A FORMER New York policeman, named Peter Hart, helped save the American flag at Fort Sumter in that first battle of the Civil War. In the early morning of April 12, 1861, Southerners opened fire on the federal-held stronghold in Charleston Harbor and kept up the bombardment for thirty-four hours. The second afternoon, a few minutes before one o’clock, an enemy ball shot off the tip of the fort’s flagpole. Down fluttered Old Glory. Peter Hart, then a sergeant in the United States army, dashed out onto the Uttered parapet, carrying a long pole. A captain and two lieutenants ran to his aid. Amid a tempest of shot and shell the four soldiers fastened the pole to a gun carriage and raised the colors once more.
In New York during the opening days of the war a famous widow sat in her home making American flags. Her husband had been Captain James Lawrence, the naval officer who had won immortality during the War of 1812 by shouting, “Don’t give up the ship!” He had died of his wounds and lay buried in Trinity Churchyard.
As newspapers issued one extra after another, Mrs. Lawrence showed her little granddaughter how to scrape lint with a carving knife. A visitor, a flip young man known as “Poke” Wright, dropped by. He made an insulting remark about the American flag. The old woman looked up in astonishment and then cried, “No one can speak with disrespect in my house of the banner under which my husband fought and died!” Pulling her frail body out of a chair, she charged the rascal with her knife, driving him out onto the street. Her shrill anger attracted pedestrians, who grabbed Wright, forced him to his knees, and made him cheer the flag.
This symbolized the changed attitude of most New Yorkers upon the fall of Fort Sumter. A merchant wrote: “There is but one feeling here now, and that is to sustain our flag and the government at all costs.” A Charleston man who ordered flour from another New York merchant got this reply: “Eat your cotton, God damn ye!” The Planters Hotel at Albany and Greenwich streets, long popular with Southerners, quickly closed. Tammany Hall had opposed war with the South, but now, sniffing public opinion, it issued a loyalty proclamation and sent a regiment to the front.
Mayor Fernando Wood issued his own bland proclamation, urging everybody to obey the laws of the land. Remembering that only four months earlier the mayor had suggested that the city secede from the Union, G. T. Strong wrote in his diary: “The cunning scoundrel sees which way the cat is jumping and puts himself right on the record in a vague general way, giving the least possible offense to his allies of the Southern democracy.” A mob chased Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett up the street and insisted that an American flag be displayed from his building; Bennett had to send out an office boy to find one. The supply of bunting ran short as nearly every private and public building flew Old Glory.
The previous year work had ceased on the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral for lack of money. Now a halt was called to the landscaping of Central Park, and Frederick Law Olmsted went to Washington as general secretary of the Sanitary Commission. The city took on a military appearance, as camps were set up in City Hall Park, at the Battery, on Staten Island, on Rikers Island, and at Atlantic and Flat-bush avenues in Brooklyn. Cannon ringed the new Croton Fountain in City Hall Park. Private houses and public buildings were taken over by the army for offices and recruiting stations. The Brooklyn Navy Yard hired more men.
President Lincoln called for 75,000 three-month volunteers on April 15, and within 10 days 8,000 well-equipped men from this city left for the front. For days afterward the slap and scuffle of marching feet resounded in streets as volunteers from upper New York State and from New England flowed through the city en route to threatened Washington. The local Irish, Germans, Poles, Italians, and Scots organized their own regiments. Firemen banded together into regiments of Zouaves. In their drill and dress they imitated Algerian light infantry of this name. Their gaudy uniforms consisted of baggy trousers, gaiters, open jackets, and turbans or fezzes. Oddly clad, too, were members of the Seventy-ninth New York Highlanders. On ceremonial occasions the officers wore kilts, while the men donned pantaloons of the Cameron tartan in honor of their colonel, James Cameron.
A physics professor left Columbia College to join the new Confederate army. A few Columbia students enlisted and fought, but they did not enroll en masse, as did Harvard boys, and war fever never gripped Columbia, as it did, say, the University of Wisconsin.
Free Negroes tried to enlist, but they were rejected at first. New York was still a segregated city. In 1860 voters had defeated a bill giving Negroes the right to vote without meeting property qualifications. Black men persisted in their clamor to bear arms against the South. Visiting here was a South Carolina white woman, who cried, “Just think how infamous it is that our gentlemen should have to go out and fight niggers, and that every nigger they shoot is a thousand dollars out of their own pockets!” The first local company of colored soldiers was mustered on February 9, 1864. All told, 200,000 American Negroes served in the Union army.
The New York Sabbath Committee declared it would be unholy of soldiers to fight on Sunday. The Reverend Stephen H. Tyng, of St. George’s Episcopal Church on Broadway, said that it was a historic fact that “the party who attacks in war on Sunday has invariably been defeated.” General Robert E. Lee, who had spent five years in New York strengthening local forts, took command of all Southern forces. Tiffany’s began making swords, medals, corps badges, and other military insignia. Brooks Brothers turned out uniforms for generals Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Hooker and for thousands of their men.
The largest mass meeting in the city’s history was held in Union Square to pledge loyalty to the Union cause. Crowd estimates vary from 100,000 to 250,000 persons. Whatever the exact number, the multitude was so vast that speeches were made from 5 different stands erected in the square. Fernando Wood presided because he was mayor, but scowling men muttered that they might run him out of office unless he took a strong pro-Union stand. This warning was echoed by a boy perched in a tree: “Now, Fernandy, mind what you say! You’ve got to stick to it this time!” People laughed, and Wood spoke as ordered. The rabid patriotism of New Yorkers galled Southerners, who felt betrayed by the one group of Northerners they had considered their friends. The Richmond Dispatch editorialized: “New York will be remembered with special hatred by the South for all time.”
The Rebels, with superior leadership, won the first two engagements of the war. After the First Battle of Bull Run, demoralization spread throughout the North, and Greeley wanted an armistice. In the Tribune he wrote: “The gloom in this city is funereal—for our dead at Bull Run were many, and they lie unburied yet. On every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair.” Spirits drooped even lower after the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. Then came incredible news of how some New York units had conducted themselves on the field.
