Acton knew he would have to leave large areas of the city without protection, a risk he deemed necessary. At the same time, he asked Mayor Opdyke to request the mobilization of the state militia and have federal troops brought in from the harbor forts. Acton also sent plainclothes detectives to mix with the crowds and predict their movements.38
Around the city, scenes unfolded that revealed the chasm between New York's social classes—and how deeply the antidraft rioters craved equal treatment at a time when the poor lacked the most basic amenities. "Turn out; turn out by six o'clock, or we'll burn you in your beds!" a rioter shouted from the basement of St. Luke's Hospital at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, threatening some one hundred sick and wounded soldiers. The "huge, hatless laborer, with his sleeves rolled up to the armpits, bare-breasted, red with liquor and rage, strode up and down the hall," according to Eliza Woolsey Howland, who served beside her sisters as a nurse caring for Union troops.
"But a wounded rioter (shot, with a brick-bat in his hand), was about this time brought by a crowd to the hospital door, promptly admitted, and kindly cared for" by the Reverend Dr. William Muhlenberg, the founder and director of the charitable hospital. An "elderly man . . . with a noble face, white hair and wonderful dark eyes," Muhlenberg then left the rioter's bedside and went outside to speak with the mob. Explaining that his hospital was open to anyone who needed treatment, he asked if they would still "threaten this house with fire and storm."
The crowd responded with shouts of "No, no; long live St. Luke's," and established a "vigilance committee" to defend the hospital. "As he braved alone that howling mob of men and women, and by his personal magnetism quieted their rage," Howland wrote, "it was like the picture of the working of a miracle by a mediaeval saint."39
"It was now noon, but the hot July sun was obscured by heavy clouds, that hung in ominous shadows over the city," Headley wrote, "while from near Cooper Institute to Forty-Sixth Street, or about thirty blocks, [Third Avenue] was black with human beings,—house-tops, windows, and stoops all filled with rioters or spectators. Dividing it like a stream, horse-cars arrested in their course lay strung along as far as the eye could reach. As the glance ran along this mighty mass of men and women north, it rested at length on huge columns of smoke rolling heavenward from burning buildings."40Of the estimated fifty thousand people on Third Avenue, most were spectators, but about ten thousand were actively rioting. Of the latter, several thousand prevented the fire department's chief engineer, John Decker, and his men from getting near the draft office with their equipment, despite the fact that poor, mostly German families lived in the upper stories and adjacent buildings.41
While these women and children fled the blaze and lost their belongings, John Andrews, the Copperhead lawyer from Virginia briefly tailed by the police the night before, kept the crowd stirred up with a harangue against the draft.42"'You must organize, boys.' (Cries of 'That's the talk,' 'You're the boy, my chicken,' &c.) 'You must organize and keep together, and appoint leaders, and crush this damned abolition draft into the dust.' (Tremendous cheering.) . . . 'If you don't find any one to lead you, by Heaven! I will do it myself.' (Great sensation and applause.)" Many in the crowd wondered who the speaker was, and when someone said it was Ben Wood, Andrews was cheered even more enthusiastically.43
At about 12:30, when chief engineer Decker managed to address the rioters, he expressed sympathy with their objections to the draft but pleaded with them to step aside and let him save the property of residents who had nothing to do with it. Hoping to contain the mayhem he had sparked, Black Joke foreman Peter Masterson supported Decker's appeal, and the cheering crowd parted momentarily, but a more aggressive mob returned to the scene and kept the firefighters back.44When the crowd shifted its attention to plundering stores and homes, the fire engines were put to use, but almost the entire block was consumed.45
While Decker was trying to soothe the mob uptown, James Whitten, a barber at the Astor House hotel downtown, spent his lunch break stirring up a crowd of almost five hundred people armed with clubs and stones gathered in front of the Tribune building on Printing House Square, across Park Row from City Hall. A Tribune employee peering from a second-floor window said Whitten was dressed in a Panama hat and light-colored coat and "called for Horace Greeley to show himself; that he was a G[o]d d[amne]d scoundrel, a d[amne]d Abolitionist, and that if he would come down he would take his life, or take his heart out." Led by Whitten, the crowd alternated cheers for the Caucasian (a Copperhead paper with offices nearby), groans for the Tribune, cheers for McClellan, and groans for the Times.
