CHAPTER 33

The Volcano Erupts

On the morning of Tuesday, July 14, New York governor Horatio Seymour stepped off a ferry from Jersey City onto a dock on the west side of Manhattan. What he saw shocked him. Black smoke billowed from rows of burning buildings. The muggy midsummer air crackled with gunfire and echoed with screams. Phalanxes of policemen and soldiers chased citizens up and down streets littered with smoldering rubble, shards of glass, broken paving stones, and the ruined furnishings of homes tossed out of windows. The most widespread and destructive rioting in the city’s long history of mob violence had broken out the day before. It had now escalated into a mad orgy of wanton destruction—of racial murder, drunken hooliganism, arson, thievery, and thuggery. Whole neighborhoods were barricading their streets to keep the Metropolitans and soldiers out. Others armed themselves to keep looters out of their homes and shops. What came to be known as the New York City draft riots were reducing the city to utter anarchy.

The Battle of Gettysburg ended on Friday, July 3. New York papers of Saturday, July 4, were still not quite clear on the outcome of what the Times called the “perfectly fearful” fighting. What news had come through in a blizzard of specials’ telegrams was, the Times said, “of a cheering character, yet not sufficiently definite and decisive to allay the anxieties of the people.” The fuller story would come in the Monday editions, along with the news that Vicksburg had at long last surrendered to Grant.

While other New Yorkers celebrated July Fourth with the usual fireworks and cheers, Peace Democrats gathered at the Academy of Music in a more somber mood. Governor Seymour gave a speech characterized not by patriotic huzzahs but by gloom and doom. “I stand before you,” he intoned, “not as one animated by expected victories, but feeling… the dread uncertainties of the conflicts which rage around us.” Victory and peace could be won only by a united Union, he went on. But how could the Union be united when the Republicans kept trampling on the rights of the citizens? Addressing Republicans, he warned, “Remember this—that the bloody and treasonable and revolutionary doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government.” That line would soon come back to haunt him.

Definitive news of the Union’s victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg did lighten spirits that following week. “It would seem as though this war might now be brought to an end,” Maria Daly wrote, and other New Yorkers let themselves hope that the hated draft would be unnecessary. Then came the staggering lists of the twenty-three thousand Union casualties at Gettysburg. As the collective mood darkened again, Colonel Robert Nugent, late of Corcoran’s 69th and Meagher’s Irish Brigade, now provost marshal for the city, announced that the first draftees’ names would be drawn on Saturday, July 11.

There was every reason to anticipate trouble. In February, speculators on Wall Street had driven the price of gold sky high. A few days later the struggling treasury issued millions of dollars’ worth of new greenbacks, and their value slid. Soon, Bryant’s Minstrels debuted two satirical new songs, Dan Emmett’s “Greenbacks!” and another called “How Are You, Greenbacks.” The second, yet another parody of “We Are Coming, Father Abraham,” included some rather nasty comments about war profiteers:

We are coming, Father Abram, one hundred thousand more,

And cash was ne’er so easily evok’d from rags before;

To line the fat contractor’s purse, or purchase transport craft

Whose rotten hulks shall sink before the winds begin to waft

Just as bitter was a parody of “Sing a Song of Sixpence” that began:

Sing a song of greenbacks

A pocket full of trash

Over head and ears in debt,

And out of ready cash

Workers watched the shoddy aristocracy living it up while their own ability to purchase basic necessities declined. With Copperhead newspapers and politicians constantly warning them that freed blacks were about to pour into the city to make things even worse, their anger and anxiety had been erupting in rashes of violence around the city since 1862. In August of that year a few hundred white workers attacked and set fire to a Brooklyn tobacco factory that employed mostly black men, women, and children. Cops dispersed the mob only after a fierce melee, and the owner promised not to hire any more Negroes. Roving white gangs beat random blacks on the streets in the following weeks.

From October 1862 up to July 1863 there were constant, violent strikes on the city’s waterfront. Since the mid-1850s most of the city’s longshoreman work, done by black men before then, had been in the hands of Irishmen. They jealously guarded those jobs from blacks—not that they were good jobs. Employment was irregular—known euphemistically as “casual labor”—and depended on how many cargo ships were at the docks at a given time. Most longshoremen managed to get only three or four days’ work a week. And when the merchants saw how cheaply the Irish would work, they reduced the hourly rate to a pittance.