At Bull Run the First New York Fire Zouaves distinguished themselves. However, another group of Zouaves panicked their first time under fire. Basically brave men, they were such individualists that they defied discipline. Then too, the Seventy-ninth New York Highlanders, who had volunteered for three years of service, mutinied when three-month volunteers left the front.
Early victory faded from sight, and defeatism corroded the North. A Confederate major from Mississippi rashly made his way to New York, swaggered from one Broadway saloon to another, and boasted how he had chewed up Union soldiers at Bull Run. He was clapped into prison, but people shuddered at his words. August Belmont, a Rothschild agent in New York, wrote that thousands of people were sorry they had voted for Abraham Lincoln. Bennett of the Herald roared, “The business community demands that the war shall be short; and the more vigorously it is prosecuted, the more speedily it will be closed. Business men can stand a temporary reverse. They can easily make arrangements for six months or a year. But they cannot endure a long, uncertain and tedious contest.”
Greeley, who blew hot and cold about the Lincoln administration, first used the word “Copperhead” in the Tribune on July 20, 1861. Copperheads were Northern Democrats who opposed the war policies of the Republican President and favored a negotiated peace. New York became the nest of these snake-named conspirators. According to A Short History of New York State: “The peace faction was particularly strong in New York City, which from the elections of 1860 to Appomattox provided more moral support to the Confederacy and more opposition to the war than any other important section of the North.”
The first two war years the Union’s fighting men consisted of four grades of troops—regular army, state militia, three-month volunteers, and three-year volunteers. Most were volunteers, since this was a people’s war fought by amateurs, rather than by professional soldiers. In April, 1862, the Confederacy began drafting men, and the following July New York State passed a weak draft law. Lincoln’s first call for 75,000 three-month volunteers proved inadequate, so he asked again and again for various quotas to serve various periods of time. Not enough men stepped forward to replace battle losses and the thinning of ranks because of illness. On March 3, 1863, the first federal American draft went into effect. All able-bodied Northern white males between the ages of twenty and forty-five became liable for military service.
The draft was “profoundly repugnant to the American mind,” according to the New York World, controlled by Fernando Wood and August Belmont. Wood’s brother, Benjamin, headed the Daily News, which said, “The people are notified that one out of about two and a half of our citizens are to be brought into Messrs. Lincoln & Company’s charnelhouse. God forbid!” The proslavery Journal of Commerce snarled that the war itself had become the work of “evil-minded men to accomplish their aims.”
Even though his own state had already passed a draft act, Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour challenged the federal government’s right to conscript citizens. By protesting the quota assigned to New York State, he postponed the first local draft lottery. On July 4, in New York City, the governor made one of the most inflammatory speeches ever uttered by a public official. Seymour shouted, “Remember this! Remember this! The bloody, treasonable and revolutionary doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government!”
His words fell like sparks on a city rotten with crime and ripe for revolt. In 1862 nearly one-tenth of the population had been arrested on one charge or another, and between 70,000 and 80,000 criminals infested the town. Wages were low, and prices high; coal, for example, cost more than $10 a ton. A draftee could buy exemption from service by paying the federal government $300, but few unskilled workers had this much money. They muttered that it was a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight. It was known that John Jacob Astor, grandson and namesake of the late multimillionaire, was a colonel on General McClellan’s staff and lived by himself at headquarters in a rented house with a valet, chef, and steward.
In New York City a recent strike had been broken by importing freed slaves willing to scab. This further incensed poor whites against Negroes. More than half the city’s dwellers were foreign-born, most were Democrats, and 203,740 were Irish. Tammany Hall, dependent on the Irish vote, was eager to undermine the national war effort. The Daily News charged that the federal draft was a deliberate attempt to reduce the number of Democratic voters in the city.
The draft was scheduled to begin here on Saturday, July 11, 1863. The city was divided into districts, each having an enrollment office. There the names of eligible men would be drawn from revolving lottery wheels. City officials were not asked to take part in the draft; the War Department had appointed Robert Nugent chief provost marshal to oversee everything. Nugent, a colonel of the Sixty-ninth Regiment, an Irishman, and a Democrat, was named in the hope of assuring the city’s Irish that the draft would be conducted fairly.
As the deadline approached, New York City was almost stripped of troops. Confederate General Lee had invaded Maryland and filled Pennsylvania with wild alarm. President Lincoln had asked the governor of New York to send 20,000 men for 30 days to resist the invaders, and 19 regiments of the state national guard had been rushed to the front. Only about 1,900 military men remained here. Of these, 1,000 belonged to various militia and volunteer companies still being organized; 700 were soldiers, sailors, and marines garrisoning the city’s forts and manning the warships anchored here; and 200 were members of the Invalid Corps, or crippled and wounded soldiers protecting arsenals, armories, and munitions plants. A few of these invalids were detached from duty to protect draft offices. There was 1 constable for each of the city’s 22 wards. The police force totaled only 2,297 men.
The infamous Draft Riots of July, 1863, were so well led that they constituted an organized insurrection, rather than a spontaneous mob uprising. Definite strategy may be seen in the efforts to cut off approaches to the city, to sever communications, to capture forts, to seize armories and munitions works with all their weapons and ammunition, and to plunder banks and federal treasury vaults. In fact, the mobs have been called “the left wing of Lee’s army.” G. T. Strong spoke of the “scoundrels who are privily engineering the outburst” as “agents of Jefferson Davis,” the president of the Confederacy—but he stretched a point.
Some contemporary New Yorkers regarded the riots as a Catholic plot, since Protestant property was burned and looted, while no Catholic property was even threatened. This seems unlikely, for on several occasions lone Catholic priests turned back murderous mobs. It is true, however, that most rioters were Irish Catholics. Between 50,000 and 70,000 of them took part in the orgy, and some individual mobs numbered as many as 10,000 frenzied men and women.
