, at most reputable, a tavern.
On the evening of April 13, 1773, John Pile, a sailor off the ship Success, entered Harvey’s house. He purchased a bottle of wine from Harvey, who sometime later departed to visit another neighbor. When Harvey left, she noted that Pile and a woman named Christian Taylor both appeared “to be disguised in liquor” (drunk).
Harvey’s visit to a Mrs. Henly was cut short when a third neighbor, Jane, the wife of John Dowers, arrived to inform her that Christian Taylor “had burn’d to death.” Harvey rushed home to find Christian very much alive, albeit in bed, surrounded by many people and evidently suffering from severe burns.
Jane Dowers provided more substance. She testified that at about ten in the evening, Christian Taylor had burst into her home, “her Clothes all in a Blaze.” Dowers quenched the flames with a pail of water and a mug of beer. She returned Christian to Harvey’s, and after carrying the injured woman upstairs, Jane pulled Pile out of his bed to make room for Taylor.
Pile confessed to Jane that he had placed a candle under Christian’s petticoats, because “she refused to let him lie with her.” Jane added that Pile had previously threatened to “either stab or burn her [Christian] to Death” if she refused.
The day after her attack, Christian Taylor was lucid enough to swear to her version of events before Alderman George Brewerton Jr. At about ten or eleven at night, Pile had entered her room and asked her to go upstairs with him. When she “positively refused,” he threatened “to stick her with a Knife, or burn her up alive.” “Having a lighted Candle in his Hand,” he “immediately” seized her petticoats.
Christian decided to call his bluff. She “made small resistance – but soon found her Clothes all in a Flame.” Unable to smother the flames herself, Christian fled to the Dowers’ house for help.
Despite Christian and Jane’s corroborating testimony, the article concludes with the following:
What other Evidence or Circumstances to the Jury, we have not heard, but the Verdict was Christian Taylor, being intoxicated with Liquor, her Clothes accidentally, and by misfortune took Fire, whereby she was badly burned, and languish’d from the 13 of April till the 1 of May, and then died, and so came to her Death in Manner and Form as aforesaid, and not otherwise.
I could find no records of the inquest, nor much on these witnesses or Taylor herself, so I don’t know why the jury did not believe the women. Perhaps other witnesses saw something that contradicted them. Or perhaps the jury was biased due to the location of Harvey’s business, the possible profession of the victim, and/or the fact that all three witnesses were women. But I have no evidence either way.
Still, there is no mention of Christian having a disease. There is actually not even a mention of her being a prostitute. She very well may have been, given the area and her presence drinking in a a public house late at night, but again, we just don’t know.
Altogether, I’m left perplexed why this story is cited as evidence of men lighting prostitutes on fire for venereal disease. At best, it’s an awful tragedy in which a woman accidentally inflicted a painful, eighteen-day-long demise on herself. At worst (and frankly much more likely), it’s an awful travesty where a man decided to take revenge because he felt spurned, and never faced justice despite Christian’s dying testimony.
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