CHAPTER 34

Tweed to the Rescue

Southern newspapers reacted to the rioting with expressions of glee. They predicted that more riots would break out in the North, forcing Lincoln to suspend conscription. It took only a few days for their euphoria to fade. There were small outbreaks of violence in towns around New York City, from Long Island to Staten Island and New Jersey, but no other large-scale events. Unhappy Northerners would resist through draft evasion rather than draft riots. The specific combination of conditions that caused the rioting—long-standing Southern sympathies, racial hatred, class conflict, and extreme labor unrest—seemed peculiar to New York City.

New York’s Democrats and Republicans blamed each other for the havoc. The Tribune accused Governor Seymour of inciting the “incendiaries, thieves, and murderers” with his July 4 speech, then kowtowing to them with the “My Friends” speech. Morgan Dix was convinced that Copperhead conspirators, “the sanguinary fiends in our unfortunate city,” were behind the riots. The Times believed that Confederate provocateurs had collaborated with them, timing the uprising to coincide with Lee’s invasion and the draining of troops from the city. Events a year later would suggest that this was not entirely far-fetched. Democratic newspapers like the World countered that it was the Tribune and the other “radical journals of this City” that were to blame.

Republicans and their publications, including the Times, Tribune, and Harper’s Weekly, singled out Irish Catholics as the only or at least the most vicious perpetrators, a version that continued to hold much currency for decades. Hughes and the Irish papers fired back, but nativist and Know-Nothing sentiments enjoyed a renaissance in the weeks after the disturbance.

Republicans’ calls for harsh punishments ran against the dominant sentiments in the city. Though more than four hundred alleged rioters were rounded up on charges from murder and arson to assault and robbery, half were summarily released. Others jumped bail or plea-bargained for light sentences. Grand juries were reluctant to indict, witnesses to testify, juries to convict. When there were convictions, judges were lenient. Their harshest sentences were not for the brutal beatings and murders of blacks but for destruction of property.

Republicans and Democrats also differed on how to proceed with the draft. Republicans wanted Lincoln to restart it immediately, under martial law if necessary. Seymour and the Peace Democrats begged Lincoln to keep the draft suspended in the city until their challenges to its constitutionality cleared the federal courts—which could take months. Lincoln was in no mood to appease the protesters, and his generals needed troops. He could hardly suspend the draft in one city and continue it in others. He ordered its resumption. He did not quite impose martial law, but he did fill the city with a much stronger military presence. As the military man in charge, General Wool took the fall for failing to quell the riots in the first few days. He was forced to retire, moved to his hometown of Troy, and died there in 1869. He lies in Troy’s Oakwood Cemetery under a large obelisk.

The general who replaced Wool was John A. Dix. By mid-August, when the draft was scheduled to resume, he had effectively turned New York into an occupied city, with ten thousand federal troops who maintained a highly visible presence on the streets. He had Lincoln’s permission to declare martial law if necessary. He also had a network of spies keeping tabs on anyone suspected of Southern sympathies, including some of his Democrat friends like Richard Lathers.

When the draft started up again that month, the city remained calm. In fact, for all their violent opposition to it beforehand, New Yorkers found the draft very easy to evade. For the city’s tens of thousands of immigrant men, the easiest way to stay off the draft rolls was simply to put off becoming citizens. Not surprisingly, naturalizations declined sharply for the rest of the war.

While half the New York City men who entered the army as a result of the draft were immigrants, it appears that few of them were actually compelled to go. Historian Tyler Anbinder conducted an intensive study of the available draft records, haphazardly kept as they were, and found some surprising data. For example, of the more than fifteen thousand poor people stuffed into the wretched Five Points slum area, most of them Irish immigrants, only a single man seems actually to have served in the army as a result of being drafted. Four out of five poor immigrants whose names were pulled from the wheel of misfortune managed to evade service, and without paying a penny. A good many simply failed to report to the provost officers when their names came up, hoping not to be hunted down for it. More were granted exemptions for a wide variety of reasons: because they were too young or too old, were convicted felons, or sole supporters of parents or children. And because the army was looking for able-bodied men who could march and fight, and because poor immigrants were prone to all sorts of injuries and infirmities, they got medical exemptions for a very long list of reasons ranging from hernias, “inflamed” testicles, and “tender feet” to syphilis, “excessive obesity,” imbecility, and “excessive stammering.”

