New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  One man carried the preoccupation with New York into the inner sanctum of the Confederate cabinet. Stephen Mallory, Jefferson Davis’s navy secretary, envisioned an ironclad steamer that could win the war, its metal armor impervious to shellfire as it sank wooden-hulled Union ships at will. In March 1862, after his prototype, the Merrimack, wreaked havoc on Union shipping in Virginia waters, Mallory wrote excitedly to its commander, Franklin Buchanan, of what would follow. The ironclad would be ordered north to New York harbor to “shell and burn the city and the shipping. . . . Peace would inevitably follow. Bankers would withdraw their capital from the city. The Brooklyn Navy Yard and its magazines and all the lower part of the city would be destroyed.” Such an attack, Mallory concluded, “would do more to achieve our immediate independence than would the results of many campaigns.”23

  In the end, the Merrimack would not lob shells into New York. By the time Mallory wrote his letter, the ship had already been checked in battle by the ironclad Monitor, dispatched from New York harbor. Buchanan himself pointed out to Mallory the obstacles to a successful foray: the unlikelihood of finding Sandy Hook pilots to guide the Merrimack through the Lower Bay’s treacherous sandbars and the possibility that New York’s outer forts would open fire on it. Buchanan did concede, however, that if it reached the inner harbor, it could batter the city’s houses and ships.24

  Through the early months of 1862, New Yorkers feared just such an onslaught as the one that Mallory envisioned. More precisely, after the Union navy caused a diplomatic crisis by removing two Confederate envoys from the English-bound vessel Trent on the high seas, they feared two possible onslaughts: one from the much-discussed Merrimack, the other from the Royal Navy. George Templeton Strong worriedly questioned “whether we can stop iron-plated steamers from coming up the Narrows and throwing shells into Union Square.” Lincoln’s willingness to appease the English to avoid a transatlantic war, and the blowing up of the Merrimack in May, allowed New Yorkers to breathe a sigh of relief, but their anxieties resurfaced throughout the war. In September 1862, Union navy secretary Gideon Welles scoffed in his diary that “men in New York, men who are sensible in most things, are the most easily terrified and panic-stricken of any community. They are just now alarmed lest one iron-clad steamer may rush in upon them one fine morning while they’re asleep and destroy their city.”25

  A few weeks later, however, such alarm seemed less ludicrous. On November 2, forty-four survivors from vessels sunk by the eight-gun Confederate navy steamer Alabama arrived in Boston harbor. The survivors carried a message for the New York Chamber of Commerce from Raphael Semmes, the Alabama’s captain, informing the chamber “that by the time this message reached them, he would be off” the port of New York. After burning nine New England whaling ships in the Azores, Semmes had turned to the Atlantic coast, where over the course of October he captured ten Northern vessels, most of them bound from New York to Europe with grain and flour. Some of the ship captains showed Semmes papers indicating that their cargoes belonged to English owners, but the Confederate commander was not impressed. “The New York merchant is a pretty sharp fellow,” he later wrote, “in the matter of shaving paper, getting up false invoices, and ‘doing’ the custom-house; but the laws of nations . . . rather muddled his brain.” Declaring the documents invalid, Semmes sank eight of the cargo-laden ships.26

  Next, Semmes planned to bring the war to New York’s doorstep. Recent copies of the Herald and other New York papers found on board his prizes reassured Semmes that the harbor was lightly defended by the navy, which had dispatched gunboats that he managed to bypass on his way toward the city. Aware of the large number of cargo vessels riding in the Lower Bay, Semmes determined, in the words of one of his officers, “to enter Sandy Hook anchorage and set fire to the shipping in that vast harbor.” But on October 30, with the Alabama still two hundred miles east of Sandy Hook, Semmes decided that the move was too risky because his coal supply was running low. The Alabama pulled off toward the Caribbean, to the disappointment of the crew. “To astonish the enemy in New York harbor,” Master’s Mate George Fullam noted in his log, “to destroy their vessels in their own waters, had been the darling wish of all on board.”

