New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  Although luck largely determined who escaped the mob and who fell victim to it, the rioters chose a predictable range of targets. The households of wealthier families who could be identified as Republicans or emancipationists were attacked, looted, and sometimes burned to the ground. On Tuesday, for example, some two hundred rioters converged on the West Twenty-Ninth Street townhouse of white abolitionist James Gibbons. Through the shutters of her aunt’s house two doors down, Gibbons’s daughter Lucy watched as men with pickaxes shattered the parlor windows of her home. She saw “sheets of music . . . flying in every direction” and observed “women, laden with spoils . . . leaning against the courtyard railing; one had a pot and was fanning herself with the lid.” The Gibbons home barely escaped conflagration; neighbors, fearing for their own townhouses, climbed to the roof and lowered buckets of water into the house to douse the flames ignited by the looters.41

  Isolated members of the Metropolitan Police Force—controlled by the Republican state legislature in Albany, rather than by local Democrats—also came in for rough treatment. Near the Ninth District draft office on Monday, a crowd recognized police superintendent John Kennedy, known for his success in arresting Union army deserters. They beat and kicked him savagely and left him for dead (miraculously, the sixty-year-old Kennedy survived). Patrick Dolan, an eighteen-year-old blacksmith, led a group to destroy Mayor Opdyke’s Fifth Avenue mansion, but they were driven off by police. When, on West Twenty-Eighth Street, a drunken John Fitzherbert shredded the stars and stripes while shouting “Damn the flag!” and others offered “Three cheers for Jeff Davis!” they made clear their revulsion at a war they now saw as serving the rich man and the abolitionist.42

  The most hated prey were black New Yorkers—men, women, and children. For four days, “Down with the bloody nigger!” and “Kill all niggers!” echoed through the streets. On Monday afternoon, a mob surrounded the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue at Forty-Third Street, a philanthropy funded by wealthy Quakers and hence a symbol of the link between the city’s white abolitionists and its black population. As members of the crowd shouted “Burn the niggers’ nest!” and split the front door with axes, superintendent William Davis led the asylum’s residents—237 black children—out the rear. With looting under way and the edifice going up in flames, an Irishman in the crowd beseeched those around him: “If there’s a man among you, with a heart within him, come and help these poor children.” Their answer was to beat him. But elsewhere in the crowd, Paddy M’Caffrey with several fellow stage drivers and volunteer firemen protected twenty children who had become separated from the main group. Davis managed to get his charges, unharmed, to the sanctuary of the Twentieth Police Precinct House at Thirty-Fourth Street off Ninth Avenue.43

  The assault on the asylum was only the beginning of the pogrom. Mobs looted and set fire to blocks of shanties occupied by black families. “Don’t never show your face in this street again,” laborer James Cassidy, who lived nearby, warned Mary Alexander as he expelled her and other African Americans from their homes on West Twenty-Eighth Street. By Monday night, lynching had also come to the streets of New York. William Jones made the mistake of walking down Clarkson Street, returning home with a loaf of bread bought at a neighborhood store. A group of white men caught him, hanged him from a tree, and then ignited a bonfire under his suspended corpse. On Wednesday in broad daylight, Abraham Franklin, a disabled coachman, was hanged from a lamppost at West Twenty-Eighth Street and Seventh Avenue; a Jewish emigrant tailor from England, Mark Silva, helped hoist Franklin to his death. After the body was cut down, a white sixteen-year-old butcher’s apprentice, Patrick Butler, dragged Franklin’s corpse by the genitals through the street, to the cheers of the mob. Before the week was out, one more black man, James Costello, was hanged; at least two others were beaten to death. Eighteen sustained injuries from beatings; four other African American men and women were hurt jumping from the windows of their homes to escape the mob. Peter Heuston, a Mohawk Indian mistaken for a black man, died from his wounds after the riot ended. These numbers may reflect only a fraction of total African American casualties; others probably went unreported as black families fled for their lives.44

  African American New Yorkers being attacked during the Draft Riot, as pictured in the Republican periodical Harper’s Weekly. Engraving by unidentified artist, How to Escape the Draft, in Harper’s Weekly, August 1, 1863. AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.