Most of the city’s immigrants who did serve from July 1863 on were not draftees, but the draftees’ paid substitutes. Few workers could come up with the commutation fees and bounties paid to substitutes, but they could turn to their friend William Tweed. In one of the political masterstrokes of his career, Tweed commandeered the draft issue and devised a plan that satisfied everybody. He proposed exemptions for policemen, firemen, and militiamen, so the city would not be left unguarded again. He also called for a County Substitute and Relief Committee of six Democrats (including himself) and six Republicans, which would review the cases of all draftees who asked to be excused from service. The city would raise $2 million and pay the commutation fees and bounties for all cases found worthy.

To give his proposal bipartisan appeal, Tweed enlisted one of the more malleable Republicans on the Board of Supervisors, a gun-maker named Orison Blunt, to cosponsor the idea. During the war Blunt invented his own, apparently inferior version of the Gatling gun, which he called the pepper-box gun. A prototype he demonstrated for President Lincoln somehow fell into Confederate hands, “and after some strange vicissitudes,” according to his 1879 obituary in the Times, “Mr. Blunt finally discovered the weapon after the war in a junk shop in this City. He bought it back for $5.” Opdyke came aboard as well. In August, Tweed and Blunt met with Stanton in Washington and won his approval.

So it wasn’t just General Dix’s troops who kept the peace when the draft resumed in the city that month. Tweed dispatched Tammany men to stand with the soldiers at all the draft offices, a reassuring indication to the poor men of the city that their friends at Tammany were looking out for them.

At first Tweed’s plan seemed to work brilliantly. With Blunt chairing the review process, almost no draftee from the city of New York was ever forced into uniform. At the end of September, of 1,034 cases reviewed, the committee bought substitutes for 983 and excused 49 others, leaving only two who went into uniform. The army got its new soldiers; the masses got a hero and savior in Tweed; even the Times approved.

How well the committee actually served the Union is another matter. Inevitably, the millions being paid out to substitutes invited fraud and corruption. When states had begun paying bounties to fill their volunteer quotas in the fall of 1862, a new industry of bounty brokers and “bounty jumpers” sprang up out of nowhere. Although many brokers worked scrupulously to help recruiters fill their rolls, others brought gullible men to the recruitment office by any means necessary and, with the connivance of corrupt recruitment officers, swindled them of some or all of the bounty. Jumpers made a profession of signing up, then disappearing with the bounty, and repeating the process at another office.

Blunt’s committee, and the city provosts with whom it collaborated, relied on brokers and ignored the criminal abuses of the bad ones. Brokers were free to go to any length to bring men in. They prowled the city’s waterfront dives, got men drunk, and dragged them insensate to the provosts; the men woke up the next day as new recruits in the barracks on Governors Island. Brokers swarmed aboard ships from Europe the instant they docked and signed up uncomprehending, non-English-speaking immigrants. They rounded up deserters and threatened them with imprisonment if they didn’t sign up; brought the lame, the halt, and the aged to the provosts, who turned a blind eye; and resorted to outright kidnapping. Large numbers of the recruits who filled the city’s quotas weren’t from the city at all, but press-ganged and brought in by brokers from rural counties. Brokers weren’t above hiring thugs to beat any man who resisted. One seaman who tried to fight off a gang of broker’s toughs in a Hester Street bar died of seventeen stab wounds.

Naturally, men recruited in these ways made poor prospects as soldiers. Many deserted before they could even be put into uniform. But that was the army’s problem, not the County Committee’s. They were counted toward fulfilling the city’s quota.

