The Devil's Own Work

by Barnet Schecter

  New York City enrollment poster

  Colonel Robert Nugent, in charge of the draft in New York City, knew as an Irishman the strong resentment that was brewing in the community and planned to start the lottery in the outlying districts of the city on Manhattan, and in Queens and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, to prevent civil disorder from engulfing the whole metropolitan area. While this plan avoided the slums at the lower end of Manhattan and the industrial areas of the East Side, from which protesters might emerge, it placed the first drawing at the Ninth District draft office on Third Avenue at Forty-sixth Street—a less densely developed area at the northern edge of the city, which nonetheless contained many tenements and shanties full of hostile residents.13

  Colonel Robert Nugent

  The fully settled area of New York City in 1863 extended up to about Forty-seventh Street. Farther north, "the blocks were masses of rocks with squatter shanties perched here and there on the level spots," one resident recalled. "On Fifth Avenue at 45th Street were great cattle yards . . . Only the foundations of the Catholic Cathedral at 50th Street and 5th Avenue had been built . . . Much of Central Park was still unfinished. There were a few lines of street cars, but most of the travelling was done in stages, which started around the city hall and at Union Square turned in different directions."* The northern reaches of Manhattan also contained clusters of development far older than the rapidly expanding street grid, at villages such as Yorkville, on East 86th Street, and Harlem, on East 125th Street.14

  Born in Ireland, Nugent was active in the Fenian Brotherhood, the main Irish nationalist organization formed in the aftermath of the Great Famine. Revolutionaries exiled after the Rising of 1848 established the group in New York City in 1854 and raised money to fulfill their dream of launching an armed rebellion to liberate Ireland from the British. They believed the Civil War would be a good training ground. Nugent had eagerly recruited troops for the Sixty-ninth Regiment of New York Volunteers. "YOUNG AMERICA AND OLD IRELAND ONE AND INSEPARABLE," declared the recruiting posters for the Sixty-ninth. "The COTTON-LORDS and TRAITOR-ALLIES of England Must Be Put Down!"15

  At Fredricksburg, in December 1862, Nugent had led the Sixty-ninth in the doomed charge against Marye's Heights which decimated the regiment, and he was wounded by a rifle ball in the groin; his pistol shattered from the impact of another ball and saved his life. Transferred back home to recover, Nugent had become acting assistant provost marshal general in April.16 "Colonel Nugent, the recent idol of the Irish, now Provost-Marshal, was cursed beyond measure," the Evening Post reported.17

  Copperhead resistance could not be discounted either. Saturday began with a report to the police that the Knights of the Golden Circle were plotting to take over one of the arsenals in the city. Since the outbreak of the war, the Knights had been most active in the Midwest, especially Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, recruiting northerners for the Confederate army, torching the homes of Union volunteers, and smuggling arms into Missouri for the proslavery guerrillas terrorizing that state.18

  The Knights, a secret organization complete with handshakes and code words for recognizing fellow members, was founded in Cincinnati in 1854 by George Bickley, a quack from Virginia who traveled the country with a suitcase full of paraphernalia for mysterious rituals and established numerous lodges, or "Castles." By 1863, the Knights were said to have some three hundred thousand members, mostly in the Midwest, and it was an open secret that its leaders included outspoken Peace Democrats across the North: James McMasters and Fernando Wood of New York, and Clement Vallandigham and George Pendleton of Ohio.19*

  Police superintendent John Kennedy sent fifteen men to guard the arsenal at Thirty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue, but the attack never materialized. "Many stories have been circulated to the effect that bands, gangs and companies have been organized here and there with the intention of resisting the draft, and that the members are armed and drilled, hold secret meetings and so forth," Greeley's Tribune reported calmly on July 11, "but from all that we can learn, no such organizations exist; and even if they did, they will amount to nothing."20

  A crowd of about 150 people gathered at the Ninth District draft office, and the lottery began at 9 a.m. on Saturday. Superintendent John Kennedy "was on hand and had a large force of police in waiting," even though the department had received no request from Washington to help the provost marshals carry out the draft.21

  Slips of paper, each "rolled tightly and bound with a ring of India-rubber," were placed in a cylindrical drum, rotated by a handle on the side in order to mix the names randomly. The Daily News dubbed it "the wheel of misfortune." A blindfolded clerk pulled the name of the first man "fated to shoulder the musket": William Jones, Forty-ninth Street, near Tenth Avenue. A "suppressed murmur" ran through the crowd inside the office. Then with "considerable merriment" people called out, "How are you?" "Poor Jones," and "Good for Jones."

