Late in September, the president faced one more irritating press controversy in Missouri, another consequence of Schofield’s heavy hand. By this time, Lincoln believed, “no organized military force in avowed opposition to the general government” still existed in the state. Yet he had just received complaints from Union men there that Schofield persisted in menacing its opposition voices. Determined to avoid new confrontations in the region, Lincoln instructed the general to do no more than “compel the excited people there to leave one another alone.” Schofield was ordered to arrest only “individuals, and suppress assemblies, or newspapers, when they may be working palpable injury to the Military in your charge; and in no other case will you interfere with the expression of opinion in any form, or allow it to be interfered with violently by others.”111 Lincoln’s order certainly left the door ajar for future press censorship, but as Schofield learned, only victorious generals earned the power to suppress journalists unchecked.
• • •
Just one day after writing his exasperated July 13 letter to General Schofield on the McKee case, Lincoln scribbled a frantic message to his eldest boy, Robert, then lodging at the posh Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York en route home to Washington after finishing his latest semester at Harvard. Asked the worried father: “Why do I hear no more of you?”112
The lost or unspoken answer was that the young man was trapped—or perhaps thrilled to find himself—in the middle of the most horrific urban convulsion in American history. On July 13, as the military prepared to draw the names of the city’s first conscripts, Manhattan erupted in anti-draft violence. Born of resentment over the new law’s escape clause—the wealthy could avoid the draft by hiring a substitute or paying the U.S. Treasury $300—the protest quickly cascaded into a bloody, full-blown rampage. Blaming African Americans for both the draft and the war, rioters directed unspeakable violence against the unarmed local black population, women and children included, devastating the city’s small community of color.
Dependably Republican newspapers—along with Bennett’s Herald—had supported the draft wholeheartedly. Although Bennett objected to the $300 opt-out provision, he argued that “we need all the soldiers we can obtain” and overoptimistically reported “the good feeling that has everywhere marked the first drawings.” But Joseph Medill more accurately reported to Lincoln from Chicago that he had “never witnessed greater hostility to any public measure.”113 Just as Medill feared, New York’s Copperhead dailies assailed the draft as unconstitutional and discriminatory, and, according to the Republican papers, succeeded in stirring up murderous resentment in the city’s poor white neighborhoods.
Knowing full well that the reply would be “black freedom,” Manton Marble’s New York World nonetheless posed this incendiary question: “To what use is this new army to be put?” The draft will ignite “manifestations of popular disaffection,” Marble predicted. “It is impossible to tell what shape it will assume.” Benjamin Wood’s New York Daily News was even blunter: “A free people will not submit to the conscription.” The draft was “an outrage upon all decency and fairness.” Noting ominously that “violence and bloodshed have already marked the cause of [draft] enrollment in the West,” the News warned: “There is a lurking mischief in the atmosphere that surrounds this unwelcome stranger as it now prepares to make its forcible entry across our thresholds. There are symptoms of a wide-spread inclination to extend to it a harsh greeting.” On July 4, New York governor Horatio Seymour fanned the flames. In a roaring Independence Day speech, Seymour all but urged violent resistance, offering the rallying cry: “Remember this, that the bloody and treasonable and revolutionary doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government.”114
Nine days later, on July 13, just as the governor had prophesied, a mob attacked the provost marshal’s office on Third Avenue as officials prepared to commence drawing names for the draft.115 By the time Robert Lincoln received his father’s urgent message to hasten to Washington, crowds had already sacked and torched the office, stormed uptown toward the southern end of the new Central Park, then pillaged their way down Manhattan’s West Side. That afternoon, a largely Irish-American mob heartlessly set fire to the Colored Orphan’s Asylum on Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street. For a time they trapped more than two hundred helpless children inside the burning building, permitting them to escape only after forcing them past a gauntlet of jeering hecklers. Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, host of the city’s joyful, integrated “midnight hour” church service just six months earlier, became a target as well. His home would certainly have been sacked had his daughter not had the presence of mind to cut his nameplate off their front door.116 If the rioters learned that the hated president’s own son was in the vicinity, his life would have been endangered, too.