  As Semmes predicted, the city went “agog” as news spread of his audacious message to the Chamber of Commerce. Although Union navy commander Henry Wise argued that “any of the armed ferry boats now at the Navy Yard would make toothpicks of her [the Alabama] in five minutes,” New Yorkers were not so sure. “It seems strange that the energy and resources of the country cannot result in ridding the ocean of a pestering pirate,” Horace Greeley’s Tribune complained.27

  Captain Raphael Semmes (center right) poses next to one of the Confederate raider Alabama’s guns, 1863. NAVAL HISTORY & HERITAGE COMMAND PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION.

  In August 1864, Confederate “pirates” would return to New York waters. The three-gun cruiser Tallahassee, at seventeen knots one of the fastest steamers in the world, slipped out of Wilmington, North Carolina, past a Union blockade, under orders from Stephen Mallory to wreak havoc on Union shipping along the East Coast. Four days later, cruising off Long Island’s south shore and Sandy Hook, the Tallahassee’s captain, John Taylor Wood, commenced a two-day looting and burning spree. Soon the waters off New York were littered with the wrecks of twelve brigs, barks, schooners, and ships, scuttled or burnt to the waterline. Wood loaded the scores of crewmen and passengers he captured onto other vessels and sent them into Fire Island and the city with the news of his presence. Captain Reed of the captured brig Billow told a reporter that Wood “appeared to be a very affable man, and said he was doing what it was not pleasant for him to do.” Wood told Reed that his mission was to “slacken up the coasting trade so that ‘Uncle Abe’ would be glad to make peace.” But the commander also warned several of the prisoners he released that “he was coming into New-York harbor.”28

  Given Wood’s audacious temperament, his vessel’s unmatchable speed, and the dearth of Union warships in the vicinity of New York (almost all were on Southern blockade duty or Atlantic patrol), he probably intended to make good on his threat. But Wood could not persuade or pressure any of the Sandy Hook pilots he captured to aid him in his plan, which was to maneuver his steamer through the bay’s shoals into the East River, shell anchored ships and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and then slip through Hell Gate out into Long Island Sound. Instead, Wood decided to turn east and hunt in New England’s shipping lanes. Although he was pursued by Union gunboats, August 26 found the rebel raider safely back in Wilmington, having sunk a total of twenty-eight Northern vessels. New Yorkers, especially ship owners and sailors, breathed a sigh of relief, but they also remembered Wood’s warning that the Confederacy had other cruisers it would unleash against Northern shipping.29

  Well before Semmes’s or Wood’s attacks, New Yorkers had worried about the vulnerability of the port’s defenses. In 1821, a federal board had recommended that six new forts be built to seal off New York’s outer approaches from possible attack. These works would protect the inner line of forts and guns that Jonathan Williams had placed on Ellis, Bedloe’s, and Governors Islands. By 1861, granite-walled Fort Schuyler on the Bronx shore of Long Island Sound was complete; so was Fort Lafayette, built on an offshore reef in the Narrows channel, and Fort Hamilton, overlooking it from the Brooklyn shore (where an up-and-coming army engineer, Robert E. Lee, had served capably during the 1840s). But much was left undone. Construction continued on forts Richmond and Tompkins on the Staten Island side of the Narrows, and little had been done at Sandy Hook or on the Queens side of the Sound. Nervous New Yorkers shared George Templeton Strong’s antebellum perception that “our fortifications at the Narrows, though quite picturesque of a summer afternoon, are still, considered strictly as defenses, about as much as a line of squirtgun batteries.”30