General Dix found all this outrageous. He demanded that Blunt pay closer attention to the abuses, and when he felt that Blunt’s response was insufficient, he began arresting the most crooked brokers and ordering them to repay the money they’d swindled or be confined as military prisoners in Fort Lafayette. He moved against corrupt provosts, court-martialing one recruitment-office doctor for “passing men while in a state of intoxication and perfectly unconscious.” He stepped up efforts to find and arrest deserters and bounty jumpers. One of the latter came to an unhappy and very public end on Governors Island in February 1865. New Yorker James Devlin enlisted and deserted twice. Then he deserted his wife and three children as well, shacking up with a woman on Mott Street. Enraged, his wife ratted him out to Dix’s office. Dix quickly had him court-martialed and sentenced to execution. His wife, frantic with remorse, tried unsuccessfully to secure a pardon. On February 3, on the beach just outside the circular Castle Williams, Devlin faced a firing squad of ten muskets. A priest and the wailing Mrs. Devlin stood near him. “All of the inhabitants of the island, both male and female, including many children, appeared to have assembled to witness the execution,” the Times reported. They numbered about a thousand. “Boys and girls, from ten years of age upward, were to be seen passing through the crowd, to obtain a good view of the tragedy.… The eagerness of the women to witness the shooting was most disgusting.” Devlin was given a white handkerchief for a blindfold, then a volley of “ten balls sped upon their deadly errand, passed through his body, and sank into the bay. The body stood poised in the air a moment, and then fell forward with a heavy thud upon the sward.”

Still, the fraud and abuses continued as long as the draft was in effect. Most New Yorkers shrugged, considering brokers and jumpers a necessary evil.

Ironically, the draft riots and ensuing scramble to find volunteer replacements for New York’s draftees led to the formation of the first black regiment of volunteers raised in New York, the 20th Regiment of United States Colored Troops. They were recruited and outfitted by the wealthy Republicans of the Union League Club. Union Leagues, also called Loyal Leagues, had sprung up all around the North to counter the dismal morale that had spread by the start of 1863. Henry Bellows, Frederick Law Olmsted, the lawyer George Templeton Strong, and other Sanitary Commission leaders started New York City’s Union League Club in February 1863, and wooed some five hundred others. Club members were the cream of Protestant, patrician New York, including the influential businessman Alexander Stewart and the shipping magnate William Aspinwall, along with politicians like Dix and the former governor and now senator Edwin Morgan. When the draft riots raged around their posh clubhouse on East 17th Street, near both Union Square and Edwin Booth’s home, club members like Strong had seethed helplessly at the “brutal, base, cruel… Irish scum” and the “unspeakable infamy of the nigger persecution.” In November they went over the head of the objecting Governor Seymour and won Stanton’s permission to recruit black volunteers to help fill New York’s quota.

On March 5, 1864, the 20th’s 1,020 black soldiers marched from the clubhouse to a waiting steamship while tens of thousands lined their route, some cheering and some just gawking. The club would raise a second regiment, the 26th, and part of a third, the 31st, by which point the city’s complement of eligible black men had been largely depleted. Many of the soldiers had left jobs paying up to sixty dollars a month to take ten dollars (three less than white soldiers) from the army. As was customary with black regiments, the officers and noncommissioned officers were all white men, except for the chaplain. Reverend Henry Highland Garnet served as chaplain while the regiment trained on Rikers Island, but he could not go to the front with them because he limped on a wooden leg, the result of a boyhood injury. He was replaced by the Reverend George Le Vere of Brooklyn as the unit prepared to leave the city.