The Civil War had finally come to New York. Robert Lincoln eventually made his way safely to Washington, but up to five hundred people, many of them people of color, died in the four-day-long atrocity, chased and beaten to death on the streets, forced off the docks to drown in the rivers, genitally mutilated, or strung from lampposts and incinerated. The rioters targeted property as well, invading the homes and shops of prominent Republicans, looting and plundering, and menacing black-owned dwellings and “colored” churches. Outnumbered city police and unheeded Catholic priests proved powerless to stop the violence. George Templeton Strong watched one band of “Irish blackguards” attack Mayor George Opdyke’s home on Fourteenth Street. Strong felt somewhat cheered when a group of passing “gentlemen” rushed to the scene and used “their walking sticks and their fists” to disperse “the popular uprising (as the Herald, World, and News call it).” A furious Strong predicted that for encouraging riot—which it certainly did not—the Herald would be “doomed henceforth to obscurity and contempt.” Then he ominously prophesied: “Tribune office to be burned tonight.”117
Indeed, within hours, the rioters turned their fury on Newspaper Row. “Down with the Tribune!” came a loud voice from Printing House Square as a mob massed outside the paper. “Down with the old white coat that thinks a naygar as good as an Irishman!”118 Inside, Horace Greeley, no doubt wearing just such a trademark coat, worked away obliviously at his desk. As the threat mounted, managing editor Sydney Gay finally rushed to his boss’s side. “The authorities have taken no steps for our defence,” he cried. “The Evening Post has armed its building; we must do the same if it is to be saved. This is not a riot, but a revolution.”
“It looks like it,” Greeley calmly replied. “It is just what I have expected; and I have no doubt they will hang me; but I want no arms brought into the building.” Then the editor rose from his desk and announced that he was going out for his usual evening meal. “If I can’t eat my dinner when I’m hungry,” he declared, “my life isn’t worth anything to me.” With that, Greeley stepped outside and coolly walked through the milling crowd and safely on to a nearby restaurant, white coat and all.119
Late that night, some 125 employees returned to the paper to await the inevitable attack from the “bloodthirsty vagabonds.” Venturing into the thronged street at one point, Greeley biographer James Parton heard one “bull of a man” declaiming in a distinct Southern accent: “What’s the use of killing the niggers? The niggers haven’t done nothing.” Then, gesturing violently toward the upper floors of the Tribune, the man shouted: “Them are the niggers up there.” Someone hurled a rock toward one of the windows, but it struck a shutter and tumbled harmlessly back to the street. Parton then raced to the nearby City Hall police station and begged for protection. By the time a contingent of five patrolmen ran back with him across the park to the paper’s defense, “stones were flying fast,” shattering the Tribune’s windows. The police tried restraining the mob, but the rioters shoved them aside, rushed forward, and broke into the building’s ground-floor “counting room.” Only when an officer outside fired a gun into the air did the invaders retreat back into the street and disperse, leaving in thei
r wake shards of glass, smashed furniture, scattered papers, and a few smoldering fires. At least they had not reached the editorial rooms upstairs, or found their way down to the printing presses.120
The danger was postponed, but not eliminated. A sudden thunderstorm helped disperse what was left of the mob—“undoubtedly they had a natural dread of water as well as soap and towels,” mocked journalist Charles Congdon.121 But the next day, another menacing crowd assembled in the square, and staff members—they were reporters, after all—learned from a credible source that a second assault on the Tribune would begin soon. Somehow, James Gilmore managed to slip outside and secure an emergency audience with General John Wool, from whom he obtained a permit to secure arms. Gilmore then ferried across the river to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where Admiral Hiram Paulding provided him with wagonloads of “bombshells” to defend the paper. The establishment whose editor had refused weapons the day before now fortified itself with a supply of lethal grenades and a cannon loaded with grapeshot and canister.