  One army officer who understood New Yorkers’ fears threw himself into the work of making the port impregnable. Sixty-three-year-old Colonel Richard Delaf
ield of the US Army Corps of Engineers was a native New Yorker, reared in his merchant father’s Wall Street townhouse. A former superintendent of West Point like Williams before him, Delafield was an acknowledged expert on port defense who had toured Europe’s great forts. Appointed engineer to the New York State Commission of Harbor and Frontier Defence, Delafield dedicated himself to keeping the Confederate foe at bay. With some 1,100 cannon already lining the ramparts and casemates of the port’s defenses, Delafield promised New Yorkers that he would add another 242 heavy guns, “a greater number . . . than exists in most of the fortified harbors of Europe.” Armed with a congressional appropriation, Delafield extended rudimentary defenses at Fort Lincoln (later renamed Fort Hancock) on Sandy Hook and began building what became known as Fort Totten on the Queens shore opposite Fort Schuyler.31

  Delafield also solicited ideas from the city’s inventors and scientists, professional and amateur, who were happy to oblige. One suggested a railway running along the Upper Bay with mobile guns to fire on invading ships. The magazine Scientific American argued that a pool of petroleum dumped into the harbor and ignited on the enemy’s approach would prove an effective deterrent. Delafield himself advocated a system of chains and pontoons across the Narrows to let in friendly vessels and keep out hostile ones, and a string of electrically triggered “torpedoes” (“the fruits of American science and genius”) across the riverbed between the Bronx and Queens, but expense and practical obstacles prevented these from being implemented.32

  Although he fretted privately about insufficient funds and the slow pace of the work, Delafield tried to calm New Yorkers. Many of them believed that the Confederacy was acquiring fearsome new technologies from England or France, fast ironclad steamers and powerful rifle-barreled artillery that might turn brick and granite forts into rubble. “No hostile force can ever reduce it,” he wrote confidently of Fort Schuyler, provided it were properly supplied and garrisoned. New fifteen-inch guns he installed at Fort Hamilton in 1864, mounted on rotating carriages, promised to rain death and destruction on any enemy warship trying to enter the Narrows or Upper Bay.33

  In the summer of 1863, however, it was Delafield’s turn to vent his alarm. As Robert E. Lee’s army surged north into Pennsylvania, Delafield realized that the city faced a threat that rendered its seaward-facing forts irrelevant. In an urgent letter to New York governor Horatio Seymour on July 3, Delafield sketched the probable result if Lee proved to be “a successful conqueror” in his northward march: Confederate occupation of Philadelphia, followed by the taking of Jersey City, from which the rebels could easily bombard Manhattan with their artillery and throw an army of fifty thousand across the Hudson. Delafield beseeched the governor to mobilize the state militia and reserves to expand New York City’s home guard, as well as an army to strike Lee’s rear from the Susquehanna Valley. “Now shall we stand with our arms folded,” he asked, “and allow the resources within the limits of the State of New York in this eventful and momentous crisis to be ‘not ready’?”34

  Delafield’s fears were unwarranted. As he wrote his letter, Meade’s Army of the Potomac was turning Lee back at Gettysburg. Yet the war was soon to come to the city. Edmund Ruffin’s nightmare vision—of civil war erupting in Manhattan’s streets—was about to become a reality.

  On the hot summer morning of Monday, July 13, 1863, crowds of men and boys swarmed through the streets of Manhattan, inviting and bullying others to join them from foundries near the East River docks and workshops scattered among the new blocks that had sprouted uptown in the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties. Some carried homemade placards and banners reading “No Draft.”

  The previous Saturday, federal provost marshals had begun to implement the first compulsory military conscription in the Union’s history. Bounty money offered by government recruiters was failing to turn out the full complement of volunteers Lincoln had counted on to win the war. With veterans like Thomas Southwick retiring from the army and other young men thinking twice about risking their lives and limbs in a seemingly endless bloodbath, the administration and a Republican-controlled Congress had resolved on a drastic measure. The War Department set quotas for a national draft to begin in mid-July 1863, applying to all able-bodied single men ages twenty to forty-five and all married men ages twenty to thirty-five. New York City alone was to supply twenty-four thousand men to the Union army.35