During the war the longshoremen’s position grew even worse. They were still working only a few days a week and still getting their meager 1850s wages, while inflation hiked prices. In February 1863 shipyard and iron workers held a mass meeting at Tammany Hall to denounce their employers for importing “hordes of blacks from the South, as well as whites from Europe” to take their jobs away. The next month a thousand strikers on the Hudson waterfront drove off Negro scabs with sticks and fists. In April hundreds of longshoremen went on a three-day binge of violence, beating any blacks they found on or near the docks, shouting, “Kill the niggers!” and “Drive off the damn niggers!” The Metropolitans barely prevented them from lynching two black men. Another mass strike of longshoremen paralyzed the docks that June, holding up supplies needed on the war front. The federal government stepped in. Soldiers with fixed bayonets kept strikers away from docks while prisoners from Governors Island loaded army supplies. That month barge and railroad workers also went on strike and attacked white and black scabs.

The Times claimed at the end of June that the process of building enrollment lists in the city in May and June had gone quietly, and speculated that the violent responses elsewhere must have been “owing to the appointment of insolent or stupid enrolling officers.” Shortly after this, however, a construction worker did scuffle with an enrollment officer collecting names at a city construction site; the worker waved a crowbar, and the agent pulled a pistol. The foreman of the site was arrested the following day.

In this extremely volatile setting, the provost marshals proceeded with care. As a Fenian and a Democrat, Nugent had no trouble reading the foul mood of the city’s immigrants and workers. He prudently chose to begin the draft in the sporadically developed and sparsely populated zone north of 42nd Street. And in fact the Saturday, July 11, drawing of 1,236 names at the draft office on Third Avenue at 46th Street went surprisingly smoothly. A crowd of some 150 men watched as the slips of papers with names on them were turned in a hand-cranked wooden drum the Daily News called the wheel of misfortune. The mood, the Herald said, was mostly jocular.

Down at the other end of town, Thomas Francis Meagher was trying to raise troops in a different way that Saturday. He had decided to organize a new brigade, and called for all former Irish officers who wished to volunteer to come meet him that day in his home on Ann Street. Meagher’s life was beginning to take on a tragicomic aspect. If trying to raise a new Irish brigade in New York City were not already a fool’s errand, events of the following week would certainly make it so.

When newspapermen fanned out to the bars and taverns in working-class neighborhoods on Sunday, they recorded much grumbling that built to anger as the day and the drinking progressed. For Irish Catholics an added irritation that Sunday was Orange Day, when the city’s Irish Protestants marched and celebrated.

By Monday morning many workers in the city had decided that the choosing of names would not continue as planned. At eight o’clock a contingent began marching up the west side, gathering hundreds more from their workplaces as they passed—longshoremen, iron workers, machinists, construction workers—beginning what in effect would turn into a citywide labor strike. They included skilled and unskilled laborers, Irish, Germans and nativists, Catholics and Protestants. The one group they did not include was black workers. From Central Park they marched down Third Avenue to the draft office at 46th Street. Massing outside the office, they waved “No Draft” placards and yelled insults at President Lincoln and Horace Greeley.

Then the men of Engine Company 33 arrived with a wagon of stones. By an unfortunate accident of history, they were known as the Black Joke Company. “The name was given her in honor of an Albany sloop which distinguished herself in the war of 1812,” Augustine Costello wrote in his 1887 history, Our Firemen. “She was painted a ‘nigger’ black on the body, and had a gold stripe running all the way around.” In the 1840s the company allowed “two gigantic negroes,” nicknamed Black Jack and Black Joe, to run with them. “Those darkeys made themselves very serviceable around the engine house, and felt themselves highly honored in being asked to do anything. They were not, however, allowed to bunk in the engine house.”