When Greeley discovered that, against his express wishes, his newspaper had been turned into an arsenal, he demanded that the “brimstone pills” be removed. “Take ’em away, take ’em away,” he squawked in his high-pitched voice. “I don’t want to kill anybody, and besides they’re a damn sight more likely to go off and kill some of us.” But his staff informed him that the building was now subject to martial law under the command of a Colonel Adams, and that it might help matters if Greeley left the building. “The mob knows he is here,” Adams agreed, “and if he stays it is likely they will attack us.” Sydney Gay ordered a carriage, and finally, after protesting that he could easily take a streetcar home—then glancing out the window and conceding of the mob, “Well, they are a hard-looking set”—Greeley slipped out a side door and departed to safety. Meanwhile, in the erroneous belief that the Tribune editor resided at a town house on Twenty-ninth Street, another mob had stormed the vicinity and nearly torn to shreds a lookalike it mistook for the editor.122 To Gilmore, Greeley showed “a very high order of bravery” that day. “He knew that he was marked out as a special victim by at least ten thousand ruthless ruffians, who, had they laid hands on him, would have given him short shrift and a short rope from the nearest lamp-post; and yet he came and went as usual, and with no regard whatever for his personal safety. He evidently felt that the trial day of his life had come, and had made up his mind to meet it like a man.”123
Tribune correspondent Whitelaw Reid arrived in town just in time to join the ranks of defenders. “Muskets were provided for every employee,” he testified. “The floor of the editorial room was littered with hand grenades, and extra bayonets were lying about on the desks like some new pattern of mammoth pen-holders. Arrangements for pouring a volume of scalding steam into the lungs of anybody attempting to force an entrance had been perfected.”124 Meanwhile, the mob began milling again in the summer heat, as if waiting for a signal or a leader. Suddenly a gang of three times its size materialized out of City Hall Park and joined the surging crowd. Shouted orders were heard, but then, just before the next attack could begin, a large contingent of city police dramatically emerged from the dark and began beating the rioters into submission. From the upstairs windows, a Tribune editor could hear the awful “tap, tap, tap, of the police clubs on the heads of the fugitives.”125 The Tribune had escaped destruction again.
At Times headquarters just north of the Tribune building, Henry Raymond was not about to allow his paper’s gleaming new five-story tower to meet the same fate as the draft office, orphanage, or Tribune counting room. Together with Leonard W. Jerome, one of his principal investors, Raymond took to the second floor, armed with two newfangled Gatling guns he had obtained from the army. Raymond and Jerome pointed them into the street from the northern windows where they could easily be seen throughout Printing House Square, leaving no doubt that the editor would deploy the deadly “revolving cannons” against any rioters who threatened his establishment.