On Saturday morning, July 11, Governor Seymour was vacationing at Long Branch, New Jersey, a two-hour carriage drive from New York City. He sent the state adjutant general from Long Branch to Washington to ask federal officials to postpone the draft. Lincoln’s twenty-year-old son, Robert Todd Lincoln, on holiday from Harvard, was stopping in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. Sir Winston Churchill’s paternal grandfather, Leonard Walter Jerome, sometime adviser to Cornelius Vanderbilt and a big stockholder in the New York Times, puttered about his mansion, at Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street.
Early that morning the police heard that the arsenal at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street was to be raided by Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society of Northerners siding with the South. The police superintendent, John A. Kennedy, sent a sergeant and fifteen patrolmen to the building, where they broke up a gathering crowd and then marched inside.
News of the Union victory at Gettysburg now reached the city, and optimists assured one another that the rebellion had been put down. Who wanted to be drafted when the whole shooting bang was about over? A sullen crowd collected in front of the Ninth District’s enrollment office on the northeastern corner of Third Avenue and Forty sixth Street, where the city’s first draft lottery was to be held. Names and addresses of eligible men were written on white slips of paper. The papers were folded and dumped inside a wooden revolving drum. It was hand-cranked until the papers were thoroughly scrambled. This process was repeated again and again until 1,236 names had been picked. Then it was announced that the draft would be resumed the following Monday.
Saturday’s evening papers published the results of this first local draft. As Leslie’s Illustrated said:
It came like a thunderclap on the people, and as men read their names in the fatal list the feeling of indignation and resistance soon found vent in words, and a spirit of resistance spread fast and far. The number of poor men exceeded, as a matter of course, that of the rich, their number to draw being so much greater, but this was viewed as a proof of the dishonesty in the whole proceeding.
That night Southern sympathizers visited saloons in the Five Points and along the waterfront, fanning the first flames of resentment.
On Sunday morning, in hundreds of homes, the meaning of the draft sank deeper into the minds of conscripted men, their wives, and their sweethearts. The city’s seventeen detectives spread through streets to look and listen. Stormy-faced citizens gathered at corners to growl that some rich men had already paid their $300 and been excused from military duty. Messages flew back and forth among gang chieftains. Hoodlums collected bricks, clubs, stones, and other weapons and hid them. Superintendent Kennedy kept a guard at the arsenal and made full use of his detectives, but otherwise his Sunday assignments were routine. That evening several fires broke out in lower Manhattan, and firemen noted that the watching crowds were larger and more boisterous than usual.
Monday morning dawned hot and clear. About 6 A.M. men and women slunk out of Lower East Side slums, filtered to the West Side, and paused to regroup. They were joined by others until the crowd became enormous. Now it split into two detachments, which tumbled north up Eighth and Ninth avenues. Groups of men spun off from these main bodies and darted into side streets, yelling for workers to lay down their tools and join the fun. By the time respectable people sat down to breakfast, the mob had turned east and reached its rendezvous. This was a vacant lot just east of Fifth Avenue near Fifty-ninth Street. Agitators climbed onto boulders and bellowed about the injustice of the draft.
At eight o’clock, augmented by newcomers, the human tide began moving again, this time southward, clattering in two thick columns down Fifth and Sixth avenues, cursing, singing, brandishing weapons, and screaming defiance of the federal government. At Forty-seventh Street the columns merged and wheeled east in one vast multitude, filling the street from curb to curb, requiring twenty-five minutes to pass a given spot. At Third Avenue the rabble turned south and tramped down the broad thoroughfare to the draft office at Forty-sixth Street, where another crowd was already assembled.
Although Police Superintendent Kennedy knew that trouble was brewing, he was not yet aware of how deadly it would become. He had sent a captain and 60 cops to reinforce the squad of patrolmen on duty at the uptown draft office. He also dispatched a captain, 4 sergeants, and 69 cops to another threatened draft office on Broadway at Twenty-ninth Street. That Monday morning, July 13, Kennedy had a total of only 800 policemen available for duty as the riots began.
Federal officials in the city began to stir uneasily. Major General John Ellis Wool was in charge of the Department of the East, with headquarters in New York City. The seventy-four-year-old general was muddleheaded and indecisive. Now he detached fifty members of the Invalid Corps from guard duty elsewhere and sent them limping toward Third Avenue horsecars to ride to the Forty-sixth Street draft office. By this time rioters were chopping down telegraph poles around the menaced building.
Ruffians along Second and Third Avenues halted the horsecars, and by 8:30 A.M. no more of these vehicles were moving on the avenues. G. T. Strong had heard the roars of the mob and boarded a Third Avenue car to go see what was happening. At Thirteenth Street he found the track blocked by a line of motionless cars stretching way up the avenue, so he got off and began walking. Above Twentieth Street all shops were closed.
At 9 A.M. so many alarming reports reached Police Headquarters, at 300 Mulberry Street, that Superintendent Kennedy sent this message over the police telegraph system: “To all stations in New York and Brooklyn: Call in your reserves and hold them at the station house subject to further orders.” A millionaire merchant, named George Opdyke, was now mayor of New York City. From his City Hall office Mayor Opdyke sent a request to Major General Charles W. Sanford to call out all the militia units left in town. As a result, the first military unit mustered on Monday—apart from the Invalid Corps already under arms—was the Tenth Regiment of the national guard. It assembled in the arsenal at Elm and Worth streets. The mayor also telegraphed an appeal to Governor Seymour to hasten to the city from his Jersey retreat.