  The lottery proceeded peacefully, the Herald reported. "The people seemed to take it in more of a jocular than serious mood." When people recognized a name drawn from the wheel, they shouted, "How are you, Brady?" or "How are you, Jones?' followed by "Goodbye, Patrick," or "Goodbye, James." Everything went smoothly, and by 4 p.m. about half of the 2,500-man quota for the district had been drafted. The office closed, and the draft was set to resume on Monday, July 13, at 9 a.m.22

  The draft had also begun peacefully in Boston, Providence, New Haven, and Pittsburgh, among other cities. The New Haven Journal noted that the announcement of the draft and "explanation of the process" had helped relieve much of the public's "rising anxiety." The fact that enrollment officers and provost marshals, blacks and whites, rich and poor, were all "so fortunate as to draw a prize" at the lottery argued for the fairness of the draft and promoted calm among the "very anxious and deeply interested" audience at the draft office, the Pittsburgh Gazette reported.

  However, the Providence Journal pointed out that workingmen who could not afford the three-hundred-dollar exemption would be the ones to actually serve, and their families would immediately become charity cases. "The families of such should be provided for at public expense, and the sooner steps are taken to do this the more cheerfully will men of this class take their places in the ranks, knowing that their wives and little ones will be cared for during their absence," the paper declared. A soldier's pay would "little more than pay the rent of a small tenement."23

  • • •

  By Saturday evening, "there was intense excitement in the neighborhood" around the Ninth District draft office in New York, the Herald reported. The residents showed a "general determination to resist the law" and viewed anyone who favored the draft as "an enemy of the people." The spirit of defiance "ripened on Sunday," after the Herald printed the twelve hundred names drawn in the lottery and people abandoned their churchgoing routines to pore over the list. Angry discussions all over the city focused on "how the rich (made so by a war they sought to make perpetual) were exempted on payment of a nominal amount, which the profits on a roll of shoddy or a few explosive muskets would realize."24

  According to James Gilmore, Greeley's intermediary with Lincoln in 1862 and now a member of the Tribune editorial staff, "throngs of excited men began to crowd the hotels and barrooms" in the area around the Ninth District draft office and were egged on by Copperhead agitators. "Gathering in little knots, they denounced conscription, and openly talked of attacking the draft offices. Mingling among them were men in common, and in some instances shabby, clothing, but whose speech indicated cultivation, and whose hands showed them unused to labor. They advised concert of action, and the gathering of clubs, fence-rails, stones, rusty guns, and every variety of offensive weapon, to be secreted in convenient places, in readiness for a grand outbreak on the morrow."25

  Like Gilmore, George Templeton Strong was convinced that Copperheads were plotting behind the scenes and fomenting a rebellion. He noted snobbishly in his diary on Sunday that the draft had begun: "Demos takes it goodnaturedly thus fa
r, but we shall have trouble before we are through . . . That soulless politician, Seymour, will make trouble if he dare. So will F'nandy Wood, Brooks, Marble, and other reptiles. May they only bring their traitorous necks within the cincture of a legal halter! This draft will be the experimentum crucis to decide whether we have a government among us."26*

  The apparent calm of the previous day's lottery had already unraveled, and it dawned on many observers, including journalist Joel Tyler Headley, that starting the draft right before the Sabbath had been a serious mistake. As Headley pointed out, "To have the list of twelve hundred names that had been drawn read over and commented on all day by men who enlivened their discussion with copious draughts of bad whiskey, especially when most of those drawn were laboring-men or poor mechanics, who were unable to hire a substitute, was like applying fire to gunpowder."27