While some New Yorkers cheered the men of the 20th, others went out of their way to discourage them. The brokers through whom they signed up cheated them even more grossly than they did white recruits. Facilities on Rikers Island were abysmal. Reverend Garnet was so badly mistreated on the ferry to the island that the army had to assign him an escort. When Le Vere took over, white officers refused to let him eat with them in the mess; even the club neglected to invite him to a reception for the regiment’s officers. Two of the city’s most famous marching bands, Harvey Dodsworth’s 13th Regiment Band and Claudio Graffula’s 7th, refused to lead “the niggers” on their parade through the streets. The five hundred club members marched with the troops, partly as a sort of honor guard, partly as bodyguards. The Tribune and Times cheered the event, while the Herald moaned that putting “these ex-bootblacks and scrubbers, waiters and whitewashers” in uniform was the “inauguration of miscegenation” (a new coinage in the spring of 1864).

The 20th Regiment was posted to the swamps of Louisiana, where, though they didn’t engage in any major fighting, more than two hundred of them would die of disease. The 26th and 31st saw more action and fought, their white officers agreed, with distinction.

In the third week of July, Dan Sickles, on crutches, with Gus Schurmann taking an elbow as needed, hobbled off a ferry onto the island of Manhattan, where the ashes were still hot from the rioting the week before. Reeling and in need of something to celebrate, New York City gave him a hero’s welcome. Even the Times joined in the huzzahs, declaring that he “has proved what militia are capable of, when led by a brave man, even without the advantages of a regular military education.… Gen. Sickles has literally carved his way to fame with his sword.… When the roll of heroes is written for this war, one of the highest on the list will be that of Gen. Daniel E. Sickles, and New York will justly claim him as her own.”

No doubt all the lofty praise speeded the general’s recovery. By the fall he was back south to ask Meade if he could resume command. Meade put him off on medical grounds. Privately, he was glad to be through with the man.

But Sickles wasn’t through with Meade. Now a regular and welcome guest at the White House, he launched a smear campaign to portray Meade as a cowardly bungler who narrowly avoided defeat at Gettysburg only through the fine soldiering of his subordinates, including of course Dan Sickles. In Congress he made his case to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, led by Radicals ready to denounce anyone they felt was not prosecuting the conflict with proper gusto. Butterfield offered supporting testimony. Bennett’s Herald joined the attack, running letters signed “Historicus” damning Meade and praising Sickles that were almost certainly written by Sickles himself. The committee urged Lincoln to sack Meade, but in the end he kept his job. Sickles never got his back.

Meanwhile, Gus remained with his family in New York City. Gettysburg had been his last battle. Sickles, with Lincoln’s approval, had gotten him an appointment to a preparatory school, with the idea that he’d go on to West Point. Gus didn’t stay in school long. He went to work to support his mother instead.

A few weeks after Sickles’s visit, New York turned out to cheer an unalloyed war hero, Rear Admiral David Farragut, who brought his flagship the Hartford to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for repairs and refitting. Since taking New Orleans he’d gone on to victory after victory on the Mississippi, earning the nickname “the American Viking” for his boldness and courage. Oliver Wendell Holmes would dub him “the Sea King.” He looked the part, tall and trim in his admiral’s gold-buttoned blues, with gray curls ringing the sober and alert visage of an eagle. He would be off again in January, his most legendary victory still to come.

New York City voters went to the polls that December. Opdyke wisely decided not to run, so the Republicans nominated Tweed’s collaborator Orison Blunt. The Democrats, as usual, split. Tammany and Mozart Hall agreed to a temporary fusion and nominated a Tammany functionary. Democrats who opposed them nominated Charles Godfrey Gunther, who’d been Tammany’s man in 1861. Raised on Maiden Lane in a prosperous fur-trading family, Gunther was pro-South and very antiwar. He was not in fact German, but the German community thought he was and helped him eke out a victory. His two years in office would prove to be almost as tumultuous as Opdyke’s had been.