Up at the Third Avenue draft office, for the next hour and a half, the police had little trouble coping with the mob surrounding the place. The lottery wheel stood on the ground floor, while the upper three stories were occupied by poor families. The Invalid Corps had not yet arrived. The cops, clubs drawn and faces tense, stood with their backs against the building as the draft lottery resumed. To complete the Ninth District’s quota, 264 more names had to be picked. The mob extended half a dozen blocks north and south of Forty-sixth Street, pushing and yelling and hooting. A few reckless carriage drivers tried to whip their horses through the throng. Plug-uglies caught the bridles of horses, unhitched animals from their shafts, and forced drivers and passengers to get out. Bobbing up and down in the melee were placards reading: “No DRAFT!” The mob surged closer to the cops ringing the draft office. Its vanguard consisted of members of a street-brawling outfit, volunteer firemen in Engine Company 33, popularly known as the Black Joke. The Black Jokers jeered the cops and shouted so uproariously that those inside draft headquarters could barely hear themselves.
At 10:30 A.M. someone in the mob shot a pistol into the air. Then a volley of bricks and stones shattered windows of the draft office. The Black Jokers lunged toward the door. The police fought bravely but were overwhelmed. A police captain ordered his men to retreat inside the building. They backed through the door but were unable to slam it shut, so fast did the howling firemen pour in after them. Draft officials scampered out rear windows. In the halls the cops fought a hopeless rearguard action. Then they dived out windows into the alley and ran toward Second Avenue. Thousands of rioters surged inside. They broke the lottery wheel. They set fire to the building. The flames spread to an adjoining building. Loyal firemen raced up; but the mob kept them from dousing the blaze, and they had to stand by helplessly and watch the destruction of the entire block from Forty-sixth to Forty-seventh Street.
Moments later those on the southern fringe of the mob saw the Invalid Corps unit closing in. These veterans of battlefield horrors, their flesh and bones mending from wounds, had been delayed when the horsecars had stopped running. Now they walked and limped straight toward the mob, which wheeled and charged at them. The clash came at Third Avenue and Forty-second Street. The veterans were vastly outnumbered. Gangsters stoned them, killing one soldier and injuring half a dozen more.
The commanding officer ordered his front rank to fire blanks. The volley pricked the mob into greater fury and left half the troops defenseless. Snarling Irish plug-uglies lunged at the soldiers. The second rank of the Invalids fired real bullets, slaying and wounding six men and one woman. For a second the mob paused. Then, with ferocious roars, the ruffians fell en masse on the veterans, who did not have time to reload. Muskets were jerked from their trembling hands. Many were clubbed with the butts of their own weapons and shot point-blank in the belly. One veteran ran toward the East River and clawed his way to the top of a cliff. He was followed, caught, and hurled to death on the rocky beach below. Then his lifeless body was pounded to pulp by boulders so big that it took two strong men to lift and throw them. All told, a score of veterans were killed. Those able to run took to their heels. They abandoned wounded comrades, who were mutilated as they lay on the ground.
Meantime, Police Superintendent Kennedy had left his headquarters to make a tour of inspection. That hot summer day he wore civilian clothing and carried a bamboo cane. By carriage he drove to Forty-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue, where he heard the hoarse shouts of the mob and saw smoke charcoaling the sky. Kennedy got out and began walking east on Forty-sixth Street. He had gone only half a block when he was recognized. Gangsters rushed him, and one man in an old army uniform knocked him down. Kennedy jumped up and slashed the bully across the face with his cane. Kennedy was beaten to the ground again. He was kicked and stamped on. Once more he leaped up. A hail of blows hammered him to the edge of a hole dug in the street, and he was knocked into it. Up he bobbed. He fled across a vacant lot toward Forty-seventh Street, where another gang met him. He was slugged and slashed as he tried to escape to Lexington Avenue. There a thug pounded him into a deep mudhole. Kennedy pulled himself out and, muddy and bloody, staggered on until he collapsed in the arms of an influential citizen, named John Eagan. This good Samaritan convinced Kennedy’s attackers that the police superintendent was dead. He was indeed unconscious. Kennedy later was placed in a wagon, covered with gunnysacks, and driven to Police Headquarters. There a surgeon found seventy-two bruises and more than a score of cuts on his body.
In the nation’s capital President Lincoln was getting telegraphic news of the riot from Sidney H. Gray, managing editor of the New York Tribune. At 11:45 A.M. the federal government ordered the city draft offices closed. This did not end the violence. The criminals, the poor, and the disloyal were out to seize control of the town, and they did. By tearing up tracks, they isolated the city from direct approach by train. They cut wires that cobwebbed the police telegraph system, but repairmen soon spliced lines and restored communications.
With Superintendent Kennedy unconscious, police command devolved upon police commissioners John C. Bergen and Thomas C. Acton. Bergen took charge in Brooklyn and on Staten Island. Acton, a prominent Republican and a founder of the Union League Club, assumed command in Manhattan. Intelligent and energetic, Acton received and answered more than 4,000 telegrams between Monday morning and Friday afternoon. All this time he neither slept nor changed clothes.
Monday noon a mob clattered toward the home of Mayor Opdyke, at 79 Fifth Avenue, near Fifteenth Street. Although the mayor had neglected to provide a guard for his residence, fifty neighbors now armed themselves and took up defensive positions. Supreme Court Justice George G. Barnard climbed onto the stoop of an adjoining house and spoke to the mob. Everybody knew that Barnard had been elevated to the court by William Marcy Tweed, and the fat Boss was everybody’s friend. So the judge talked the crowd out of attacking the mayor’s home.
Mayor Opdyke was in his City Hall office, where he now called for a special session of the city council. Because only half a dozen aldermen appeared, no quorum could be obtained. The mayor then issued a proclamation ordering the rioters to disperse. The Irish, who regarded the mayor as a Black Republican, reacted violently. A mob began to howl under City Hall windows. Since the mayor was in danger, Tweed and other Democrats persuaded him to seek safer quarters in the St. Nicholas Hotel, at Broadway and Spring Street.
Monday afternoon the city was mob-ruled. As Carl Sandburg has written: “Never before in an American metropolis had the police, merchants, bankers, and forces of law and order had their power wrenched loose by mobs so skillfully led.” Now brutal Irishmen began attacking Negroes, whom they blamed for the war.
