The Epic of New York City

by Edward Robb Ellis

  Thursday morning, in a proclamation published in the newspapers, the mayor urged all citizens to open their stores and factories and go back to work. Most streetcar and omnibus lines resumed operations. However, a gunboat still stood guard at the foot of Wall Street.

  Thursday afternoon, as the incipient revolution flickered and faded, the city was plastered with signs bearing an announcement from Archbishop Hughes. He said, “To the men of New York, who are now called in many of the papers rioters: Men! I am not able, owing to the rheumatism in my limbs, to visit you; but that is not a reason why you should not pay me a visit in your whole strength. Come, then, tomorrow at two o’clock, to my residence, northwest corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street. I shall have a speech prepared for you.” The archbishop had moved uptown from Mulberry Street.

  Thursday evening the last sharp clash took place near Gramercy Park, where regular solders roughed up rioters who were looting fine homes. Soldiers from West Point reinforced the regulars already thrown into the city. As the thud and cadence of ever more marching men sounded in streets, rowdies sullenly retired to their dirty dens. By midnight on Thursday peace had been restored, but bitterness lingered. G. T. Strong wrote: “Never knew exasperation so intense, unqualified, and general as that which prevails against these rioters and the politic knaves who are supposed to have set them going, Governor Seymour not excepted. Men who voted for him mention the fact with contrition and self-abasement, and the Democratic party is at discount with all the people I meet.”

  Friday morning the New York Times snapped: “The Express is a very curious journal. It ‘begs’ and ‘implores’ us to ‘hush up’ the statement that the President has not ordered the draft suspended. . . . We prefer, for our own part, to tell the truth and shame the Express. The draft itself ought not and must not be abandoned.” Lincoln had overridden lesser federal officials who had called off the draft. The thirteen regiments of regulars now on duty in the city remained until the draft was resumed on August 19. Then it went off peaceably.

  At 11 A.M. on Friday 4,000 persons gathered in front of the home of Archbishop Hughes. He had spent eight months in Europe as Lincoln’s personal representative, successfully setting forth the Union’s cause in France, Italy and Ireland. Now sixty-six years old and a sick man only six months from death, the archbishop tottered out onto a balcony and sat down in a chair. He wore a purple robe and other insignia of his high ecclesiastical office. He told the throng:

  I have been hurt by the reports that you are rioters. You cannot imagine that I could hear those things without being pained grievously. Is there not some way by which you can stop these proceedings and support the laws, of which none have been enacted against you as Irishmen and Catholics? . . . Would it not be better for you to retire quietly—not to give up your principles or convictions, but to keep out of the crowd where immortal souls are launched into eternity, and, at all events, get into no trouble till you are at home? . . . When these so-called riots are over, and the blame is justly laid on Irish Catholics, I wish you to tell me in what country I could claim to be born—

  Came a clamor of voices: “Ireland!” The archbishop went on:

  Yes, but what shall I say if these stories be true? Ireland—that never committed a single act of cruelty until she was oppressed! Ireland—that has been the mother of heroes and poets, but never the mother of cowards! I thank you for your kindness, and I hope nothing will occur till you return home, and if, by chance, as you go thither, you should meet a police officer or a military man, why, just—look at him.

  Archbishop Hughes had not spoken until five days after the riots had begun. According to Joel T. Headley, a historian and former secretary of state for New York: “The address was well enough, but it came too late to be of any service. It might have saved lives and much destruction had it been delivered two days before, but now it was like the bombardment of a fortress after it had surrendered—a mere waste of ammunition. The fight was over, and to use his own not very refined illustration, he ‘spak’ too late.”

  The Draft Riots of July, 1863, stand as the most brutal, tragic, and shameful episode in the entire history of New York City. Politicians encouraged mob violence. Law and order broke down. Mobs seized control of America’s largest city. Innocents were tortured and slaughtered. The Union army was weakened.

