The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  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 a
dvanced, 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.