The Colored Orphan Asylum, on the west side of Fifth Avenue, occupied the entire block between Forty-third and Forty-fourth streets. It looked a little like the White House in Washington. Here were sheltered more than 200 Negro children under the age of twelve, together with 50 matrons and attendants. Soon after the abortive attack on the mayor’s home, a mob of 3,000 persons gathered in front of the asylum and began shouting threats. The asylum superintendent, William E. Davis, barricaded the doors. Rowdies roared that they damned well would break in. The children’s eyes widened in terror. Davis and other staff members herded them out the back and into a nearby police station. Later, under military escort, the children were taken to Blackwells Island. Moments after the asylum was evacuated, rioters stormed its front doors, broke them down, tumbled inside, smashed furniture, carried out toys and bedding, and then set fire to the place. While the vandalism was at its height, one little Negro girl, overlooked in the hasty departure, was found trembling under a bed. She was pulled out and beaten to death.
The middle of Monday afternoon the rioting spread to the downtown section of the city. Most stores had closed, but saloons stayed open to stoke people’s fury with raw liquor. Jewelry shops were looted. Hardware stores were raided for guns and pistols and ammunition. Fires were set here, there, everywhere. Negroes were chased and cornered and strung up and tortured. Irish biddies knifed the flesh of hanged Negroes, poured oil into the wounds, set fire to the oil, danced under the human torches, and sang obscene songs.
(Despite the unspeakable cruelty of some of New York’s low-class Irish, many of the city’s Irishmen served with distinction in the Union army. At least 8 all-Irish regiments were formed here. Thousands of Patricks and Clanceys and Emmets donned the honorable blue uniform, a total of 150,000 Irishmen from all parts of the North swelling the ranks. Generals Meade, Rosecrans, Sheridan, Meagher, Sickles, Ord, and Gillmore were Catholic. At Fredericksburg, Virginia, an Irish brigade marched into battle flying Ireland’s green flag with its golden harp. Later a color sergeant was found with the flag wrapped about his body, a bullet having pierced the flag and his heart. An Irish washerwoman followed some of her countrymen into combat during the Second Battle of Bull Run and stood tall and unafraid as she cheered them on.)
But here in New York, as drunken Irishmen lurched through the streets, decent people locked themselves in their homes. Peter Goelet owned a big house at Broadway and Nineteenth Street. With him lived his twenty-five-year-old nephew, Elbridge Gerry. The old man raised peacocks and pheasants and let them strut about the lawn. In normal times pedestrians stopped to peer at them between iron railings. On this day of peril young Gerry felt that the gorgeous plumage of the birds might attract the attention of rioters. He ordered the coachman to pull out all their colorful tail feathers. Divested of this weight, the peacocks and pheasants, looking like drunken acrobats, lost their balance and toppled over onto their beaks. Elbridge Gerry later became vice-president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
One mob looted and burned a block of fine houses on Lexington Avenue near Forty-sixth Street. Another set fire to the draft office on Broadway near Twenty-ninth Street. Then this downtown mob, led by a giant carrying an American flag, a bobbing, throbbing, chanting mass of men and women, 10,000 strong and armed with guns, pistols, clubs, swords, and crowbars, clattered down Broadway, setting the torch to houses as they went and heading for Police Headquarters. Under the hot sun the rioters cast snake-weaving shadows. At the central office, as Police Headquarters was then called, 200 policemen had gathered, but 50 were too weak from wounds to be efficient. Commissioner Acton wired precinct houses to rush reinforcements at once. The besieged Eighteenth Precinct Station, on Twenty-second Street near Third Avenue, replied, “One of our officers, just in, says that not one of us can get to the central office, in uniform, alive. They will try in citizens’ dress.” Detectives who had mingled with the advancing mob now raced into headquarters, panting that if the rioters overran the central office, their next target would be the Wall Street area. There they planned to loot banks and plunder the Subtreasury Building. The alert was relayed to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and two armed ships glided into position, one in the East River and the other in the Hudson, ready to rake the toe of Manhattan with their guns.
Sweeping sweat from his forehead, Acton decided to head off the mob before it neared the central office. Combat command was given to Inspector Daniel C. Carpenter, the senior uniformed officer in the department. Lining up 125 cops in front of headquarters, he said grimly, “We are going to put down a mob, and we will take no prisoners.” Then he marched his men out of Mulberry Street west toward Broadway and turned north onto this wide thoroughfare. From the north as far as the eye could see, a lavalike hubble-bubble of people seethed and seeped down Broadway. The police trudged north. The mob inched south.
They met at Broadway and Amity (now West Third) Street, one block south of Washington Square and near the sumptuous hotel called the La Farge House. Scores of rioters swarmed into the hotel and beat up Negro bellboys and waiters. Out on the street, when the police heaved in sight, the mob halted. Then a huge club-waving bully sprang at Inspector Carpenter, marching several feet in front of his men. Carpenter ducked a blow that might have cracked his skull and killed the man with his nightstick. Patrolman Doyle slew a man carrying a “NO DRAFT!” sign. Patrolman Thompson captured the American flag from the giant. The mob let go with a storm of bricks and stones and opened up with firearms. Several cops slumped to the pavement. The rest closed ranks and charged, their clubs rising and falling, tattooing skulls on all sides. It was hand-to-hand combat, no quarter given, with the thud of nightsticks and the crunch of breaking bones, the howls of fury and shrieks of pain, sweaty bodies thudding against one another, blood and sweat dripping down weary arms and legs. For fifteen minutes all was confusion. Then the rioters broke and ran. The dead and dying and disabled littered the street and sidewalk. Gone was the threat to Police Headquarters.
The battle did not quell the riots. It was an island of success in a sea of defeats. In first one section of the city and then another, brutish mobs killed and tortured and looted and burned, and by 4 P.M. on that Monday of infamy every good citizen who was able to do so had left New York. Trains had stopped running at noon, after tracks had been spiked in the upper reaches of the city, so panic-stricken people jammed ships and boats and vehicles of every sort to get away. By evening it was impossible to hire a rig of any kind. Quaking Negroes fled afoot, skulking up alleys and bypaths, dodging hot-eyed pursuers, and racing and stumbling to the safety of woods and fields.