While New York’s Germans were electing a mayor, New York’s Irish community lost a hero. That December the much-reduced General Meagher visited his old friend Michael Corcoran where the Corcoran Legion was stationed at Fairfax Courthouse, midway between Washington and Manassas. They got to toasting each other’s health, and Corcoran decided he wanted to ride Meagher’s horse, a big and notoriously testy brute. The beast tossed Corcoran down a ravine and tumbled on top of him. He never regained consciousness. He was thirty-six. His body was brought back to New York City with all solemn honors. Large crowds came to view it as it lay in state at City Hall over Christmas, then followed it to a funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street, across the street from the Hibernian House where he’d once worked. He was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Stephen Foster had returned to New York just before the start of the war. Hard times had come for him again and again in the second half of the 1850s as his songwriting income dwindled to a pittance. He’d been forced to sell his publishers Firth, Pond & Co. the rights to much of his catalog at a terrible price. When he came back to New York in a last-ditch effort to make a go of it, he brought his wife, Jane, and their daughter, Marion, with him. At one point they were in a boardinghouse on Greene Street in today’s SoHo.

Foster had sickened of minstrel songs and wrote parlor ballads at a desperate clip; it showed in their tonal mediocrity and poor sales. The morbid lyrics signaled his increasingly dark mood—“Lizzie Dies To-night,” “Our Willie Dear Is Dying,” “Farewell Mother Dear,” and so on. He wrote his last good parlor song, “Beautiful Dreamer,” but failed to publish it.

Within a year Jane had left him, taking Marion with her. He sank deeper into despondency and drifted to the Lower East Side, where he took up drinking bad rum in the backroom grog shops behind grocery stores. People on the Bowery recognized the great songwriter even as his condition deteriorated. Some bought him drinks and asked him to sing “Hard Times”; others mocked his sad condition. When one young woman asked if he was Stephen Foster, he replied, “Yes, the wreck of Stephen Foster.”

In the winter of 1862–63 a law student named George Cooper, whose father had a store on the Bowery, screwed up his nerve to approach Foster as he was drinking. He had a poem he thought might make a good song, “Willie Has Gone to the War.” According to Cooper, Foster pulled a crumpled sheet of music from a pocket, flattened it on one of the cheese boxes that served as tables in the joint, and jotted down a melody for the poem. Then they headed for Broadway, where Foster’s music publisher, now called Wm. A. Pond & Co., had its offices. As they passed Wood’s Minstrel Hall near Spring Street, Henry Wood stepped out, recognized Foster, and asked if that was a new song he had rolled up in his fist. He bought it on the spot for twenty-five dollars, the easiest money Foster had made in some time. Pond published the sheet music.

Encouraged, Foster collaborated with Cooper on some twenty more songs. Most were undistinguished wartime ditties no one listened to. Some are utterly unperformable now, like “A Soldier in the Colored Brigade,” Cooper’s lyrics for which include lines like:

Old Uncle Abram wants us, and we’re coming right along

I tell you what it is, we’re gwine to muster mighty strong

Then fare you well my honey dear! now don’t you be afraid

I’s bound to be a soldier in de colored brigade

A soldier! a soldier in de darkey brigade!

I’s bound to be a soldier in de colored brigade.…

In days ob Gen’ral Washington we fought de British well,

Behind de bales wid “Hickory” I tink we made ’em yell.

I tell you we’re de chickens dat can handle gun or spade,

And Greeley he’ll go wid us in de Colored Brigade.

Foster continued to decline through 1863. He drifted from one cheap rooming house to another on and around the Bowery, drinking too much, eating too little. Even a backroom bartender commented that he was “not very delectable society.” In January 1864, with money from a saloonkeeper fan, he managed to take a room in a relatively respectable location by Bowery standards, the New England Hotel at the northwest corner of the Bowery and Bayard Street. On the morning of Sunday, January 9, Foster stood at his door speaking to a chambermaid, then turned and suddenly collapsed, crashing down into a washing bowl that shattered, gashing his neck. The hotel sent for his friend Cooper, who lived a few blocks away. Cooper found him on the floor, bleeding horribly. As they waited for a doctor, Foster croaked, “I’m done for,” and asked for a drink. The doctor crudely stitched the wound and had Foster carried up to Bellevue, where he died on January 13. He was thirty-seven. He’d written some of America’s favorite songs, and had thirty-eight cents to his name.