A member of the company had been on the Saturday list of draftees. Fire laddies had been exempt from conscription in the state militia, and now felt they should be exempt from the federal draft as well. Stones flew through the office’s windows, a pistol shot rang out, and the crowd erupted. They broke in, intending to seize and destroy the draft records. They beat a draft officer and a Metropolitan who tried to keep them out, then trashed the building and set it on fire. Outside, a lawyer named John U. Andrews, originally from Virginia and well known to Superintendent Kennedy’s agents as a Confederate sympathizer as well as a consorter with thieves and whores, roused the rabble to fury with a speech exhorting them to “crush this damn abolition draft into the dust.” Some in the crowd who were under the impression that he was Benjamin Wood cheered loudly. Their bloodlust up, they looted adjacent tenements. They stopped streetcars on Third Avenue, pulled off any blacks they found, and savagely beat them. They looted hardware stores for ax handles to use as weapons, and for crowbars that were used to pull up the tracks of the Fourth Avenue railway. By noon the mayhem was spreading in all directions through the city in a confusion of flames, screams, and gunfire. Workers by the thousands walked off their jobs and joined either the rioters or the huge crowds who climbed up to rooftops to watch them. Business and transportation shut down. Nugent ordered draft documents carried to Governors Island for safety. The city was under siege from its own citizens.

As soon as he heard of the trouble, Superintendent Kennedy took a couple of men and rushed uptown from Metropolitan headquarters on Mulberry Street. The crowd, which was growing in size and ferocity by the minute, immediately engulfed them and clubbed them nearly to death. Other small squads of Metropolitans ventured out from precinct houses and waded into the crowd, swinging their clubs. The metastasizing mob easily scattered them, chasing them through the streets. They stabbed and beat those they caught. The rioters proceeded to George Opdyke’s rifle factory at 21st Street and Second Avenue, where the one thousand rifles he’d manufactured, out of the ten thousand the army had contracted, were stored. The mob battered down the doors, drove off the small contingent of Metropolitans guarding the place, hauled out the rifles, and torched the building. Thirteen people died in the melee, several of them in the fire they themselves had set.

Other rioters gathered outside Mayor Opdyke’s home on Fifth Avenue, which Tweed’s man Judge George Barnard talked them out of destroying. Opdyke was not at home, nor at City Hall. He had fled up Broadway from City Hall to the St. Nicholas Hotel, where he was firing off panicked telegrams and messages for help in all directions.

The mob turned to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets. Quakers founded the asylum in 1836; since the 1840s its medical director had been the extraordinary Dr. James McCune Smith. Born in the city in 1813 to a self-emancipated black mother and a white father he never knew, Smith was refused admission to study medicine at Columbia and other universities in New York. He sailed to Scotland in 1832 (most likely on a British ship, since blacks couldn’t buy tickets on many of the New York–based lines) and graduated first in his class from the University of Glasgow’s medical school in 1837, the first black American with an M.D. Back in New York City he practiced medicine and opened what’s believed to be the first black-owned pharmacy in America, on West Broadway, as well as becoming the staff physician at the asylum. As it happens, Smith was home sick the day the rioters attacked the building. As the 237 children were helped to safety—notably, by Irish firemen—the crowd looted and torched the building, shouting things like, “Burn the niggers’ nest!” After the rioting, Smith, like many other black New Yorkers, would move his family to Brooklyn, settling in Williamsburg, where he would die of congestive heart failure in 1865.

Dr. John Torrey, a distinguished botanist and chemist, was at work at the U.S. Assay Office on Wall Street when reports of the trouble reached downtown. He decided to return to his home on 49th Street “to protect my colored servants.” He would write several letters to a friend over the next few days. This first day he made his way through the growing mayhem, past “rough fellows (& some equally rough women) who were tearing up rails, cutting down telephone poles & setting fire to buildings.” When he got home, “furious bareheaded & coatless men assembled under our windows & shouted aloud for Jeff. Davis!” He ventured out to speak with “one of the ring-leaders who told me they would burn the whole city before they got through.”

As the day wore on, roving gangs, from a few dozen to a few thousand each, rampaged all over the city. They engaged in wide-scale looting of shops and bars, and the great quantities of free liquor consumed added to the insanity. They targeted the homes of blacks, and of anyone known to be or suspected of being a Republican, abolitionist, or prowar. One huge mob filled Printing House Square, outside the offices of those Republican organs the Tribune, Times, and Evening Post. Anticipating trouble, Henry Raymond had borrowed three Gatling guns, a recent invention, from the army. He aimed two out windows, manning one himself, and placed a third on the roof. He armed his staff with muskets. Post staff armed themselves as well. Across the square, ruffians shook their cudgels and fists at the Tribune’s windows and called for Horace Greeley. For once, Greeley kept his cool. He forbade his staff to arm themselves, then slipped off to keep a dinner engagement with Theodore Tilton at a nearby restaurant. His staff armed themselves in his absence. Raymond sent sixteen musket-bearing Times staffers across the square to help, and Greeley biographer James Parton showed up with more rifles. The crowd broke into the Tribune building, piled desks in the middle of the ground floor, and set them alight. Metropolitans arrived in some force to clear them out before they could do more damage. Meanwhile, up in Chappaqua, a drunken mob trying to break into Greeley’s farm was rebuffed, while Mary and their daughters hid.

