The crowds of striking workers mingled with the unemployed and converged on a large vacant lot just east of Central Park and north of Fifty-ninth Street, pouring into it like "living streams," journalist Joel Tyler Headley wrote.7A motley crew of leaders emerged to direct the crowds. Among them were John Andrews, the lawyer from Virginia tailed by the police the previous night; Francis Cusick, an Irish-born stage driver and former policeman; James Whitten, a barber at the Astor House hotel; and Irish workingmen like Patrick Merry, a cellar digger, Patrick Canary, a stonemason, and Henry Wade, a boilermaker. Some Germans were in the crowds too, led by Adam Chairman, an escaped convict, and Andrew Smith, among others. Henry Tilton, an English-born grocer and gardener, was also identified by witnesses as a "ringleader."8
After listening to several speeches, many marchers, like Thomas Fitzsimmons and his group, who wanted a one-day strike, not a crime spree, broke away from the mob.9 The leaders conferred momentarily at 8 a.m., and then the mob, carrying placards painted simply with the words NO DRAFT, set off down Fifth and Sixth jvenues in two columns, which joined after both turned east onto Forty-seventh Street and "heaved tumultuously toward Third Avenue," Headley wrote. The mob consisted of perhaps ten thousand people, he calculated, given that "it filled the broad street from curbstone to curbstone and was moving rapidly" but still "took between twenty and twenty-five minutes . . . to pass a single point."10
The mob's target was the Ninth District draft office, a four-story brick building at Forty-sixth and Third, but some men stopped to cut down telegraph poles with axes stolen from a hardware store, while women pulled up the Fourth Avenue railroad tracks with crowbars. The loss of the poles and tracks threatened to cut off not only the links between the police Central Office and the precincts, established by Mayor Wood in the mid-1850s, but the city's communication with its suburbs and the rest of the country.11
Throughout the morning, the mayor and police reacted with a series of small deployments that were rapidly swept aside by the gathering mobs. Robert Nugent, the federal official in charge of the draft in the city, had only seventy soldiers attached to his office, and his attempt to coordinate with the police and military came too late to be effective.
At about 7:30 a.m. on Monday, Nugent "received intelligence that opposition was to be made" to the draft in the Ninth District. He sent twenty-five troops there and twenty-five more to the state arsenal at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street, in case of trouble at the nearby Eighth District draft office. The remaining twenty men at Nugent's disposal from the army's Invalid Corps—a unit composed of convalescents like himself who were unfit for much more than garrison duty—stood by in their barracks as reinforcements.
According to Nugent, he then went in person to the heads of the police, the army, and the state militia in the city, who promised to send reinforcements to the draft offices and to Nugent's headquarters. On second thought, the commanders, along with Nugent, agreed that both state and federal troops should be sent to the state arsenal. From there, Nugent wrote, "they might be dispatched to any section where they would be most needed, besides protecting the large amount of arms . . . which, once in the hands of the mob, would have rendered them perfectly uncontrollable."12
As law and order broke down, between 8 and 9 a.m., James Crowley, the superintendent of the police telegraph system, began to convey the magnitude of the problem to headquarters. He was on his way downtown when the mob stopped the Third Avenue streetcar he was riding, forced the passengers out, and pushed the car off the track. Crowley noticed the severed telegraph wires in the gutter and gathered them up.
"He is one of the damned operators," the rioters shouted, while Crowley proceeded to coil the wires around a lamppost and ground them, keeping them functional. "Smash him, kill him!" the rioters chanted as they closed in. "Only getting the wires out of your way, boys," Crowley answered, as he slipped away and hurried to a station house at Thirty-fifth Street, where he telegraphed the Central Office.13
With Crowley's alarm, the seriousness of the situation began to dawn on Superintendent Kennedy, but he still did not send enough men. A detail of about sixty Metropolitans was dispatched from the East Fifty-ninth Street station house, and they joined the dozen officers inside the draft office on Third Avenue at Forty-sixth Street. Kennedy also dispatched almost seventy men to the draft office on Broadway at Twenty-ninth Street, where another mob had gathered.14
At 9 a.m., deluged with telegrams warning of trouble around the city, Kennedy telegraphed all of his police stations, including those in Brooklyn, ordering them to call in their reserves and stand by. Thanks to Crowley's efforts, Kennedy had just enough time to contact Manhattan's upper precincts before rioters knocked out the lines.15
Later, Kennedy ordered other detachments to converge on the draft office at Forty-sixth and Third, including the squad at Broadway and Twenty-ninth, which had scattered the mob there, allowing the draft to proceed. Then, out of uniform, and armed only with a bamboo cane, Kennedy set off from headquarters in a buggy to inspect the scene himself. After visiting the arsenal on Thirty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue, he had his driver take him close enough to Forty-sixth and Third that he could approach the draft office on foot.16
The weather that morning was a "deadly muggy sort with a muddy sky and lifeless air," wrote George Templeton Strong, who went up to the Ninth District draft office to see the disturbance.17 Third Avenue for several blocks north and south of Forty-sixth Street was a scene of mounting chaos, fueled by alcohol from nearby bars, which did a brisk business.18 The core of the mob "was concealed by an outside layer of ordinary peaceable lookers-on," but Strong, with unabashed bigotry, calculated that inside there were between five hundred and a thousand of "the lowest Irish day laborers . . . Every brute in the drove was pure Celtic—hod-carrier or loafer."19
"Let's go in boys, stick together and we can lick all the damn police in the city," declared Francis Cusick. Then he recognized the superintendent. "Here comes the son of a bitch Kennedy, let's finish him," shouted Cusick, who struck the superintendent on the chest and shoulder with a large wooden club, knocking him to the sidewalk. Turning to Kennedy's driver, Cusick shouted, "You son of a bitch, I've got you now, and I'll finish you," before beating him unconscious and stealing his coat, pants, pistol, and cash. A third officer, a clerk from headquarters, was also attacked when the mob closed in.