  Workers gathered in pubs, churches, and on street corners on their one day off. Opponents of the draft suddenly had a list of specific draftees around which to rally their disgruntled friends and families. Women too— wives facing imminent widowhood, and poor women generally—spent the day planning resistance for Monday morning and stockpiling a variety of weapons at numerous depots.28 In a barroom on East Broadway, a former army captain stirred up enthusiastic support when he declared he would rather "blow his own brains out than shoulder the musket in defence of an abolition administration."29

  Volunteer firemen were particularly angry about being drafted because they had long enjoyed exemption from militia service. In the case of one fire company, drafting its men soon proved to be more trouble than it was worth to the government. Peter Masterson was a building contractor and the foreman of volunteer Fire Engine Company No. 33, which included his brothers, John and William; after one of their men's names was drawn on Saturday, they resolved to do something about it.30

  Housed near Fifty-eighth Street and Broadway, their engine and company were known as the "Black Joke," after an Albany sloop that saw distinguished service in the War of 1812, and the firemen were dubbed the "Black Jokers."31Masterson also started several other firehouses in different parts of the city. In the ten years since he had organized the Black Joke, Masterson had also served in the state legislature for two years, and as an alderman for four years, while rising politically within the citywide fire department, becoming an influential trustee of the Benevolent Fund.32

  Masterson's was the second company of this name, the first Black Jokers having been disbanded by city authorities in 1843 for violent clashes with other engine companies and breaking department rules by marching in an election parade. This original group of forty firemen was known as "a pretty hard crowd," always ready for a fight. Two "gigantic Negroes," called "Black Jack" and "Black Joe," served as runners for the company and did chores around the firehouse but were not allowed to bunk there. The company described its engine as being painted a "nigger" black with a gold stripe running all the way around.33

  In 1863, the twenty-four members of the reconstituted Black Joke occupied a spacious three-story brick building with its own telegraph, which made them "the quickest company in the upper districts." They also had the city's first steam-powered fire engine, which the men grudgingly agreed was better than pumping the water by hand.34 However, they were still "roughs," like their predecessors in the 1840s, ready for a "muss" at the slightest provocation from a rival fire company—or a graver summons from the federal government.35They met on Sunday and, with Masterson's approval, vowed to destroy the draft office with the records containing their fellow fireman's name.36

  Peter Masterson

  On Sunday night, an undercover detective telegraphed the police Central Office that he was tailing a Copperhead soapbox orator named John Andrews who was stirring up crowds on the Lower East Side with denunciations of blacks as well as the draft. A lawyer from Virginia who frequented the haunts of New York's thieves and prostitutes, Andrews had become a familiar figure to the police during his four years in the city. Superintendent Kennedy apparently did not regard Andrews as a serious threat, and the police lost track of him later that night.37

  The police and federal authorities remained confident that they could handle any eruption of violence. Kennedy was content to assign a sergeant and twelve men to each of the six draft offices for Monday morning, a routine step called for by the expected presence of any crowd.38 Police captain George W. Walling, who stayed at his Upper West Side station house that night, was the exception: "For my part, I had for several days noticed with great uneasiness the growing discontent among certain classes," he recalled. "Things, I thought, were coming to a head."39

  Democratic newspapers were busy preparing their Monday morning editorials and going to press Sunday night. These were the editorials Horace Greeley later branded "The Torch that Lit the Flame." Manton Marble's World likened Congress to "an oligarchic conspiracy plotting a vast scheme of military servitude" and asserted that the Conscription Act was so oppressive it "could not have been ventured upon in England even in those dark days when the press-gang filled English ships-of-war with slaves, and dimmed the glory of England's noblest naval heroes."40

