Most recently, Democrats charged that the Metropolitans had become the instrument of Lincoln's civil rights abuses, arbitrarily arresting political opponents and detaining them without charges in the city's prisons and the dungeons of Fort Lafayette. Moreover, Superintendent Kennedy stood accused of intimidating Democratic voters with the threat of arrest during the fall 1862 elections, for political advantage, not—as he asserted—because they were aliens who had claimed to be exempt from the militia draft.
After Seymour's inauguration on January 1, 1863, his first official act as governor had been to summon the commissioners to Albany for questioning as a prelude to removing them from office. The commissioners, however, refused to appear, on the grounds that the governor had no jurisdiction over them: He was in Albany County, and they would only submit to questioning by the district attorney of New York County. Seymour—a champion of local control—had seen no choice but to give in and drop the matter.20
Horatio Seymour
Even before this showdown, Seymour harbored a deep aversion to New York City, matched by his warm affection for the hinterlands of the state, where he grew up. Seymour was a longtime political ally of the Irish, a friendship sealed by the building of the Erie Canal by Irish laborers in the early 1820s when Seymour was a boy and his father was a state canal commissioner. The father's political connections made for the son's smooth entry into state politics, where his expertise in canal issues kept him at the center of power, leading to his first term as governor.21
Guided by sympathy for his Irish constituents, along with his own racism and conservatism, Seymour reaffirmed his opposition to emancipation and the enlistment of black troops in February 1863 when top Democratic leaders met at Delmonico's Restaurant in New York. In this posh setting, the party chieftains and intellectuals formed a propaganda arm called the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge. Hoping to force a reversal of Lincoln's edict, the organization published pamphlets and scholarly articles defending slavery and predicting dire economic consequences for both sides if it were abolished.22
Manton Marble attended the summit at Delmonico's, and the World continued to be a major part of the anti-emancipation campaign. General George McClellan, dismissed from command a few months earlier, was also on hand. He had moved to New York and was being groomed by Democratic party chairman August Belmont to unseat Lincoln the following year.23
A few weeks later, the city's Republican elite responded to the Copperhead challenge—both from the New York Democracy and from midwestern groups like the Knights of the Golden Circle—by establishing the Union League Club. Describing themselves as members of the "intelligent and prosperous classes," three hundred of the city's top business and professional leaders—including George Templeton Strong, Henry Bellows, and Frederick Law Olmsted— banded together to address the burgeoning problem of "disloyalty" and the Union's inability to gain the upper hand in the war, politically and militarily.24
Olmsted, the designer, with Calvert Vaux, of New York City's Central Park, and a leader of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, envisioned a club for the "true American aristocracy" that would transform New York politically, socially, and architecturally. Harnessing the power of elite citizens loyal to the national government, the club would win over and pacify the proletariat with recreational facilities like Central Park and various forms of cultural enrichment.25
Businessman and philanthropist William Dodge was a member and helped organize the Loyal Publication Society, which churned out almost a million copies of some ninety Unionist pamphlets during the war. The Union League Club also engaged in grassroots political organizing; the magazines Harper's Weekly and later the Nation became the club's instruments of influence. The enlistment of black soldiers in the Union army would soon become one of the club's priorities.26
"Experience has shown that serious defects exist in the militia law, which should be promptly remedied," Stanton had told Congress at the end of 1862. Despite the satisfactory number of men raised, in 1863 the secretary of war remained frustrated by his dependence on the governors and their personnel, their delays, and the overly complicated system with different militia regulations from state to state. Worst of all, from Stanton's perspective, was the nine-month limit on federal service for militia draftees. Keeping the details to himself, while assuring congressional leaders and fellow cabinet members that he would consult with them, Stanton had been developing plans for a uniform, national draft.27
To Lincoln and Stanton's chagrin, the Confederacy had resorted to a centralized draft before the Union, in April 1862. The law required every able-bodied, white male citizen, between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, to serve in the Confederate army for three years. There was no commutation clause, but draftees were allowed to hire substitutes who were not subject to the draft; government officials, workers in essential industries, hospital staff, apothecaries, clergy, and teachers were exempt.
Since the Confederacy was fighting for states' rights, many southerners denounced the national conscription as a violation of their ideals—an abuse of power worthy of the federal government in the North. In some areas, where allegiance to the Confederacy was nil anyway, enrollment officers were forced to retreat, leaving entire counties in the hands of organized draft resisters and deserters.28Nonetheless, bounties and other incentives for volunteering, combined with the draft, had built up the Confederate forces in 1862 to some 450,000 troops.29
Three times that number—some 1.3 million men—had joined the Union forces between the outbreak of the war and the end of February 1863. However, the army's need for men had increased sharply, while the Lincoln administration's prestige hit a new low. The military setbacks of 1862 made local communities reluctant to provide bounty money, which drove down recruitment, while tens of thousands of veterans declined to reenlist. At the same time, the rate of desertion soared: An estimated one hundred thousand men were missing from the Union army at the end of 1862, and by the beginning of 1863 several hundred soldiers were leaving every day.