  Some sought to defend their homes. At the height of the riots the black abolitionist William Wells Brown entered a tenement on Thompson Street to find eight black women, an “octet of Amazons,” concocting a simmering mixture of water, soap, and ashes they called “the King of Pain.” Brown inquired how they intended to fend off the mob if it materialized. “We’ll fling hot water on them, and scald their very hearts out.” “Can you all throw water without injuring each other?” he asked. “O yes, Honey,” they replied, “we’ve been practicing all day.” Downtown on Dover Street, Brown’s fellow activist, William Powell, vowed not to leave his Colored Sailors’ Home “until driven from the premises.” By Monday afternoon, however, “king mob” had surrounded it, and the evening found Powell with his wife, children, and eight other men on the roof of the five-story building next door as rioters ransacked his house. How to escape? With the help of a Jewish neighbor—“a little, deformed, despised Israelite,” as Powell put it—Powell, an experienced sailor, rigged a rope and pulley that allowed them all to descend, roof to roof, and land safely in a nearby yard. A few blocks away, Albro and Mary Lyons stood guard in the vestibule of their own hostel for black seamen. When a mob approached the doorway after midnight, Albro Lyons fired a gun into the crowd, scattering them. At dawn on Tuesday, the couple heard a voice outside crying, “Don’t shoot, Al. It’s only me.” Officer Kelly, an Irish policeman from the local precinct, greeted with relief the news that they had survived the night. “This kind hearted man,” their daughter Maritcha would remember, “sat on our steps and sobbed like a child.”45

  “The beastly ruffians were masters of the situation and of the city,” George Templeton Strong wrote grimly after returning home to Gramercy Park from “the seat of war” in the East Forties. By Monday afternoon, the city’s authorities were scrambling to meet the onslaught many of them had half-expected, but whose magnitude they had never fully anticipated. The rooms of Major General John Wool, commander of the army’s Department of the East, in the elegant St. Nicholas Hotel on Broadway at Spring Street, became an impromptu command center for riot control. But the official response was alarmingly decentralized. While Wool’s deputy, Brevet Brigadier General Harvey Brown, corralled about four hundred soldiers from the Invalid Corps and the harbor forts and prepared them for deployment, Major General Charles Sandford, head of the state militia, unaccountably kept some six hundred militiamen “in reserve” within the state arsenal at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-Fifth Street.46

  All involved in the attempts to stop the rioters longed for the presence of the city’s active regiments, but they were in Pennsylvania with the Army of the Potomac. New York City had been left with a skeletal home guard in the face of Lee’s invasion. But by working together, Brown and Thomas Acton, energetic president of the Metropolitan Police Commission, emerged as capable commanders while Wool and Sandford dithered. With a combined force of 700 federal soldiers and 800 policemen, and with several hundred armed and deputized civilians, the two men dispatched squadrons. Telegrams and scrawled messages poured in and out of their joint base at police headquarters on Mulberry Street. “Quail on toast for every man of you, as soon as the mob is put down. Quail on toast, boys,” Acton promised his policemen as they set off into the streets. Armed with hardwood clubs, over one hundred patrolmen under Sergeant Daniel Carpenter beat back a large group of rioters surging down Broadway at Bleecker Street on Monday afternoon. When a belligerent crowd of several hundred filled City Hall Park and threatened the New York Tribune Building that night, a contingent of 150 police, in the word
s of one of the riot’s early historians, “fell in one solid mass on the mob, knocking men over right and left, and laying heads open at every blow.” New York’s civil war generated its own fratricide: if many of the rioters were Irish immigrants and their sons, so were the police who challenged them in hand-to-hand combat.47

  It was Brown’s soldiers—along with regiments that started arriving from the front by Wednesday evening—who brought the full thrust of the Civil War to Manhattan’s streets: gleaming bayonets, loaded muskets, and field howitzers. In close formation, troops repeatedly fired down avenues to clear them of angry New Yorkers, much as some had recently swept Confederates from Pennsylvania cornfields. “I halted the company, and fired by sections, allowing each section to fall to the rear to load as fast as it had fired,” Captain Walter Franklin of the Twelfth US Infantry later recalled of his unit’s action against the mob in Second Avenue on Tuesday afternoon. The New York World reported the result: “The dead bodies of the killed were to be seen being borne away by their friends. . . . Pools of blood would be met at frequent intervals, and in a large number of houses lay the wounded writhing in pain.” But in many cases rioters were firing too, from behind makeshift barricades and from tenement roofs. On Thursday evening, in the riot’s last major engagement, 160 federal infantrymen marched up Second Avenue in the Twenties and low Thirties, only to be barraged by stones and bullets aimed at them from streets and buildings. While Union sharpshooters picked snipers off rooftops, artillerymen aimed cannon down the avenue, firing canister shot—cylinders that spewed forth metal balls with devastating force—to clear it of the enemy.48