  No one will ever know exactly how many people were killed. The New York Post said that the bodies of rioters were boated across the East River and buried secretly at night. Governor Seymour, who tried to minimize the tragedy, told state legislators that “more than a thousand” civilians, policemen, and soldiers had been slain. Police Superintendent Kennedy, after recovering from his injuries, told G. T. Strong that 1,155 persons had been killed—not counting those smuggled to their graves. Social historian Herbert Asbury wrote that “conservative estimates placed the total at two thousand killed and about eight thousand wounded, a vast majority of whom were rioters.” Four days of rioting in New York City produced casualties numbering almost half the total of Americans killed in the American Revolution, just about as many as perished in the War of 1812, and more than all the battle deaths in the Mexican War.

  More than 100 buildings were burned down, and about 200 others were damaged and looted. The property loss has been estimated variously at from $1,500,000 to $5,000,000. Business suffered in another way, too, for of the thousands who fled the city, many did not return for several months.

  The federal government investigated but took no other action. The identity of the men who planned and led the riots was never disclosed. Of the 50,000 to 70,000 men and women who had taken an active part in the insurrection, only 19 were tried and convicted. None was a ringleader. The 19 men got an average of 5 years each in jail. Governor Seymour, on the other hand, tried but failed to remove police commissioners Acton and Bergen, who had done all in their power to quell the uprising.

  Carl Sandburg wrote: “So delicate and combustible was the subject that neither party cared to go into details about those New York riots, the Democrats because their record was so lawless and shameful, the Republicans because they were still conducting the draft over the country.” Perhaps the most trenchant judgment was made by George Templeton Strong: “This is a nice town to call itself a centre of civilization!”

  Chapter 25

  CONFEDERATES TRY TO BURN DOWN NEW YORK

  THE IMPACT of the Civil War on the city was varied and colorful. When hostilities began, New York was suffering from a recession. Scores of firms went bankrupt, and thousands of men were thrown out of work. Employers took advantage of the labor surplus to cut wages from an average of $1.25 to 85 cents a day. Women were paid only $1 to $3 a week. At the same time Arnold Constable & Company sold lace at $1,000 a yard, lace parasols at $500 each, and shawls at $1,500.

  By the fall of 1861 the recession had ended, and the city was prospering as never before. But it was a selective prosperity. Wages lagged behind price rises. Workers, plunged into even greater poverty, organized unions and walked off jobs. Newspaper publishers broke a strike by the printers’ union. Streetcar drivers lost their bid for an 11-hour working day. For a second time war increased Cornelius Vanderbilt’s fortune; he chartered his fleet of ships to the federal government. Cotton, once the chief export from New York, fell off to a trickle. On the other hand, torrents of wheat left Manhattan docks for England. Officers of a Russian fleet anchored here donated $4,760 to buy fuel for the poor. But William B. Astor raised his rents 30 percent.

  Corruption fell like a leper’s shadow on the city, as well as on the rest of the country. Lincoln sighed that “few things are so troublesome to the government as the fierceness with which profits in trading are sought.” The New York Tribune advocated the gallows for New York profiteers who sold the army rotten blankets and “rusty and putrid pork.” Mayor Opdyke made a fortune as a secret partner in a munitions firm. Edwin D. Morgan, governor of New York State when war broke out, was a brother-in-law of Secretary of the Nav
y Gideon Welles, of Connecticut. Welles gave Morgan permission to buy ships for the navy at a 2.5 percent commission, and within a few months Morgan had profited by $90,000. The House Select Committee on Government Contracts said, “Worse than traitors in arms are the men pretending loyalty to the flag, who feast and fatten on the misfortune of the nation, while patriot blood is crimsoning the plains of the South, and bodies of their countrymen are mouldering in the dust.”

  The city’s social fabric was torn by the excitement of the times, the grief of separation and death, easy money, and increased tension between rich and poor. Morals degenerated. Broadway teemed with women of easy virtue. Saloons were crowded. Luxury shops and restaurants catered to the new rich. Men wore diamond buttons on their waistcoats, and women powdered their hair with gold and silver dust. The Herald estimated that an average of $30,000 was spent in the city each night just for entertainment—or a third more than in Paris. After attending The Follies of a Night to raise money for army relief, G. T. Strong mourned in his diary that “the spectacle of lavish luxury tonight was a little suggestive of fiddling while Rome is in full blaze at its corners.”