  Fernando and Benjamin Wood's Daily News denounced "the Inquisition Conscription," charging that the "miscreants at the head of the Government" were using the draft "to kill off" Democratic voters, enfranchise blacks, and remain in power for another four years. "It is a strange perversion of the laws of self-preservation which would compel the white laborer to leave his family destitute and unprotected while he goes forth to free the negro, who, being free, will compete with him in labor . . . Let the laboring population assemble peaceably in mass meeting and express their views upon the subject . . . Let them make it a necessity with the Administration to give up its insane Emancipation scheme. Let them insist that in place of the conscription of white men to serve blacks, we shall have negotiation, compromise, and peace."41

  Rumors of riot were whispered throughout the city and suburbs. "Hints to be careful had come to various private persons during the previous week from servants and others who had a favor for them," according to the Evening Post. "As far off as Yonkers, a gentleman who is connected with the order and law-sustaining wing of the city press, received such an intimation from his Irish cook."42 At about 3 a.m. on Monday, the Tribunes managing editor, Sidney Gay, finished work and left the newspaper's offices at Spruce and Nassau Streets. When he got on the streetcar to head uptown, the driver greeted him: "Stirrin' times, sir. Fa'th an' ye'll have something to talk about to-morrow."

  "How so? What do you mean?"

  "Nothing; only a mob will resist the draft to-morrow, and New York will see the biggest riot in history."43

  *Stages, or stagecoaches, were horse-drawn conveyances that followed fixed routes. Starting in 1832, they were gradually replaced in New York by streetcars, which used horses to pull railroad coaches on rail tracks, producing a smoother ride and less strain on the horses.

  *Vallandigham, deported to the South in May, had made his way to Canada and remained in contact with his supporters in Ohio and Copperhead groups throughout the Midwest.

  *James Brooks owned the Express, which voiced the desire of many New York merchants for an armistice and negotiations to end the war.

  CHAPTER 8

  " Down with the Rich Men!" : The

  New York City Draft Riots Begin

  rs. Hilton said she never saw such creatures, such gaunt-looking savage men and women and even little children armed with brickbats, stones, pokers, shovels and tongs, coalscuttles, and even tin pans and bits of iron," Maria Daly wrote of her friend, whose husband was also a judge. "They passed her house about four o'clock on Monday morning and continued on in a constant stream until nine o'clock. They looked to her, she said, like Germans, and her first thought was that it was some German festival."1 Such was the confusion of an upper-class New York woman when the city's mostly Irish poor took the unusual step of leaving the slums and marching northward through the finest neighborhoods, that she m
istook them for revelers.

  By 6 a.m., when workers usually started their twelve-hour day at factories, shipyards, railroads, and other industries, small groups coming up from the southern end of the island had gathered at several points on the west side and traveled north along Eighth and Ninth Avenues. On the East River waterfront, "some fifty rough and rowdyish-looking fellows were observed . . . prowling along the wharves and picking up recruits," the Evening Post reported. From the squatters' shacks crowding the city's open lots, and the slums the police called "Mackerelville," new marchers quickly swelled their ranks, and crowds of women trailed behind them.*

  "They went on gaining insolence by increase of numbers, until they began to enter the iron-foundries and other places of manual labor," the Evening Post recalled disapprovingly, "and by persuasion and threats, induced the workmen to join them. So they swelled and rolled on."2The crowds that gathered to protest the draft on Monday morning were imposing their own form of conscription.3 They soon enforced a work stoppage—a citywide labor strike that included street crews and other laborers on public works.4 Some rioters would later plead innocence on the grounds that they had been coerced.5

  James Jackson was standing in the yard of his iron foundry on the corner of Second Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, when an employee alerted him to the mob of a hundred men and boys, armed with stones, sticks, and clubs, "hallowing and hooting and making a noise" in front of the factory. Jackson allowed four or five men, including cartman Thomas Fitzsimmons, into the lobby of the building, where they said they "did not wish to injure Mr. Jackson," but demanded that he close the shop until the next day so the workers could help protest the draft. The men "intimated that unless he did so his men would be forced to stop work," one of Jackson's clerks recalled. Some of the employees stopped working immediately, the mob moved on to another factory, and Jackson closed the ironworks within a few hours.6