Monday evening some influential citizens called on Mayor Opdyke and General Wool in the St. Nicholas Hotel and urged that martial law be declared. The mayor said that this was the general’s responsibility. The general said that it was the mayor’s responsibility. Then the mayor was asked to issue a proclamation urging peaceful citizens to enroll in a volunteer force to defend life and property. With a shiver the mayor replied, “Why, that is civil war at once!” It was already civil war, whether the mayor admitted it or not. The general’s chief of staff told the delegation that everything was under control, but it was not. The visitors left in disgust and went to the Union League Club, where they argued about what should be done. Some felt that the city was doomed. At last they wired President Lincoln to beg for troops. And despite the mayor’s reluctance, some good people reported at Police Headquarters, where they were sworn in for emergency service and given clubs and badges.
The same evening a mob came together in City Hall Park and glared menacingly at the Tribune Building across the street in Printing House Square. Some began chanting, “We’ll hang old Greeley to a sour-apple tree!” Others took up the cry “Down with the Tribune! Down with the old white coat that thinks a nigger as good as an Irishman!” (The eccentric Greeley was known for the white coat he wore.) Inside the Tribune Building the managing editor, Sidney Gray, shouted to his boss, “We ought to arm ourselves! This isn’t a riot! It’s a revolution!” Baby-faced Greeley sauntered over to a window, peered out nearsightedly, and said, “It’s just what I expected. I have no doubt they’ll hang me, but I want no arms brought into the building.”
Defensive measures already had been taken at the nearby New York Times Building, the handsomest newspaper building of its day. Its editor, thickset Henry J. Raymond, had received two machine guns from the army. These were set up in northern windows overlooking the probable line of attack. Raymond manned one gun. The other was taken over by Sir Winston Churchill’s grandfather, who had hastened downtown to help defend the property in which he held an interest.
In City Hall Park, thicker grew the mob, and more clamorous grew its thousand-voiced fury. After working themselves to fever pitch, the rioters now charged across Park Row, into Printing House Square, and up to the doors of the Tribune Building. Bricks arched across the darkening sky. Windows tinkled to extinction. Timbers thudded at the front doors, which splintered and gave, admitting bellowing hordes thirsty for the blood of Greeley. But before the first wave of attackers could surge up to the city room, 200 police erupted onto the scene, whanging nightsticks upon heads, brandishing cocked revolvers, and bucking and cursing and bulling their way through the mob until they broke its will to fight, turned it back, and saved the Tribune and Horace Greeley.
Mayor Opdyke finally acted. He wired the War Department in Washington, requesting that New York regiments at Gettysburg be returned to the city as fast as possible. He asked the governors of New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts to hold troops in readiness. By 11 P.M. on Monday, in the city, 2 companies of soldiers intended for the battlefront had been sent instead to Police Headquarters. By midnight 2,000 regulars and militiamen had been made available for service. About this time the postmaster’s house on West Eighty-sixth Street was burned down. Shortly before midnight a heavy rainstorm broke the heat, but at 12:15 A.M., rain or no rain, barbarians danced a death dance under the body of a Negro who had been hanged on Clarkson Street near Hudson Street. All that night the bullyboys of the Bowery and the Five Points drank and caroused and laughed like hyenas.
On Tuesday morning, before dawn, another Negro was assaulted at Washington and Leroy streets, knocked to the ground, and held there by a dozen bullies, while the leader of the mob dropped a twenty-pound rock on his head again and again and again. By 6 A.M. other mobs were roaring through the streets, chasing black men and setting fire to houses. Bells clanged as firemen raced here and there, trying to cope with the blazes. No store or shop or bank or factory opened its doors. No streetcar moved. No omnibus ran. Red-eyed householders, bestirring themselves behind shuttered windows, gulped coffee and wondered what the day would bring.
In New Jersey a leisurely breakfast was taken by New York Governor Horatio Seymour, who had not hastened to New York as requested. In New York City, at 197 Henry Street, Boss Tweed heaved his whalelike bulk out of bed in his red brick house and dressed carefully, for he hoped to play an important role in the day’s events. At 6 A.M., 200 weary cops mustered at the central office and then marched up to the Union Steam Works factory, on Second Avenue just below Twenty-third Street, where heavy fighting had taken place on Monday afternoon. This was a munitions plant partly owned by the mayor; it held more than 4,000 finished carbines and muskets, plus ammunition. Before the sun bulged over the horizon, gang members began building street barricades. The longest one stretched a mile along Ninth Avenue, from Twenty-fourth to Forty-first Street.
The morning Times, loyal to the federal administration, printed a bold editorial, headlined “CRUSH THE MOB.” This editorial said in part: “No man, whatever his calling or condition in life, can afford to live in a city where the law is powerless. This mob must be crushed at once. Every day’s, every hour’s delay, is big with evil: Let every citizen come promptly forward and give his personal aid to do good and indispensable work.” On the other hand, Copperhead newspapers, such as the World, Journal of Commerce, Express, Daily News, Day Book, and Mercury, blandly referred to the rioters and murderers as “the people.”
Before noon on that Tuesday, July 14, Governor Seymour finally arrived by ferry after a two-hour drive from Long Branch, New Jersey. Boss Tweed rode beside the governor in the first of two carriages that wheeled up Broadway to Mayor Opdyke’s temporary office in the St. Nicholas Hotel. The governor, seeing the smoke hanging over the city and feeling the tension, went gray with fear. At the hotel Seymour conferred with the mayor, Sheriff James Lynch, and other city officials. They heard discouraging reports from commanding officers of each of the twenty-six police precinct houses. Even as they discussed the situation, fire was set to the Eighteenth Precinct Station, on East Twenty-second Street near Second Avenue, by Irishmen who had poured out of nearby tenements. The arsonists gloated over the damage done to “them bloody police.”