In the past, mayors had called out militia regiments like the 7th to put down riots. But all available army and militia troops had been sent for the defense of Pennsylvania and not yet returned. The seventy-nine-year-old General John E. Wool—“Granny Wool” to younger officers—struck other officers on the scene as addled and unable to comprehend the magnitude of what was happening. This may not have been entirely fair. Wool had, after all, seen trouble coming. Events were now proving him right. Still, the others judged him incompetent and acted on their own authority to put what troops they had onto the streets. As a result the military response was not just meager but uncoordinated. Nugent handed muskets to seventy men of the Invalid Corps (wounded or sick soldiers unfit for battle but able to do light duty in the city’s garrisons) and deployed them. They got off a couple of ragged volleys, killing and wounding a few rioters, before the mob overcame them, beating two of them to death with their own muskets. Later in the week Irish rioters would break into Nugent’s house, chase off his wife and child, and trash the place. They slashed a portrait of Nugent with Meagher, but reportedly spared one of Corcoran, who was still an unsullied hero in their eyes.

By Monday evening panicked New Yorkers were fleeing the island by any conveyance available. Black New Yorkers fled by foot, following rail lines up to the Bronx, and crowded onto the ferries crossing both rivers. Many would never return, permanently settling in safer areas like the free black community of Weeksville far out in Brooklyn. The city’s black population would be 20 percent lower after the riots. In The Devil’s Own Work, Barnet Schecter points out that one of the lasting legacies of the riots would be the increasing segregation and ghettoization of black New Yorkers. Although some had congregated in certain neighborhoods, like the Five Points and Greenwich Village’s “Little Africa” (less kindly known as “Coontown”), other black New Yorkers had always lived among whites throughout the city. They would do so less freely and comfortably now.

Upper-crust New Yorkers who hadn’t already gone off to Saratoga or Long Branch also ran. Some stampeded the cab companies, where drivers charged as much as a hundred dollars to carry them through the roiling streets to the Bronx and points north. Others, like the Torreys, stayed in their homes, prepared to flee if attacked. Judge Daly, to Maria’s “great distress,” “sallied out with his pistol” every night of the rioting to see what was going on.

Edwin Booth and various family members huddled in his town house near Union Square. When his wife had contracted pneumonia and died the previous winter, he fled the Fifth Avenue Hotel, first to East 17th Street, then later in the same year to 28 East 19th Street. John Wilkes happened to be in the city staying with Edwin and the family. Edwin’s friend Adam “Vagabond” Badeau was with them as well. When the war started he’d joined the Union army and was serving as a general’s aide. Wounded in battle, he’d been laid up in a military hospital and then released to finish convalescing in New York. He arrived on a stretcher, too weak to stand, tended by a black male nurse. The Booths fussed over him affectionately. Hearing the roaring crowds and popping gunfire outside, they worried that rioters would target Edwin’s well-known address. Edwin had been a highly visible and active supporter of Lincoln and the war effort, giving benefit performances that raised thousands for Union widows and orphans. The presence of a Union officer and a black attendant added to their peril. Rioters in their area were reportedly going house to house, looking for both. John Wilkes ventured out periodically to scout the streets and search for food. Fiercely anti-Irish, he expressed disgust at the chaos the “ignorant foreigners” were causing. Through the days of the rioting, John Wilkes surprised his family by helping to care for Badeau and even being willing to protect the nurse if necessary. Apparently he surprised himself as well. “Imagine me,” he later exclaimed, “helping that wounded soldier with my Rebel sinews!” Badeau would survive the riots, regain his health, and join Ulysses S. Grant’s staff in 1864.

Heavy rain Monday night raised some hopes that the violence would cease, but when Tuesday dawned sunny and muggy, the mayhem started early. At 6 a.m. a black sailor stepped off a ship tied up at a lower Hudson dock and innocently asked for directions to a grocery store. A white mob beat, stomped, and crushed him with paving stones. He died in the hospital two hours later.