At the Astor House, Whitten's coworkers and customers were used to hearing him "talk treason in the barber-shop." In early July, when the Confederates were at Gettysburg, a soldier being shaved in the next chair had heard Whitten declare "he was in hopes he would shave Jeff. Davis in New-York within 60 days; also, that Harrisburg would be taken, Baltimore next; that the railroad would be torn up by Lee's cavalry at Annapolis Junction, at the Relay House; that a corps of the Rebel army was going to cross Virginia by way of the Occoquan, to blockade the Potomac River; that Washington would surrender without a battle, and that peace would be dictated to the North in two months."
After an hour of rallying the mob in Printing House Square, Whitten returned to work at the Astor House, where he denounced the draft's three-hundred-dollar exemption clause and tried to enlist all the waiters for a planned attack on the Tribune that evening. "Whitten came to me and seemed to be well posted on the movements of the mob," one of the headwaiters recalled. Whitten told him that if the waiters "did not turn out and help they would get their own heads broke, as the mob would be the strongest party." The newspaper dealer at the hotel's front entrance also received a warning from Whitten "to shut up, as the mob would very soon be down and it would not be safe to keep open."46
The uptown mob had continued to grow as it surged southward on Third Avenue from Forty-sixth Street, picking up new members from smaller groups that had been dispersed by the police in other parts of the city. Clusters of people from the various slums "where the low Irish dwelt," according to Headley, continued to appear on almost every street corner, lured by the news of looting.47 Having routed five squads of Metropolitans, the main mass of about ten thousand rioters had continued south to Thirty-fifth Street, where smaller groups pillaged the side streets while the mob paused and selected its next major target. "To the armory! To the armory," shouted the rioters.48
It was widely known that Mayor Opdyke and his son-in-law owned a warehouse on the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Twenty-first Street, a former piano factory, of which the top three floors contained the state armory.49 The local precinct commander had already sent some policemen to guard the five hundred guns and stores of ammunition.50 Just one block north stood the Union Steam Works, which had been converted to manufacture army carbines and contained more than four thousand of the short rifles.51 A small police guard had arrived there too.
When an attack on the state armory appeared imminent, thirty-two men from the elite "Broadway Squad" were assigned there and equipped with carbines as well as their pistols and locust clubs. The squad was based in the Central Office precinct, and its men were picked for their height and strength.52 Aware of the policemen inside, the crowd of several thousand rioters hesitated at the doors of the armory. Then, just after 1 p.m., having failed to set fire to the large brick building, the rioters pelted the windows and doors with rocks and gunfire. When several rioters charged and began breaking down the doors, the policemen shot them dead with their revolvers. As the standoff continued, the sergeant in charge succeeded in calling for reinforcements, but the precinct commander had none to send.53
The mob seemed to be steadily gaining the upper hand. Several thousand more rioters, who had stayed behind at Forty-sixth and Third to listen to Andrews, then swept down to Allerton's Bull's Head Hotel on Forty-third Street near Lexington Avenue, where the American Telegraph Company kept an office.
Apparently targeting the city's communications nodes, a few leaders chopped their way into the hotel lobby with axes, enabling the mob to sack the interior, douse it with turpentine, and set it on fire. While the hotel burned, other rioters were tearing up the tracks of the New Haven Railroad on Fourth Avenue from Forty-second to Forty-sixth Street.54
At City Hall, Mayor Opdyke attempted to confer with the Board of Aldermen on a plan to restore order in the city, but only six of the twenty-four members arrived for the meeting. The Tammany politicians were reluctant to crack down on their riotous constituents, some of whom were demonstrating noisily right outside. Former alderman William Tweed, now a county supervisor, took it upon himself to locate other members of the Board of Aldermen and get them to cooperate with the mayor.