  Far from this revelry and graft, Billy Yank fought on and on until, by the autumn of 1864, the South was losing the war and knew it. Union forces controlled the Mississippi, General Lee had failed in his second attempt to invade the North, General William T. Sherman’s army had captured Atlanta, and the South’s resources were about exhausted. In a spirit of desperation and vengeance the Confederates tried to burn down New York City.

  This plot had the approval of Judah P. Benjamin, successively the Confederacy’s attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state. Already he had underground agents in Canada just across the border from New York State. They raided Union territory, tried to free Rebel prisoners, and encouraged rebellion in the North by Southern sympathizers. The Canadian-based Rebel who masterminded the scheme to incinerate New York City was Jacob Thompson, former U.S. Senator from Mississippi and onetime Secretary of the Interior in President Buchanan’s Cabinet.

  Benjamin gave $300,000 to Thompson, who slipped part of the sum to members of the Sons of Liberty, a secret society of treasonable Northerners and an offshoot of the Knights of the Golden Circle. Thompson heard that in New York City alone 20,000 persons were ripe for revolt against the Lincoln administration. He decided to strike on November 8, election day. Abraham Lincoln, the Republican President, would be running against former General George B. McClellan, the Democratic candidate. More New Yorkers were against Lincoln than for him.

  With the development of the plot against New York, messages were carried between the Confederate capital, at Richmond, Virginia, and the Rebel base of operations at St. Catharines, a Canadian town northwest of Niagara Falls. Thompson was unaware that his principal courier was a double spy whose loyalty lay with the North. All the dispatches he carried were copied and sent to Washington so that even Lincoln knew of the conspiracy against New York. On November 2 Secretary of State William H. Seward sent a telegram to Charles Godfrey Gunther, an independent Democrat who had been elected mayor of New York on December 1, 1863. Seward warned him to beware of a scheme to burn New York on or about November 8. The mayor reported this to Police Superintendent Kennedy and to General John A. Dix, who commanded the Department of the East, with headquarters in New York City. Although both men were skeptical, they alerted their subordinates.

  The day before the election General Benjamin F. Butler arrived here at the head of 7,000 to 10,000 troops. Washington officials remembered all too well the disgraceful Draft Riots. Aware of the anti-Lincoln feeling in New York, they anticipated election disorders. Meantime, a hitch developed in Thompson’s plans, causing him to postpone his undercover strike against the city. Election day came and went without much trouble. Lincoln was reelected, but in New York City he lost to McClellan—78,746 to 36,673.

  Thompson now picked eight daring young men for the fire raid on New York. Their leader was Lieutenant Colonel Robert Martin of the Confederacy’s Tenth Kentucky Cavalry. He was tall and slender, his swarthy hawklike face bearing the stamp of resolution. Disguised as civilians and using fictitious names, the eight Rebel soldiers slipped into New York from Canada. Upon reaching this city, they made contact with local plotters, using their homes and stores as meeting places.

  Federal Secret Service agents, alerted by the Union’s double spy, trailed the arsonists to the city and kept them under observation. However, the Rebels acted so innocently that the federal men became convinced that they were on the wrong trail. The eight young men heard a sermon by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, attended a lecture given by humorist Artemus Ward, enjoyed the theater, and in general conducted themselves blamelessly. The Union agents on their trail must have been rather stupid; otherwise, they would have traced the Rebels to suspicious meetings.

  As days passed with no action taken, the local co-conspirators began to get nervous. At last they tried to persuade the Confederate spies not to burn down the city. But on November 15 General Sherman destroyed Atlanta’s military resources and began his spectacular march to the sea. When Confederate Colonel Martin and his seven picked men read New York newspaper articles praising Sherman’s gutting of Atlanta and heard rejoicing on the sidewalks of New York, they bitterly resolved to go ahead with their plan despite the mounting reluctance of their local hosts.

  Second in command to Martin was Confederate Lieutenant John Headley of Kentucky. Headley later wrote an account of this episode, and because of this we can follow him step by step that fateful day of Friday, November 25, 1864.