Governor Seymour arrived midmorning. He had been enjoying a weekend at Long Branch. On Monday morning he was happily riding in a carriage along the strand when mounted officers handed him a plea from Mayor Opdyke to come help deal with the crisis. Seymour was not shocked by the news. Hadn’t he just warned of mob violence a little over a week earlier? But he was in no hurry to intervene. He could have taken a steamboat directly from Long Branch to New York and gotten there in two hours. Instead he proceeded by land up through New Jersey and spent the night there, probably hoping the crisis would blow over by the time he arrived the next day.

If one sight heartened Seymour as he stepped off the ferry, it was of the large-bellied man waiting with his hand out. William Tweed, a vigorous forty years old, showed absolutely no physical fear on the anarchic streets, but then he had no reason to. The types of people who were rioting trusted Tammany and liked Tweed. For one thing, when Grand Sachem Fowler had absconded back in 1860, Tweed had convinced the other sachems to elect James Connor to replace him—Tammany’s first Irish Catholic grand sachem. It was a brilliant move; Tammany’s standing with the community soared. It was a sign of Tweed’s influence that two wards everyone would have expected to erupt during the rioting—the heavily Irish, crowded, poor, and working-class Sixth and Fourteenth on the Lower East Side—remained quiet all week. Tweed had sent his men out to keep the peace. The residents, loyal to Tammany, heard and obeyed.

As of the previous April, Tweed was now grand sachem, and more than any grand sachem before him, he had consolidated all of Tammany as his machine, down to his handpicked ward bosses. He still dominated the County Board of Supervisors, and he was also filling key slots around the city with friends. He’d been spending the war years using his power to make boodles of money for himself and his cohort. His grandest boondoggle was the construction of an opulent new County Courthouse behind City Hall, begun in 1861. Tweed and his cronies, who would come to be known as the Tweed Ring, took outrageous cuts from vastly inflated contracts that eventually drove the price tag from an original $250,000 to around $15 million. In 1867, William Seward would arrange for the United States to buy the entire territory of Alaska from Russia for half that. Building what is still known as the Tweed Courthouse would take so long—it would not be finished until 1881, three years after Tweed’s death—that it became a running joke in the city. A backdrop for George L. Fox’s comic pantomime Humpty Dumpty, which opened on Broadway in 1867, depicted the incomplete structure with a giant billboard announcing that it would be finished in 1960.

With the Republican Opdyke incapacitated by the riots, Tweed saw an opportunity to shine and expand his power. At the start of the upheaval on Monday morning he had gone into action. He sent Judge Barnard to talk down the crowd at Mayor Opdyke’s house. It was Tweed who suggested that Opdyke move his operations from City Hall to the more easily defended St. Nicholas. That day, when Opdyke was having trouble calling together a quorum of aldermen for an emergency session, Tweed rounded them up. He convinced the mayor not to declare martial law, arguing that it would only inflame the mob more. As the deputy street commissioner, he put armed street workers at the service of the cops and soldiers. He personally visited riot hot spots and spoke to the crowds.

He now escorted Seymour up Broadway to the St. Nicholas, where they met with Opdyke. After being brought up to date, Seymour decided another speech might help. With Tweed, a phalanx of cops, and a gaggle of city officials—including Opdyke, whom a reporter described as “ghastly white” and visibly terrified—he walked the ten blocks down war-torn Broadway to City Hall. What the Times called “a large crowd of men and boys, numbering 800 or over,” watched as the governor mounted the wide front steps. Militiamen ringed the park, bayonets affixed to their muskets. The crowd cheered when they recognized Seymour (or maybe it was Tweed, towering behind him). According to the Times, someone cried out, “We want you to stay here.” “I am going to stay here, my friends,” Seymour replied. He ordered the militiamen to put their bayonets away, and announced that he’d already written the president to ask that the draft be suspended in the city. He implored the rioters to go home, telling them that they should “leave your interests in my hands and I will take care that justice is done you.” As the crowd cheered, Seymour and Tweed withdrew into the building. They later toured Wall Street and then the riot-torn west side, and Seymour repeated versions of his speech at both.