  The Conscription Act of 1863, however, was deeply unpopular with many New Yorkers, for two reasons. First, by signing the Emancipation Proclamation the previous January, President Lincoln had pledged the Union to the liberation of the Confederacy’s slaves—a measure anathema to local Democrats who had long warned that such was the ultimate goal of “black Republicans.” Since before Lincoln’s election, newspapers like the Herald had been warning working-class readers that, should the abolitionists get what they wanted, “you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated Negroes.” The specter of a mass influx of freedmen into New York’s job market angered and frightened immigrant workers. The fear compounded a widespread belief in the Irish community that, as Maria Lydig Daly put it, “the abolitionists hate both Irish and Catholic and want to kill them off.”36

  Second, the Conscription Act contained a clause that gave a new and bitter meaning to the motto “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight”: an exemption for any man who paid a $300 fee that would be used to hire a volunteer substitute. In a city where many laborers earned about $1 a day, this was class legislation with a vengeance, and, indeed, propertied men like J. Pierpont Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., and George Templeton Strong paid the fee and stayed clear of the battlefield. Over the spring and summer of 1863, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper warned that the draft law “converts the Republic into one grand military dictatorship,” while John McMaster’s vehement Freeman’s Journal blasted that “deluded and almost delirious fanatic,” Lincoln. Another Democratic paper ran a parody of a popular Union Army recruiting song:Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to the decree;

  We are the poor who have no wealth to purchase liberty.37

  For thousands of working-class New Yorkers alienated from the war, the government’s determination to enforce the draft was an intolerable challenge, one that momentarily focused their anger on the federal draft offices established in neighborhoods throughout the city.

  In the morning hours on Monday, as crowds of machinists, iron-workers, longshoremen, and others listened to impromptu speakers in an empty lot above Fifty-Ninth Street just east of the new Central Park, they remained peaceful. But at 10 AM, when the drawing of names from a rotating drum—the “wheel of misfortune,” the Daily News called it—commenced in the Ninth District draft office at Third Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street, the situation deteriorated. The throng of hundreds pressing around the office’s door grew angrier and more boisterous until, finally, members of the Black Joke Engine Company, volunteer firemen with strong ties to local Democratic politicians, hurled paving stones through the windows. Shouting “Down with the rich men!” the crowd poured into the office, demolishing it and clubbing several draft officers. Armed with stones and sticks, the crowd beat back a company of fifty soldiers of the army’s Invalid Corps who appeared on the scene. The draft office was soon consumed in flames.38

  A block away, at Lexington Avenue and Forty-Fifth Street, George Templeton Strong watched as several hundred “of the lowest Irish day laborers” attacked two row houses because of a rumor that a draft officer lived there. After the mob (including “stalwart young vixens and withered old hags”) shattered the windows with stones and forced several women and children to flee, “men and small boys appeared at rear windows and began smashing the sashes . . . and dropped chairs and mirrors into the back yard. . . . Loafers were seen marching off with portable articles of furniture.” As smoke billowed out of the buildings, Strong turned away. “I could endure the disgraceful, sickening sight no longer, and what could I do?” The New York Draft Riot, the bloodiest mob
action in American history, was beginning.39

  By Monday afternoon, the pent up fury of Manhattan’s white immigrant working class was exploding throughout the city. On Third Avenue alone, a crowd estimated at fifty thousand surged back and forth. Although many were spectators like Strong, a hard core of rioters numbering in the thousands ranged through the city. Breaking into stores, the mob armed itself with “revolvers, old muskets, stones, clubs, [and] barrel-staves,” as well as with alcohol from saloons and liquor shops. Rioters and policemen battled for possession of a gun factory at Twenty-First Street and Second Avenue, partly owned by Republican Mayor George Opdyke. By night, the building was a charred ruin littered with thirteen corpses. Another draft office at Broadway and Twenty-Ninth Street went up in flames. The many New Yorkers who frantically boarded ferryboats to escape, and especially the African Americans who sought refuge on the city’s outskirts or tried to hide in Central Park, were well advised to take flight. Monday proved to be only the beginning of a rampage that continued for four days and nights.40