Some were exploiting the bounty system—taking the advance portion of the money and then "skedaddling"—while others left because the army had not paid them for months, the U.S. Treasury being chronically broke from funding the war. Moreover, a private soldier's meager salary of thirteen dollars per month didn't compare to potential wages on the home front in an inflationary economy, and many deserters hurried back to support their impoverished families.30
The bigger payday on the home front was often illusory, however. While the war boom in the Northeast had created new jobs, real wages had fallen because of inflation, fueled by the federal government's issuing of paper money, dubbed "greenbacks" for their color, as well as by profiteering and shortages of basic commodities. Unskilled workers—many of them Irish Americans, women, and children—were the most vulnerable to inflation's bite. These economic pressures in turn generated racial conflict as the labor movement revived and organized more strikes—on the basis of white solidarity.31 In March 1863, the Irish-American reported that riots between blacks and whites were breaking out everywhere.32
"I seen in the heareld all about the conscripts law," Sergeant Peter Welsh wrote to his wife, Margaret, in New York from an army camp, after reading in the Herald about the nation's first federal draft, approved by Congress on March 2, 1863, and signed by the president the following day. Stanton's plans to centralize the process of manning the armed forces, initiated almost a year earlier, had borne fruit in the final days of the Thirty-seventh Congress, when Republican majorities prevailed against Democratic objections, amendments, and delaying tactics, including an attempt, supported by almost a third of House Republicans, to repeal the three-hundred-dollar clause.33
Unlike the militia law of 1862, which enabled the federal government to make use of troops drafted by the states, the new "Act for Enrolling and Calling Out the National Forces" empowered the War Department to draft men directly for service in the national army. All "able-bodied male citize
ns" between the ages of twenty and thirty-five were required to enroll as potential draftees, as were unmarried men from thirty-six to forty-five years old. While blacks enjoyed few if any of the benefits of citizenship, they were subject to the draft. The law also created the Bureau of the Provost Marshal General within the War Department, and Colonel James Fry was placed at the head of it to administer the draft.34
"I am very glad it has passed," Welsh wrote. "It will bring the people to their senses and the war will either be settled or the skulking blowers at home will have to come out and do their share of the fighting."35 Welsh, whose regiment formed part of the Irish Brigade in the Army of the Potomac, was on the front lines in the war's bloodiest battles. Nonetheless, he was one of many Irish Americans whose fierce devotion to the Union cause never wavered, even during the Irish community's crisis of doubt in 1863, brought on by heavy battlefield losses and the North's new abolition agenda.
Like the Irish Catholics described by Maria Daly, and like most Irish American soldiers, Welsh opposed the abolitionists, whom he called "fanatical nigar worshippers."36 However, in letters to his wife in New York and to his father-in-law in Ireland, Welsh defended his decision to join the army, citing St. Paul and Archbishop Hughes as authorities to prove that the Confederate secession was unjustified, despite abolitionist agitation: "This war with all its evils with all its errors and missmanagement is a war in which the people of all nations have a vital interest, this is the first test of a modern free government in the act of sustaining itself against internal enemys and matured rebellion."37
Sergeant Peter Welsh
Welsh, thirty-three years old, was an Irish Catholic immigrant who had settled in Boston. He and his wife, also Irish, had moved to New York a few years before the war broke out, and he looked for work as a carpenter. When he had trouble getting a job, Welsh went on long drinking binges, the worst of which took place on a visit to Boston, where he had gone by himself to settle a family dispute. Having failed, and incurred his relatives' anger instead, Welsh attempted to drown his frustration in drink over the course of several days. Still in Boston, he awoke penniless and too embarrassed to ask friends or family for help. He ran away to the army on September 3, 1862, enlisting in Company K of the Twenty-eighth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, which soon joined the Irish Brigade.38
Of those who argued that the draft discriminated against the poor, Peter Welsh told his wife that "they could not labor under a more false impression, no conscription could be fairer then the one which is about to be enforced, it would be impossible to frame it to satisfy everyone." He also thought, rather optimistically, that the draft would crush the will of the Confederacy with a display of Union might "and those drafted men may never have to fight a battle."39
In New York, and across the North, fellow Irishmen and the Democratic press were not convinced. New York's Freeman s Journal, edited by Peace Democrat James McMasters, was perhaps the most incendiary, calling the federal draft an "outrage" and challenging the citizenry to prove they were not an "enervated, emasculated and slavish people" by resisting the new law.40 While the New York Times and the Tribune defended the three-hundred-dollar clause, Manton Marble's World declared that "extorted military service" was "repugnant" to a free people, and warned that violent resistance was likely.41
In Michigan, the Detroit Free Press had also been denouncing the administration for months, frightening white readers with visions of racial amalgamation and labor competition from ex-slaves freed by Lincoln's proclamation. The passage of the federal draft, published in the Free Press two days later, on March 5, coincided with labor strikes in Detroit, and the fury of the city's white residents could no longer be contained.42
The following day, a mob incited by the Free Press rained bricks and paving stones on the soldiers escorting William Faulkner, a prisoner of mixed race, from the courthouse where he had just been convicted on flimsy evidence of raping two nine-year-old girls, one black and one white, at his saloon, described by the newspaper as an "amalgamation den." The mob tried to seize "the black fiend, the monster Faulkner," and the troops opened fire, wounding several people and killing a bystander, before getting the prisoner to his jail cell.