State and city officials now crossed over to City Hall so that the governor could speak to the throng assembled there. Mayor Opdyke, trembling and white-faced, stood on one side of the governor. Boss Tweed, a smile parting his dark whiskers, took up a position on the other side. Horace Greeley left the Tribune Building and at great personal peril pushed his way to the steps of City Hall to hear the governor. Horatio Seymour was an elegant lithe man, standing six feet tall. His long lean face was clean-shaven; but a muffler of whiskers padded his throat, and ringlets of hair circled his bald pate. Graceful and cultured, the New York governor now faced a critical moment in his Copperhead career. He said:
I come not only for the purpose of maintaining law, but also from a kind regard for the interests and welfare of those who, under the influence of excitement and a feeling of supposed wrong, were in danger not only of inflicting serious blows to the good order of society, but to their own interests. I beg of you to listen to me as your friend, for I am your friend and the friend of your families.
Friend? In the crowd before City Hall were some who had killed Negroes and invalid soldiers and cops, who had burned houses, who had looted stores, and who had run drunkenly amuck through the city. Also present were some good people, who bridled at the word “friend.” Then the governor urged listeners to break up and retire peacefully to their own homes. He declared that the city could furnish its quota of soldiers with volunteers alone. He said, “I have received a dispatch that the draft is suspended. There is no doubt the conscription is postponed. I learn this from a number of sources. If I get any information of a change of policy at Washington, I will let you know.”
Despite the governor’s appeal, violence flared that Tuesday afternoon the length and breadth of Manhattan. A mob destroyed the bridge over the Harlem River. Also demolished was the Washington Hotel, at Broadway and Chambers Street. Rioters made ashes of the Weehawken ferryhouse, at West Forty-second Street and the Hudson River, when a saloonkeeper refused to give them all his liquor. Homes near Fifth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street were looted. Irishmen even strung up an Irish Catholic, named H. F. O’Brien, because he was colonel of the Eleventh Regiment.
In the White House in Washington, Abraham Lincoln read telegrams about the horrors being committed in New York. Along with feeling sorry for all innocents, he worried about his son. That Tuesday afternoon he wired the Fifth Avenue Hotel to ask Robert, “Why do I hear no more of you?” About the same time, in New York, a corrupt Tweed henchman, City Court Judge John H. McCunn, declared the federal Draft Act unconstitutional. An hour later Governor Seymour proclaimed the city in a state of insurrection. He also promised to maintain the right of every citizen to appeal to the courts when drafted, adding that “the decisions of the courts must be respected by rulers and people alike.” This was politics; the governor knew that no mere city judge had the right to pass judgment on federal legislation.
Tuesday evening City Hall Park bristled with howitzers. The new citizen police force, grown 1,000 strong, was releasing cops and local soldiers for combat missions in the city. The New York Times’ defenses had been augmented by 150 volunteers and 30 regular soldiers sent over from Governors Island. At 8 P.M. G. T. Strong tarried awhile in the Union League Club and heard rumors that the clubhouse was to be attacked that night. Half an hour later a wire was sent from the Fourth Precinct House, at 9 Oak Street, to Police Headquarters, reporting that a mob threatened to burn down the Brooks Brothers clothing store on the Lower East Side, at Catherine and Cherry streets.
A few police, disguised as civilians, were already on the scene. They were able to check the raid for a few moments, after which they were overwhelmed and beaten off. The rioters smashed into the store, lighted gas jets, broke windows, and began plundering the place. Up trotted police reinforcements. Thugs were struggling into new suits and stuffing their pockets with haberdashery. The police chased them from floor to floor. Some toughs slid down a rope dangling through a trapdoor into the basement. Waiting there were cops, who clubbed them senseless as fast as they descended. The next day a search of nearby slums turned up $100,000 worth of clothing. One dive yielded fifty new suits, while another held a gunnysack stuffed with ties and socks.
Late that Tuesday night every whorehouse in the city was attacked by mobs, who abused the harlots. At midnight Mayor Opdyke got a telegram from Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, announcing that five regiments, detached from the Union army, were being rushed to the city. All that night fire bells bonged as firemen raced from one burning building to another.
Wednesday opened with a downpour of rain, and by 10 A.M. the city was steaming like a Turkish bath. Wednesday, July 15, became the hottest day of 1863. Morning papers published a statement by Police Commissioner Acton that the backbone of the riot had been broken and that police were in control of the city, but G. T. Strong felt that “rabbledom is not yet dethroned.” Fighting resumed before dawn. For the first time violence broke out in Brooklyn; a mob set fire to grain elevators and displayed this banner: “NO $300 ARRANGEMENTS WITH US.” In Manhattan the first big clash of the day took place on the site of the present Pennsylvania Railroad Station at Thirty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, where three Negroes were lynched. A gang of bestial women milled about the dangling bodies of the black men, gashing their flesh with knives, while more than 5,000 men cheered them on. Militiamen advanced, and the mob gave ground. One New Yorker believed that the mobs everywhere in the city were better armed and organized than they had been on Monday.
By this time word of the city’s agony had reached the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, and a clerk in the Rebel war department wrote in his diary: “We have awful good news from New York. An insurrection, the loss of many lives, extensive pillaging and burning, with a suspension of the conscription.”
Early Wednesday morning a mob tried to wreck an ironclad ship, the Dunderberg, under construction in a shipyard, but were frustrated by a company of regular soldiers. On Staten Island fifty men attacked Negro houses in Stapleton, burning one to the ground, sacking others, and beating a lame Negro unable to follow his friends into the woods. In Manhattan other rioters captured two howitzers by clubbing artillerymen, but the guns were of no value to the thugs because they lacked the proper ammunition. Aldermen met in City Hall, denounced the draft, and appropriated $2,500,000 to pay the $300 needed by poor men seeking to escape conscription.