Again his words would haunt him. As the substance of his message to the rioters spread around the city, New Yorkers who were not participating in the violence were aghast and outraged. The rioters were his friends? He would see that justice was done them? Not one word for their victims or other law-abiding citizens? Seymour issued a written proclamation using slightly sterner language and declaring the city in a state of insurrection, but it was his notorious “My Friends” speech people remembered.

The mob may have cheered him, but they didn’t heed him. The bedlam on Tuesday and Wednesday was even more widespread and grotesque than Monday’s. Outmanned, and in some cases outgunned, police squads engaged rioters in flying battles on the streets, in looted buildings, inside bars and porterhouses, across rooftops. Women and children observing from windows threw bricks, crockery, and pots and pans at the Metropolitans’ heads. The savagery on Tuesday achieved truly repellent heights. Above 34th Street, two companies of the 11th New York Volunteers—a newly reorganized successor to Elmer Ellsworth’s original Zouaves, who had mustered out of service in 1862—lined up across Second Avenue to face an advancing mob. Their commander, Colonel Henry O’Brien, ordered his men to fire their muskets and a howitzer over the rioters’ heads. It worked, and the crowd dispersed. O’Brien lived nearby, and found that his house had been looted. He went off to get a horse-cart and returned to salvage what he could. It was a fatal mistake. Firing over the mob’s heads, his men had inadvertently shot a little boy and girl leaning out of upper windows; the girl, only two years old, died. The neighborhood knew who O’Brien was, knew where he lived, and when he reappeared, they pounced. They clubbed and beat him, kicked him, dragged him down the street. Little boys tried to set him on fire. Someone shoved a stick down his throat. Others cheered as men and boys continued to torture and mutilate him. A priest finally intervened and carried him in a wheelbarrow to Bellevue, where he died.

On Wednesday Dr. Torrey wrote his friend:

This morning I was obliged to ride down to the office in a hired coach. A friend who rode with me had seen a poor negro hung an hour or two before. The man had, in a frenzy, shot an Irish fireman, and they immediately strung up the unhappy African. At our office there had been no disturbance in the night. Indeed the people there were “spoiling for a fight.” They had a battery of about 25 rifle barrels, carrying 3 balls each, & mounted on a gun-carriage. It could be loaded & fired with rapidity. We had also 10-inch shells, to be lighted & thrown out of the windows.… The worst mobs are on the 1st & 2nd & 7th Avenues. Many have been killed there. They are very hostile to the negroes, & scarcely one of them is to be seen. A person who called at our house this afternoon saw three of them hanging together.

By Wednesday any black males who had not fled the city risked such gruesome deaths. A white gang beat, stoned, and trampled one man before hanging him. Another was hanged from a lamppost while a crowd gave three cheers for Jefferson Davis. They then hauled the corpse down, and a sixteen-year-old dragged it down the street by the genitals before a laughing, cheering audience. After another man was hanged, they chopped off his fingers and toes. The mob, which had shown a curious chivalry in not attacking black females up till now, began to target downtown brothels known to employ black prostitutes.

In the relative safety of her home, Maria Daly heard the stories of these atrocities with great interest but little sympathy. She recorded that when her father came from his country place to check on his house in the city, he “found fifteen Negroes secreted in it.… Father ordered them out. We feared for our own block on account of the Negro tenements [nearby], where the Negroes were on the roof, singing psalms and having firearms.” Although she claimed to be “very sorry and much outraged at the cruelties,” she went on, “I hope it will give the Negroes a lesson, for since the war commenced, they have been so insolent as to be unbearable. I cannot endure free blacks. They are immoral, with all their piety.”

Thomas Nast, the German immigrant boy from the Lower East Side who had run behind Tweed’s fire engine, drew some of the best-known images of the rioting and brutality. It’s not clear how much he actually witnessed himself, however.

In 1856, at just fifteen, he’d started working for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and was soon hanging out with the journalists and bohemians at Pfaff’s. Through marriage he fell in with another literary crowd that included the husband-and-wife team of James Parton and Fanny Fern, with whom he shared strong antislavery opinions.

Twenty when the war broke out, Nast headed for the front, drawing for Leslie’s and then Harper’s Weekly. Still small and chubby, Roly Poly was not a physically brave young man and never a true battlefield artist like Alf Waud. He spent most of his time in the camps and drew from what soldiers told him. Much of his wartime work was pure propaganda rather than visual reportage. “Southern Chivalry,” for instance, is a multipanel spread in which he depicts Confederates committing beheadings, scalpings, and other atrocities. That one earned him death threats from the South. In his most popular images he combined the propaganda with mawkish sentimentality, as in the one of a stars-and-striped Santa handing out presents to the boys at the front.