"The mob at this moment became enraged," John Warren, a black clergyman, recalled, "and one man, mounting a stump, cried out, 'Gentlem[e]n, I am for killing all the negroes.' 'Kill the negroes, kill the negroes!' shouted five hundred, at the top of their voices. They came down Benden St., frantic, like so many devils."
The rioters attacked the city's black enclave, burning thirty homes and businesses to the ground and leaving some two hundred black residents without a roof over their heads or a penny to their names. The mob destroyed the thriving cooperage owned by Whitney Reynolds. "This brother has truly distinguished himself by the many hands he employed, and the number of barrels he turned out weekly," Warren wrote. "Brother Reynolds was not home at the time of the riot. His hands fought like heroes to save his property. They never left the building until the house was set on fire."
One employee was an escaped slave who was saving up but would never reach his goal of buying his relatives from their master: A rioter split his head open with an ax. While the Reynolds family fled their home, rioters grabbed an infant and threw it on the pavement. Only two deaths were officially recorded, but scores of blacks were injured. Among them was an "honest and upright old man," eighty years old, who had lived in Detroit half his life; the rioters beat him and left him for dead. At eight o'clock that night, the Twenty-seventh Michigan infantry regiment arrived to put down the riot.*
On that same day, labor competition provided the spark for a clash in New York. "This city was disgraced yesterday by a mob," Greeley's Tribune declared on March 6 and quickly revealed the paper's bias. "A few unoffending colored laborers on the wharves were suddenly attacked by two or three hundred vagabond Irishmen." The blacks defended themselves with pistols, wounding some of the Irishmen before the police arrived. According to the Tribune, "The rioters made a desperate attack on [the police], endeavoring to seize and lynch a negro who had been arrested for his own safety." The Tribune viewed the rioting as "the natural climax" of a campaign in the Democratic press to spread "malignant falsehoods . . . that white men were to be cheated out of work by an immigration of negroes."43
In fact, the Irish were again flooding into northern cities, driven from Ireland by a famine comparable to the Great Famine of 1845—52. Irish immigration increased in 1863, to more than three times the average of the previous two years.44The poor and working classes plunged into new depths of squalor as homelessness and overcrowding increased, driven by a decline in housing construction. In New York City, the proliferation of industrial and commercial buildings ate up residential space downtown.45
During the Civil War, before landfill further expanded its shores, Manhattan had an area of about thirty-four square miles, including its parks. However, unlike large mainland cities such as Philadelphia and London, which had room to expand, New York was confined to the island and concentrated at its southern tip. While businesses and the wealthier workforce of Manhattan could settle on the New Jersey and Long Island shores, working-class New Yorkers had to live right next to the factories and docks that employed them. On an island lacking bridges and tunnels and efficient transit systems, the poor could not afford to commute; moreover, they had to be ready at the factory gates to scramble for work, since employers hired them and laid them off as needed.46
Of New York's one million people in the mid-1860s, at least half were poor or working-class. The city, both residential and commercial, was concentrated on the eight square miles of Lower Manhattan—less than a quarter of the island—and the poor, numbering five hundred thousand, were packed into a quarter of that area, about two square miles. The tenements around a single courtyard contained as many as a thousand people, while three city blocks of tenements housed more people than all of Fifth Avenue.47
Wealthy New Yorkers moved uptown, where land w
as selling fast. Immigrants who settled into some of the worst slums on Earth, in Manhattan's lower wards below Canal Street, were moving into the same town houses, mansions, and commercial buildings that the rich had fled, but landlords had subdivided these properties, along with tenements, into dark, airless "suites" in order to maximize occupancy. Five Points was the city's worst slum, where half a dozen people—men, women, and children, both black and white— sometimes lived together in a single dank basement room with inches of dirt on the floor and green slime covering the walls. Walt Whitman called the city's housing conditions a "fertile hotbed for evils the most enormous."48
In the absence of zoning, foul-smelling industries were crowded in with the tenement dwellers. Cattle, pigs, and sheep were regularly driven through the streets to the city's two hundred slaughterhouses. In addition to "hundreds of uncleaned stables" and "immense manure heaps," health inspectors told of "fat-boiling, entrails-cleansing, and tripe-curing establishments, which poison the air" for blocks.49 A tenant in the Fourth Ward* complained that "on a piece of ground 240 feet by 150, there are 20 tenant houses, occupied by 111 families, 5 stables, a large soap and candle factory, and a tan-yard, the receptacle of green-hides. The filth and stench of this locality are beyond any power of description."50
Waste from these dwellings and factories—including blood and offal from the slaughterhouses—was generally placed in garbage boxes out front or simply dumped in the streets, "covering their surface, filling the gutters [and] obstructing the sewer culverts," wrote one inspector. Children playing in the street floated paper boats on the dark red overflow in the gutters and used it to paint their faces. The stench of butcher shops with barrels of putrefied offal destined to become sausage skins also filled the air.
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