Beginning at 6 P.M. on Wednesday, the largest battle thus far took place at Nineteenth Street and First Avenue. There rowdies clashed in 20 minutes of desperate fighting with 3 companies of regular soldiers, utterly routing them. Sixteen wounded soldiers were beaten to death by the mob. Gunfire sounded elsewhere in Manhattan, and smoke from burning homes coiled into the sky. Wary householders filled bathtubs, pots, kettles, and pails with water.
About 10 P.M. on Wednesday the Seventy-fourth Regiment of the national guard reached the city. Half an hour later a Buffalo regiment arrived. At 4 A.M. on Thursday the Seventh Regiment of the national guard landed at Canal Street and soon after daybreak marched in battle array through the Lower East Side. All told, 10,000 veterans of the Battle of Gettysburg poured into the city. Manhattan was divided into four military districts. Soldiers relieved police who had been fighting almost without pause since Monday. Nearly every policeman had been wounded, and the few who escaped injury were so bone-tired that they could hardly lift their arms.
Thursday morning, in a proclamation published in the newspapers, the mayor urged all citizens to open their stores and factories and go back to work. Most streetcar and omnibus lines resumed operations. However, a gunboat still stood guard at the foot of Wall Street.
Thursday afternoon, as the incipient revolution flickered and faded, the city was plastered with signs bearing an announcement from Archbishop Hughes. He said, “To the men of New York, who are now called in many of the papers rioters: Men! I am not able, owing to the rheumatism in my limbs, to visit you; but that is not a reason why you should not pay me a visit in your whole strength. Come, then, tomorrow at two o’clock, to my residence, northwest corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street. I shall have a speech prepared for you.” The archbishop had moved uptown from Mulberry Street.
Thursday evening the last sharp clash took place near Gramercy Park, where regular solders roughed up rioters who were looting fine homes. Soldiers from West Point reinforced the regulars already thrown into the city. As the thud and cadence of ever more marching men sounded in streets, rowdies sullenly retired to their dirty dens. By midnight on Thursday peace had been restored, but bitterness lingered. G. T. Strong wrote: “Never knew exasperation so intense, unqualified, and general as that which prevails against these rioters and the politic knaves who are supposed to have set them going, Governor Seymour not excepted. Men who voted for him mention the fact with contrition and self-abasement, and the Democratic party is at discount with all the people I meet.”
Friday morning the New York Times snapped: “The Express is a very curious journal. It ‘begs’ and ‘implores’ us to ‘hush up’ the statement that the President has not ordered the draft suspended. . . . We prefer, for our own part, to tell the truth and shame the Express. The draft itself ought not and must not be abandoned.” Lincoln had overridden lesser federal officials who had called off the draft. The thirteen regiments of regulars now on duty in the city remained until the draft was resumed on August 19. Then it went off peaceably.
At 11 A.M. on Friday 4,000 persons gathered in front of the home of Archbishop Hughes. He had spent eight months in Europe as Lincoln’s personal representative, successfully setting forth the Union’s cause in France, Italy and Ireland. Now sixty-six years old and a sick man only six months from death, the archbishop tottered out onto a balcony and sat down in a chair. He wore a purple robe and other insignia of his high ecclesiastical office. He told the throng:
I have been hurt by the reports that you are rioters. You cannot imagine that I could hear those 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—not to give up your principles or convictions, but to keep out of the crowd where immortal souls are launched into eternity, and, at all events, get into no trouble till you are at home? . . . When these so-called riots are over, and the blame is justly laid on Irish Catholics, I wish you to tell me in what country I could claim to be born—
Came a clamor of voices: “Ireland!” The archbishop went on:
Yes, but what shall I say if these stories be true? Ireland—that never committed a single act of cruelty until she was oppressed! Ireland—that has been the mother of heroes and poets, but never the mother of cowards! I thank you for your kindness, and 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.
Archbishop Hughes had not spoken until five days after the riots had begun. According to Joel T. Headley, a historian and former secretary of state for New York: “The address was well enough, but it came too late to be of any service. It might have saved lives and much destruction had it been delivered two days before, but now it was like the bombardment of a fortress after it had surrendered—a mere waste of ammunition. The fight was over, and to use his own not very refined illustration, he ‘spak’ too late.”
The Draft Riots of July, 1863, stand as the most brutal, tragic, and shameful episode in the entire history of New York City. Politicians encouraged mob violence. Law and order broke down. Mobs seized control of America’s largest city. Innocents were tortured and slaughtered. The Union army was weakened.
No one will ever know exactly how many people were killed. The New York Post said that the bodies of rioters were boated across the East River and buried secretly at night. Governor Seymour, who tried to minimize the tragedy, told state legislators that “more than a thousand” civilians, policemen, and soldiers had been slain. Police Superintendent Kennedy, after recovering from his injuries, told G. T. Strong that 1,155 persons had been killed—not counting those smuggled to their graves. Social historian Herbert Asbury wrote that “conservative estimates placed the total at two thousand killed and about eight thousand wounded, a vast majority of whom were rioters.” Four days of rioting in New York City produced casualties numbering almost half the total of Americans killed in the American Revolution, just about as many as perished in the War of 1812, and more than all the battle deaths in the Mexican War.
More than 100 buildings were burned down, and about 200 others were damaged and looted. The property loss has been estimated variously at from $1,500,000 to $5,000,000. Business suffered in another way, too, for of the thousands who fled the city, many did not return for several months.
The federal government investigated but took no other action. The identity of the men who planned and led the riots was never disclosed. Of the 50,000 to 70,000 men and women who had taken an active part in the insurrection, only 19 were tried and convicted. None was a ringleader. The 19 men got an average of 5 years each in jail. Governor Seymour, on the other hand, tried but failed to remove police commissioners Acton and Bergen, who had done all in their power to quell the uprising.
Carl Sandburg wrote: “So delicate and combustible was the subject that neither party cared to go into details about those New York riots, the Democrats because their record was so lawless and shameful, the Republicans because they were still conducting the draft over the country.” Perhaps the most trenchant judgment was made by George Templeton Strong: “This is a nice town to call itself a centre of civilization!”