After his stint as one of the Common Council's "Forty Thieves" in 1852-53, Tweed had spent a term in the House of Representatives but then decided local politics was far more exciting—and lucrative. He was elected to the twelve-man New York County Board of Supervisors in 1858 and within a year had bribed enough of the six Republican members to keep the Democrats in control.* He divided the remaining profits from padded contracts approved by the board with cooperative colleagues. In 1861, Tweed also became the deputy street commissioner, which enabled him to dispense hundreds of jobs to his constituents. Six months before the draft riots, in January 1863, Tammany Hall had acknowledged Tweed's growing power by electing him chairman of its general committee.55
Despite Tweed's help, Opdyke had made little progress with the aldermen and adjourned the meeting at 1:30 p.m.56 The Board of Aldermen then met for a special session but, lacking a quorum, could do little but listen to a speech by Alderman Terence Farley, a Democrat, who lamented that the riot would "affect the reputation of the city, and possibly be a pretext for the declaration of martial law here. It affords the excuse probably desired by the [Lincoln] Administration, for supplanting the civil by the military law in this Democratic City."57
At about 2 p.m., Mayor Opdyke telegrammed Secretary of War Stanton in Washington but did not yet ask for intervention by federal troops beyond those already in the city and the harbor forts. Similarly, in a message to Governor Seymour, he merely asked for state troops from the surrounding areas, not as many as had been sent to Gettysburg. With the help of General Wool, he deployed the available U.S. Army troops to protect federal offices like the Customs House and the Post Office as well as state arsenals. For the moment, the mayor was operating on the model of deadly, smaller disturbances in the past, like the Astor Place riot of 1849 and labor protests during the Panic of 1857.58
The mayor's caution was compounded by General Sandford's inaction. Opdyke and Acton had asked Sandford to call out the state militia in the city, and the troops were mustered early Monday morning in the arsenals at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street, in Central Park at Sixty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, and downtown at White and Elm Streets.† However, Sandford, who had handled the mob so aggressively at Astor Place some fifteen years earlier, remained almost oblivious to the events unfolding outside, dismissing every report of rioting as exaggeration—while overestimating the danger to the arsenals and fussing over their defenses.
George Opdyke
Sandford, after nearly thirty years as commander, displayed a bureaucratic circumspection, exacerbated by telegrams from the state adjutant general, John Sprague, warning him to guard the arsenals.59 Moreover, since Sandford commanded state troops, he technically reported to the governor, and his reluctance to move forcefully against the rioters suggested a desire to keep in step with Seymour and other Democratic politicians.60
By about 2 p.m., as the situation deteriorated, Opdyke's requests for military aid became increasingly urgent. General Wool responded by calling in marines from the navy yard in Brooklyn along with troops and artillery from the forts and vessels in the harbor, collecting them on a gunboat dispatched from Governors Island. Using his authority as commander of the army's Department of the East, Wool also helped the mayor appeal for aid to the governors of New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island in addition to local officials in cities across New York State.61
Seventy-five years old, Wool had served competently in three wars but, like Sandford, had outlived his usefulness as a commander, and his battlefield experience helped little in the unfamiliar arena of urban crowd control. In poor health and overwhelmed, Wool declared Sandford to be in charge of all the forces—both state and federal—available to put down the riot. This placed Wool's deputy, Brigadier General Harvey Brown, commander of the military post of the city and harbor of New York, under Sandford's command.