  A New York chemist who sympathized with the South made a self-igniting fire bomb, which the Rebel agents called Greek fire. Consisting of turpentine, phosphorus, and rosin, the liquid was supposed to burst into flame when exposed to air. It was poured into bottles, and each bottle was wrapped in paper. At 6 P.M. that Friday the eight men met in a secret cottage and were given ten bottles apiece. They stuffed them into their coat pockets.

  Two days earlier the conspirators had registered at various hotels throughout the city. Each man had signed in at several different hotels. For example, Headley had taken rooms in the Astor House, the City Hotel, the Everett House, and the United States Hotel. The Rebels planned to set as many fires as possible at about the same time, making conditions as difficult as possible for the city’s volunteer firemen.

  At 7:20 o’clock that Friday evening Headley walked into the lobby of the Astor, where he was registered as W. L. Haines of Ohio. From the desk clerk he got the key to Room 204 and sauntered to his quarters. Once inside the room he lighted the gas jet against the autumn twilight. Then he pulled the blankets and sheets off his bed and loosely draped them on the headboard. Next, he piled the chairs, bureau drawers, and wooden washstand on top of the bed. Around these he stuffed newspapers. Suddenly he reflected that he did not know how quickly his fire bomb would work or if it would make any noise. To be on the safe side, he unlocked his door and put the key on the outside so that he could make a fast getaway. Out of one coat pocket he drew a bottle, carefully uncorked it, and then spilled the fluid on the rubbish. With a soft whoosh! the liquid fluttered into flame, and the entire bed was ablaze before Headley could get out of the room.

  He locked the door, strolled down the hall, descended the stairs to the lobby, left his key with the desk clerk, and sauntered out onto Broadway. Then he walked to the City Hotel, where he was registered under another alias, and repeated the performance. Having left the City Hotel, he headed toward the Everett House, glancing toward the Astor as he strode along. A bright glare lighted up the room he had occupied there, but as yet no alarm had been given. Next, Headley set fire to his Everett House room. He had just started for the United States Hotel when fire bells began clanging throughout the city. That evening G. T. Strong was attending a meeting of the Sanitary Commission, and although he heard the Calvary Church bell toll mournfully, he didn’t know at first what this signified.

  Headl
ey now touched off a fourth fire in his room at the United States Hotel. All had gone according to plan, he felt, but as he left his key with the desk clerk, he thought that the man glanced at him curiously. In that moment Headley remembered something. Each time he had registered at a hotel he had carried a black canvas bag, because it would have looked suspicious to seek lodgings without luggage. But each of his four bags was empty. Had this been discovered by the clerk at the United States Hotel? Well, it was too late to worry now.

  As Headley strolled back onto Broadway, it sounded to him as though a hundred bells were ringing, and he saw great crowds gathering in the street. By the City Hall clock he noted that the time was 9:15. Eager to learn how his first blaze was doing, he walked back toward the Astor. No panic was to be seen there, but to Headley’s surprise, a horde of shrieking people poured from Barnum’s museum across the street. The plot had not included firing the museum.

  Headley couldn’t tarry because his job was still not done. He walked south on Broadway and turned west toward the Hudson River waterfront. Tied up there were ships and barges of every kind. Having used four bottles of Greek fire in his four hotels, Headley had six left. Skulking from one dark corner to another, he pulled these bottles out of his pockets, one by one, and threw them here and there among the vessels. All touched off fires. One struck a barge loaded with bales of hay, making an especially spectacular blaze.

  Leaving that part of the riverfront in flames, Headley now dodged back to Broadway and again walked to City Hall. Crowds clustered about the flame-scalloped hotels and Barnum’s museum. Having threaded his way through the unsuspecting multitude, the Confederate spy boarded a horsecar heading north. At the corner of the Bowery and Prince Street he swung off the vehicle to see what had happened at the Metropolitan Hotel. It was burning. Headley had walked only half a block when he recognized a man in front of him as Robert Kennedy, one of his associates. Just for the fun of it, Headley closed in behind Kennedy and slapped him on the shoulder. In a flash, Kennedy squatted, went for his gun, and whirled around. Headley laughed just in time, and Kennedy recognized him. Kennedy took his hand from his pistol and chortled that he ought to shoot Headley for giving him such a scare. Then, standing there on the Bowery, the Rebels exchanged stories of their adventures.