  By Friday, with over 5,000 Union troops brought up from Pennsylvania now occupying Manhattan, the riot had burned out. Dazed New Yorkers surveyed the results: over one hundred homes, businesses, and public buildings burned down, including two draft offices, the Colored Orphan Asylum, and the Eighteenth Police Precinct House on East Twenty-Third Street; two hundred other buildings looted or vandalized; property damage amounting to between $3 million and $5 million (about $60 to $100 million in today’s dollars); 73 soldiers, 105 policemen, and 128 civilians reported injured; 105 reported dead, including 6 soldiers and 3 policemen. The actual number of wounded and killed was almost certainly higher, as rioters hid their wounded and covertly disposed of corpses; 500 dead is probably a more accurate estimate. Antidraft riots had simultaneously broken out throughout the North—in Boston, Detroit, Troy, and across the river in Brooklyn—but none remotely approached the magnitude of New York City’s.49

  For all the destruction they had wrought, the rioters failed to halt the draft: it resumed in August, with ten thousand federal troops patrolling Manhattan’s streets. And yet the rioters had scored some victories for themselves. For one thing, the city’s Democratic grand juries and courts proved loath to punish the 443 New Yorkers (including 38 women) arrested during the riot. Only 49 appear to have served any significant time in prison; most of the rest were acquitted or released without being charged. Patrick Butler, who had dragged Abraham Franklin’s corpse through the street, was found guilty of “an offense against public decency” and was sent to the House of Refuge, a juvenile reformatory.50

  Though the draft proceeded, key Democrats deflected its impact. The war had divided the city’s Democratic Party into two factions—the “War Democrats” of Tammany Hall, critical of emancipation and the draft but committed to Union military victory, and Fernando Wood’s “Peace Democrats” (or “Copperheads”), known for their willingness to consider a negotiated peace and their barely concealed pro-Confederate sentiments. Their rivalry had split the usual Democratic majority and allowed the Republican Opdyke to be elected mayor in 1861. But now Tammany, in the guise of County Supervisor William Tweed, hit upon a scheme to ensure no further draft riots would trouble the city. As the driving force of a County Special Committee on Volunteering, Tweed oversaw a program whereby the city paid the $300 exemption fee for any drafted New Yorker who did not want to serve. Over the last twenty months of the war, the committee spent some $10 million, raised through a municipal bond issue, to pay the bounties of volunteer substitutes so 116,000 drafted New Yorkers could stay at home. The program provided the soldiers to fill President Lincoln’s quotas, and it clinched Tammany’s reputation as friend to the working man. The county supervisor’s deft handling of the situation helped make him “Boss” Tweed, postwar master of the local Democratic Party and of the city itself.51

  Republicans glowered at such pandering to voters who so recently had brandished the torch and the noose, but many in the party, including Lincoln himself, recognized what a fine line they had to walk. If they acquiesced in these Tammany machinations, enlistments would proceed peacefully, and “War Democrats” would continue to support the war effort. If, instead, they imposed a draconian draft, another maelstrom might be unleashed. Lincoln cut the city’s draft quota in half. Pressed by some Manhattan Republicans to launch a federal inquest into the riots, the president held back, intimating that further antagonizing the North’s Democrats would backfire: “One rebellion at a time is about as much as we can conveniently handle.”52

  The rioters scored one additional victory. The mass influx of freed slaves from the South never materialized. As word of New York’s lynchings spread, migrating African Americans got the message about the reception that would greet them in the nation’s largest city. In the years following the riots, Manhattan’s black population declined rather than increased, as numerous survivors sought to leave behind the traumas of July 1863 and New York’s persistent racism. Albro and Mary Lyons, whose home was finally wrecked by a mob on Wednesday night, relocated their family to Providence, Rhode Island. Maritcha Lyons understood the situation precisely: she and her parents were living “in exile” from New York City.53

  On the chilly afternoon of March 5, 1864, an interracial crowd lined the northern perimeter of Union Square to watch a committee of prominent Republicans bestow an honorary flag upon the men of the Twentieth US Colored Troops, the city’s first African American regiment. Few if any recalled that black New Yorkers had been fighting in the city’s wars since Dutch colonial days. Instead, for many present, like George Templeton Strong, the event marked a more pressing set of imperatives: the need to arm blacks to aid in defeating the South and the need to offer a resolute gesture to the Democrats who had risen in bloody insurrection eight months earlier.