As backup, Raymond ordered several employees to aim rifles in the same direction. Street-level doors were locked shut. Raymond’s newfangled “mitrailleuses” were “capable of one hundred discharges per hour . . . so as to rake Chatham and Centre Streets” in the event of an attack. Unlike “Fort Greeley,” which “barricaded” its windows with “bales of printing paper” for protection, casting the establishment into darkness, the Herald’s Fredric Hudson reported that Raymond ordered the Times building “brilliantly illuminated” so no secret assault could be launched under cover of night. According to at least one eyewitness, Raymond had another useful “weapon” at his disposal: the presence of the New York Daily News’s Democratic editor, Benjamin Wood, who took up a position in the doorway and implored the roving gangs of rioters to spare the New York Times.126 Raymond’s personal involvement helped his building survive unscathed. Later, while regretting what he casually dismissed as the Tribune’s “trifling loss,” Raymond took credit for dispatching some of his own employees to spare Horace Greeley further damage. “We have not always agreed with our neighbor on political policies,” Raymond declared in a show of unity, but “when such an issue is forced upon us journalists, they must make it their common cause.”127
Otherwise, Raymond then “poured a galling fire into the ranks of the mob,” as his earliest biographer put it, not with gunfire, but through a fusillade of editorials that increasingly condemned James Gordon Bennett and other Democratic editors for showing too much tolerance for Governor Seymour and especially the mob. “The Herald characterizes it as the people and the World as the laboring men of the city,” Raymond howled. “It is ineffably infamous.”128
By July 16, a full day before Union troops belatedly arrived in the smoldering city to restore order, it was back to business as usual for the New York newspapers, with Bennett, Greeley, and Raymond resuming their sniping at each other. They even felt safe enough to quarrel over silly issues—whether or not, for example, the Tribune editor had hidden himself away at his favorite eatery during the period of greatest danger, scribbling editorials on greasy menus. Republican editors also debated the extent of their Democratic counterparts’ guilt. For his part, Bennett defiantly wondered whether “Copperhead” or “niggerhead” (Republican) newspapers deserved principal blame for the riots. Bennett could not resist the opportunity to gloat a bit that Greeley had finally tasted the kind of mobbing he had once “proposed for us.”129
The anti-draft riots may have ravaged and embarrassed New York, but at least for a time they showcased the city’s newspapermen at their courageous best. Despite the genuine danger they faced, neither the Times nor the Tribune missed a deadline or postponed an edition. Even as mobs congregated threateningly outside their doors, their reporters continued to fan out through the city to cover the story of the riots. Their presses never stopped humming.
The riots also gave New York’s pictorial weeklies the chance to escape from the shadows cast by the powerful dailies. They were unavoidably late in reporting the event—coverage did not appear until their August 1 issues. But Harper’s Weekly, for one, used the intervening time well to craft a judicious editorial response, and create compelling pictures, which the dailies were neither equipped nor staffed to offer their readers.
In addition to defending conscription as a public duty, Harper’s took exceptional care to caution against condemning the “perversity of the Irish race” for the riots. The weekly took pains to hail the brave Irishmen who helped save the displaced children of the burning Colored Orphan’s Asylum, and heaped praise on Archbishop John Hughes and “the entire Roman Catholic priesthood to a man” for condemning the outbreak. Instead, Harper’s assigned blame where nearly all Republican papers believed it belonged: on “the despicable politicians and their newspaper organs”—Democrats who, they claimed, incited the mob.130 “They denounced Mr. Lincoln as an imbecile tyrant,” the weekly charged. “They denounced the war as a needless, fratricidal, and abolition war. . . . Under these circumstances
,” Harper’s asked, “who can wonder at riots breaking out?” The Democratic press was guilty of nothing less than “malignant partisanship” designed to make “political capital on the government.”131
Most irresistibly of all, Harper’s offered a two-page centerfold adorned with ten woodcut engravings of some of the most grisly scenes of horror—including the lynching and burning of “a Negro in Clarkson Street,” the beatings of policemen, soldiers, and innocent civilians, and prominently, the Charge of the Police at the “Tribune” Office. The weekly may have warned against blanket condemnation of the Irish, but the rioters it depicted falling under the blows of police nightsticks bore the unmistakable physical attributes common in stock caricatures of Irishmen: square-topped plug hats and simian facial features, including bulbous noses reddened by whiskey. Such clichéd and incendiary portraiture did little to support the narrative advanced by the paper, but likely evoked greater interest. To Harper’s readers, who subscribed to the weekly specifically because of its prominent and timely illustrations, pictures spoke infinitely louder than words. By calling for tolerance while visually portraying the Irish as thugs (and the thugs as Irish), Harper’s had it both ways, as it did on most issues of the day. After all, it routinely provided not only topical sketches of the battlefront, but toxic cartoons that just as often lampooned Abraham Lincoln as Jefferson Davis. Appearing to be nonpartisan and offering strong support for the war leavened by frequent pictorial criticism of the president, Harper’s earned a large readership and an even larger legacy.132
Lincoln and the Power of the Press The War for Public Opinion Page 59