Brown, however, took matters into his own hands. A graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Mexican War, Brown had been put in charge of Fort Pickens, Florida, in 1861 and prevented the Confederates from capturing the island. When he learned that Wool had ordered Lieutenant T. P. McElrath at Fort Hamilton to dispatch a mere eighty men from the harbor forts, Brown, his immediate superior, told McElrath instead to have all of the roughly three hundred troops "at Fort Hamilton, Fort Lafayette, and Fort Richmond" ready "to move at a moment's notice."62*
Brown then defied Sandford's order to report for duty at the arsenal at Thirty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue, which would have left the police and military forces dangerously divided. Instead, he took the small force under his immediate command to the police Central Office and put himself under Acton's orders.63
In disobeying Wool's order to serve under Sandford, Brown had not simply insisted on his proper rank as an officer of the regular army, in which a militia general had no rank at all. More important, by putting himself at Acton's disposal, Brown was restricting himself to the proper role of federal forces in a situation where martial law had not been proclaimed. "I never for a moment forgot that to the police was confided the conservation of the peace of the city," Brown later wrote, "and that only in conjunction with the city authorities, and on their requisition, could the United States forces be lawfully and properly employed in suppressing the riots."64
Acton was in the process of drawing his forces down from the upper reaches of the city and concentrating them at 300 Mulberry Street. By 3 p.m., he was beginning for the first time to assemble a body of men large enough for rapid deployment against the toughest nodes of the mob.65 However, the rioters soon took advantage of the fact that the city above Seventy-sixth Street was protected only by skeleton crews at the police stations, police telegrapher Charles Loring Chapin recalled, and the officers "in the more densely populated and more important portions of the city were left at the Station-Houses under call by telegraph."66 At headquarters, Acton still needed some time to organize this large force so it was ready for action.
While Acton pulled his Metropolitans in from around the city, the men of the Broadway Squad, besieged in the state armory on Second Avenue and Twenty-first Street, gave up waiting for reinforcements: They wriggled through a hole in the back wall and clung to a drainpipe to reach the ground eighteen feet below, before fleeing through backyards and fighting their way to the nearest station house. Attacked there, the squad finally escaped back to its own precinct.
The rioters burst through the front doors of the state armory and began seizing weapons, particularly on the third floor, which was used for military training drills. While the distracted mob packed into the armory, about one hundred of the Metropolitans who had been beaten on Third Avenue regrouped and marched down Second Avenue, where they dispersed the crowd out front. Then, at the door the police formed two lines, facing each other, and clubbed down every rioter who came out laden with guns and other loot.
Fearing the police would pursue them on the third floor, the rioters in the drill room barricaded the doors from inside. Others, on the lower floors, decided to set fire to the building rather than turn it over to the police. While flames raced through the dry wooden interior and shot up the stairwells, rioters leaped from the windows and stumbled out the doors. Trapped in the drill room, at least t
en victims suddenly plunged to their deaths when the floor collapsed and crashed down into the cauldron of fire below.67
While Acton gathered his forces and the state armory burned on Monday afternoon, the lower wards of the city belatedly erupted in violence, directed mainly at blacks, many of whom, like the men of the Broadway Squad but with far fewer resources, found themselves abandoned to the onslaught of the mob. The police were overwhelmed, and General Sandford, who could have dispatched militiamen from the White Street arsenal to the Fourth and Sixth Wards and Greenwich Village, did nothing.68
Smaller mobs broke off from the main one and roamed the entire width of the island, starting to focus their attacks on blacks wherever they could be found: individuals on the street, waiters in restaurants, families in mostly black tenement houses, seamen in boardinghouses, and prostitutes in brothels. Blacks did not live in a distinct, large ghetto where they might have rallied to defend their turf and defeat the rioters, but rather were concentrated in individual buildings and streets throughout the city, which left them easy prey to the roving mobs.69
"I don't know that the niggers themselves is responsible for this here trouble, but by God there is a war about 'm, damn 'm, and we'll pound 'm," a rioter told a reporter from the World. "It's the abolitionists that have been pushing matters eternally, and we won't stop it. We'll pound the God damn abolitionists as well as the niggers."70
A British visitor to the city was astounded. "Never having been in New York before, and being totally ignorant of the state of feeling with regard to Negroes, I inquired of a bystander what the Negroes had done that they should want to kill them? He replied civilly enough—'Oh sir, they hate them here; they are the innocent cause of all these troubles.' "71
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