  The war had driven Strong, like other New York Republicans, steadily leftward in his thinking. Although he never fully shed his suspicion that blacks were biologically inferior to whites, he had come to understand abolition as a war strategy and as something due to four million enslaved Americans. The Union League Club, the organization of elite Republicans Strong cofounded to sustain the city’s commitment to victory, had sponsored the Twentieth Regiment in defiance of state and city Democrats. Two other black regiments, the Twenty-Sixth and the Thirty-First, would follow. As the regiment marched down Broadway to board a ship for the Louisiana war zone, Strong was moved by their appearance—“armed, drilled, truculent, elate.” Even Maria Lydig Daly, a racist and wife of a War Democrat, confessed that she was stirred: “They were a fine body of men and had a look of satisfaction in their faces, as though they felt they had gained a right to be more respected.”54

  The sense of helplessness that the Draft Riot induced in many affluent New Yorkers gave way to a redoubled commitment. The US Sanitary Commission, a quasi-public body founded by a handful of Manhattan businessmen, professionals, and doctors, worked with the federal government to improve health conditions for Union troops in the field and in military hospitals. From its executive headquarters at 823 Broadway, the commission controlled fleets of steamers, barges, and wagons; dispatched tons of medicine and supplies; hired doctors, orderlies, and nurses to supplement those of the army’s overburdened Medical Bureau; and by early 1865, supervised over five hundred agents in the field who sought to monitor and remedy dismal conditions in the hospitals. New York societ
y women, deprived of careers by prevailing gender roles, seized the opportunity to toil actively in a public cause. Some trained as volunteer nurses or doctor’s assistants and were even paid for their work. Although often resented by male professionals, many served unflinchingly under daunting conditions. Maria Lydig Daly’s unmarried friend Harriet Whetten nursed sick and wounded soldiers in Virginia. “She looked very happy,” Daly observed when Whetten returned to New York in May 1862. “She has been longing for some active employment and would like to have gone soldiering, I think, long ago.”55

  While the wounds inflicted by the Draft Riot lingered, on the surface New York resumed its daily round of getting and spending, of feverish bustle and lavish consumption, especially in its upper social echelons. In early 1864, as Sherman had prepared his troops for the drive toward Atlanta, and Grant had primed his for a campaign against Richmond, New York still seemed able to insulate itself from the war’s destruction, a fact that infuriated Southerners who learned of continued Northern tranquility through newspaper accounts and correspondence. Disappointed in their expectation that the Draft Riot would be followed by escalating Northern turmoil, Confederates decided to bring the war to New York themselves.

  The prospect of a combined attack from inside and outside the city played on the minds of many New Yorkers. Republicans in particular refused to believe that the Draft Riot had not represented some deep-laid conspiracy between Confederate agents and local Copperheads. The New York Times went so far as to label the draft rioters “the left wing of Lee’s army.” In truth, the city had become a sanctuary for refugees from Southern war zones, estimated as numbering from ten thousand to fifty thousand. Some had come north to be near husbands or relatives who were among the hundreds of prisoners of war being held in Fort Lafayette in the Narrows and elsewhere around the harbor. “The city is literally swarming with rebel adventurers of an irresponsible and dangerous class,” the Times warned. Many assumed that spies were conveying news of local troop and ship movements to Richmond. Major General John Dix, commander of the Department of the East, ordered all Southerners in the city to register with the army or else be considered “spies or emissaries of the insurgent authorities in Richmond,” but only a few hundred bothered to show up at the Department’s Bleecker Street headquarters to give their names, residences, and vital statistics. While Republicans remained enraged at Northern Peace Democrats, no evidence ever proved that Southern agents or New York Copperheads premeditated the Draft Riot (although local Democratic politicians clearly had tried to spark a more focused resistance to the draft itself). Such allegations nevertheless allowed Strong and others to overlook the grinding poverty, anti-Irish prejudice, and class discrimination that had helped fuel the riot.56