July 1863
Late one hot evening in New York City, a lynch mob made up of white men and adolescent boys marched down East 29th Street in Manhattan toward the home of New York’s richest black man, Jeremiah Hamilton. They wore dingy shirts with the sleeves rolled up and leather boots and carried revolvers, rifles, clubs, and sharpened sticks. As they marched down the gravel street toward the brownstone where Hamilton lived, they bellowed out his house number, “Sixty-eight! Sixty-eight! Sixty-eight!” and waved their weapons above their heads.
Hamilton and his wife, Eliza, heard the chants reverberating through the walls of their home. Hamilton was perhaps New York’s most infamous African American man. He was a ruthless Wall Street broker, lived in a brownstone in an all-white section of the city, and was married to a white woman fifteen years his junior. His skin was the color of mahogany; he wore expensive gray-and-black suits and a wig of flowing black hair. He was referred to as the Prince of Darkness and Nigger Hamilton as the newspapers cataloged his financial and social dealings in New York.
He could hear the boots of the men down on the street and their yelling and taunts as they drew closer to his house. Out of options, he bolted out the back door, jumped the back fence of his house, and ran away down 28th Street. As the men drew closer, Eliza was left behind to face the mob alone.
The streets had been a war zone for two days, ever since the federal government had begun draft lotteries for the Civil War. After the first names were drawn in New York, the city exploded in violence as working-class white men took to the streets and raged against the prospect of being forced to fight and end the enslavement of African Americans. In mobs of thousands, they overpowered the police, destroyed government buildings, lynched and crucified black citizens, and destroyed black churches and orphanages. High-profile African Americans were hunted as prize kills for lynch mobs. The day before they set upon Hamilton’s home, rioters had sacked and burned a pharmacy that belonged to James McCune Smith, America’s first black medical doctor.
When they arrived at Hamilton’s house, the men began to scream, “Bring the nigger out!” One of Hamilton’s white neighbors came outside and told the mob he wasn’t home, but the mob ignored his pleas to leave and continued shouting, “Nigger!” and “Bring him out!” One of the men told the neighbor, “There’s a nigger living in there with two white women, and we are going to bring him out and hang him from the lamp post.”
The men climbed Hamilton’s stoop and began slamming their shoulders into the front door. When it wouldn’t give, one of the men ran around the back of the house and rammed in the basement door. He ran up the stairs into the parlor floor of the house, followed by a dozen other rioters. At the top of the stairs, they were met by Eliza Jane Hamilton. Eliza was tall with pale skin, a downturned mouth, and brown hair that she wore in a French braid. “What do you want?” she asked the men. “Mr. Hamilton,” one man grunted. “We’re going to kill him,” another threatened. “Why?” Eliza demanded, trying to appear unafraid. “Revenge!” another man yelled. The men pushed past Eliza and spread out across the house to look for Hamilton. They scoured the house’s five bedrooms, its long hallways, its closets, the basement, the dining room, and the parlor for the rich black man they had come to lynch. Along the way, they looted his home, stuffing items of value they found in the house into their shirts and pockets.
Observing the commotion through their blinds, his neighbors locked their doors and bolted their windows. Two neighbors came outside and stood on their stoops to see what was going on.
“There’s trouble at the Hamiltons’, and they purport that they were going to burn him out and hang him,” the first neighbor said.
“Will you go down?” the other neighbor asked.
“No.”
“You won’t stand here and see a man murdered without going to help him?” the neighbor asked after a break in the conversation. The other neighbor didn’t answer.
Inside the house, a man with a revolver came downstairs and confronted Eliza. “Give us all your liquor and cigars,” he demanded. “I have no liquor,” she told them. “I have cider.” She went to fetch the cigars and cider. The looting went on for half an hour, and it seemed as though the men had no intention of leaving. Some of the men sat down on Hamilton’s parlor chairs, chaises, and sofas and put their feet up, smoking cigars and guzzling cider. Forty-five minutes later, the men became convinced that Hamilton wasn’t there and concluded that they had stolen all that there was to steal. One by one, they finally gave up and left.
Hamilton, the richest black man in New York, narrowly escaped death that day. However, it was the fleetness of his feet and not his wealth and talent that saved his life. There had been a time when he believed that his money would protect him from racism. His brush with death at the hands of a white mob was perhaps proof that African Americans, even if they had the opportunity and skill to amass a fortune, would still face threats to their lives and prosperity, similar to the ones the masses of African Americans faced, perhaps greater because of their stature.
Hamilton died in his seventies, a decade after the Civil War ended. At the time of his death in 1875, he had a net worth of nearly a million dollars, making him, at that time, the richest black man in the United States.