Arrowsmith killed himself. Woah.
A is for Arrowsmith, hanged with a rope
B is for Bagley, done in by dope
Oh, oh…we HAVE to finish this!
Mississippienne…is there a chance you have more than what you listed in the OP? 
I’d think it would be fairly common given the prevalence of the straight razor. Just a quick slit and it’s done. I’d also think that some were accidental deaths-- “Hi honey, I forgot something, hope I didn’t startle you. Are you shaving?”
I have access, though my university, to the America’s Historical Newspapers database. A search on newspapers published in New York state, for the Jacksonian period (listed in the database as 1823-1842) returns 2,397 results for the term “suicide.” Obviously, there are probably some results that are articles not related to a specific suicide, and some suicides are probably mentioned in multiple papers, but there seem to have been plenty.
I found this fabulous announcement in the New York Spectator for October 1, 1823:
You can also search a lot of historical newspapers online, even without a university account, through the Library of Congress’s fantastic Chronicling America website. Here’s a link to a page from the New York Tribune for August 11, 1841. In the second column, near the bottom, is this entry:
I half-expected a dramatic minor chord on the piano to accompany that final word. 
Of course, there’s hundreds and hundreds of pages of this stuff.
One of my favorite obits was Variety’s of songwriter Jimmie Shea in 1923; he died of “a too liberal use of alcoholic beverages of questionable quality.”
(Dat bootleg gin done kil’t him)
Although that list does make you wonder how many might have been undiscovered murders. Back then, forensics wasn’t much of an advanced science, and doubt they had any great fingerprint analysis or databases.
Wonder if any of the hanging suicides were by dudes with pants down and a pile of naughty French postcards on the floor?
That was my thinking, too.
If you came up behind someone and slit his throat with a razor, and then pressed the razor into his hand and left him, i wonder how closely the police would have considered the possibility of murder, or how easily they could have gathered evidence of a crime.
Aside from the ODs, I think this is what the record represents. I doubt there were any investigations of deaths that were not apparent homicides, especially if there was no complaining witness. Without witnesses what would they use for evidence? I suppose if someone was shot to death and no gun was found on the scene, a homicide might be assumed. But a slit throat? Just blame the victim. I wouldn’t be surprised if the razor wasn’t even found at the scene in some cases. Why increase the workload of the useless authorities and alarm the populace with a cry of ‘homicide’? Just call it suicide and be done with it.
There were likely plenty of actual suicides then, just as now. But these days a determination of suicide is frequently controversial. Plenty of people will instead David Carradine didn’t off himself while looking at French postcards. After all, a secret ninja attack is a much more likely explanation :dubious:
There wasn’t any fingerprinting at all until the 1890s, and it wasn’t introduced in the US until 1906, so no.
There are tell-tale differences, typically, between a homicidal and a suicidal cut throat, if anyone’s looking for such a thing (or so I’ve read). But I don’t know what the state of policing was in NYC at that time – the NYPD wasn’t even set up until 1844, so perhaps not great.
I think it’s pretty clear why these people killed themselves – the slow download speeds of internet porn. Think about it. The speed to download a single page back then was measured in centuries.