Nast was now into a twenty-five-year run as the star of Harper’s Weekly. Fletcher Harper was quite fond of “Tommy,” and of Tommy’s very positive impact on sales. Nast had tried to make it to Gettysburg for the battle, traveling there with Brady, but Union soldiers detained him because he wasn’t carrying proper papers. So he missed the fighting and returned to New York—just in time for the riots. When rioters massed outside the Harper brothers’ building in Franklin Square, employees armed themselves and barricaded the doors and windows. There’s no indication that Nast was present. He did make several iconic sketches of the violence in the streets, from a pitched battle between rioters and cops in Printing House Square to a black man lynched from a tree. But like his war work, much of what he drew of the riots was probably based on hearsay. It’s known that he spent most of the time with his family far away from danger in their home on 125th Street.

The first troops from outside started to reach the city Wednesday night. When the 7th Regiment arrived before dawn Thursday morning, it brought the number of fresh troops to four thousand. Marching up the streets and avenues in force, muskets and howitzers blazing, the new units scattered the mobs. In the Booths’ neighborhood, soldiers went door-to-door rooting armed rioters out of abandoned homes they’d commandeered. Meanwhile, police entered the home of the antiabolition speaker John Andrews that day and found him in bed—with a black prostitute. He was taken in shackles to Fort Lafayette, where he was held until tried in the winter of 1864—the only perpetrator tried in a federal court. Convicted of treason, he did three years in Sing Sing. He’d return to lawyering in the city on his release, and die in 1883 “forgotten even by his former friends,” according to his Times obituary.

By Friday morning the city was largely peaceful under its pall of black smoke. Businesses and shops gingerly reopened. That afternoon, Archbishop Hughes, whose health was fading at the age of sixty-six (he would die the following January), addressed a crowd of some five or six thousand from a balcony of his home near his still incomplete St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. A Times reporter described the crowd as “of various ages but of one nationality,” that is, Irish. “They were quiet and orderly, but disposed to regard with curious and seeking scrutiny any individual whose taste and purse permitted him the luxury of a whole coat and a clean pair of boots.” Hughes had been silent during the week, evidently not wanting to heighten the impression that the rioters were all Irish Catholics. He now gave an odd speech in which he cast Irish Catholics as victims of oppression, denied that they had been involved in the rioting, and yet asked them to stop the rioting (which they already had).

“Men of New York,” he began. “They call you riotous but I cannot see a riotous face among you.… I have been hurt by the reports that you are rioters. You cannot imagine that I could hear these things without being pained grievously. Is there not some way by which you can stop these proceedings, and support the laws, of which none have been enacted against you as Irishmen and Catholics?… Would it not be better for you to retire quietly?” Ending with a little joke, he said, “I hope nothing will occur till you return home; and if by chance, as you go thither, you should meet a police officer, or a military man, why just—look at him.”

The assembled cheered and peacefully parted, though someone reportedly shouted out, “Let the niggers stay in the South!” The next day, McMaster’s editorial in Freeman’s Journal argued that Negroes who “float hither from the South” should be “driven out again, imprisoned or exterminated.”

On Saturday the citizens of New York emerged and began, quite literally, to pick up the pieces. Squads of police and soldiers patrolled the littered streets, while poor women and children rooted through other people’s tossed-out belongings. Some fifty or sixty buildings had been burned to the ground, and many others trashed and looted. The published death count was 119, which makes these riots still the most deadly in the nation’s history, but many New Yorkers at the time were sure that this figure was very low. Jeff Whitman wrote Walt from Brooklyn, “Undoubtedly we shall never know the full number but I have it from the very best authority—an eye witness of most of the fights, that there are now more than 400 rioters that have paid their lives for their plunder. The papers are not allowed to publish this. I suppose it is much better not to let it be known, but the lesson was fearful and thorough to these men. Yesterday I saw them taking coffins out of the shanties on 2nd Av. piling them on carts and driving right to the cemetery. I understand they have been doing this ever since Monday night.” In 1864, Jeff’s name would come up in the draft, and the Whitman family scrambled to raise the money to pay for a substitute.