Only of medium height and slim except for his broad shoulders, the sixty-year-old Kennedy was quickly dragged to an embankment and thrown over the side into muddy water on a vacant lot below. He managed to rise, only to be struck down again, kicked, and pummeled. Then he recognized an old acquaintance in the crowd, a Democratic politician from that ward. "John Eagan, save my life!" Kennedy cried out. Eagan stepped in and convinced the mob that Kennedy was dead or would be soon. Kennedy's clerk and driver had recovered enough to flag down a wagon, stretch their chief out in it, and head down to the police Central Office, at 300 Mulberry Street, near Bleecker.20*
According to the disdainful Evening Post, the rioters became ecstatic as rumor spread that the hated Republican superintendent of the Metropolitans was dead. "A sort of war-dance was improvised on the spot and cudgels and curses and heels flew in an ungovernable 'shindig.' "21
Mayor George Opdyke arrived at his City Hall office at 9:45 and proceeded ro duplicate Nugent's efforts, but with far greater hesitation. Opdyke soon received a report which convinced him that "a serious riot was in progress." However, the state's Metropolitan Police Act of 1857 had deprived the mayor of control over the police. That power, along with the authority to call out the militia, had been transferred to the five-member Metropolitan Police Commission—appointed by the state—which in turn appointed the police superintendent. Since the mayors of New York and Brooklyn were given merely ceremonial roles, the commission was dominated by Thomas Acton, the president, and his two Republican colleagues. So at 10 a.m. Opdyke sent a note to Acton.
Opdyke also contacted Major General
Charles Sandford of the state militia and Major General John Wool of the U.S. Army. Apparently hoping that the police would get the riot under control by themselves, the mayor merely asked Wool to hold federal troops "in readiness" and described the developments uptown as "demonstrations" that might get out of hand. However, Sandford arrived at the mayor's office at 10:15 with a report that the police uptown were overwhelmed by the size of the mobs. Opdyke had not yet heard from Commissioner Acton but learned from Sandford that the State Militia Act empowered the mayor to "order out the military" in the event of a riot. Opdyke immediately gave Sandford an order declaring that "a riot exists" and telling him to "suppress it without delay."
Even this was too little, too late. Half the morning had slipped away, and Sandford had a relatively small force at his disposal. Opdyke also worried that some of those militiamen "might, from the semi-political character of the riot, sympathize with the mob," leaving the city with "military strength altogether inadequate for the emergency."22As a Republican, Opdyke was particularly anxious to avoid inflaming the situation with a harsh response, since he had to work with the leaders of the city's Democratic majority every day.23Like many Republicans, Joseph Choate, a lawyer and a cousin of the Gibbons family, was disgusted by the mayor's handling of the crisis. "We were in a very bad way at the outset," Choate scoffed. "Mayor Opdyke has no power and no pluck to use it if he had."24
With an orderly crowd filling the draft office, Provost Marshal Charles Jenkins had set the lottery wheel in motion at the Forty-sixth Street draft office at 10 a.m., and in the next half hour a blindfolded clerk pulled about seventy-five names, which Jenkins read aloud. He recalled, "Everything went on quietly, and I began to hope that no attack would be made." Then Peter Masterson's Black Joke Engine Company arrived with its steam engine and the men dressed in their firefighting gear. A pistol shot rang out like a starting gun, a hail of paving stones crashed through the draft office windows, and the firemen, supported by the crowd, surged forward.
Shouting "Down with the rich men!" the crowd stormed the draft office, setting it on fire and severely injuring several enrolling officers with clubs. "I stepped forward," Jenkins reported, "but was borne back by the mass, and pushed through the back door into the back yard, and took refuge in the next building." Without resorting to their guns, the Metropolitans fought off the rioters, enabling a federal marshal to lock the enrollment records in an iron safe that the rioters were unable to open or remove from the burning building.25
While the bruised and battered policemen escaped from the burning draft office, and the fire spread to other buildings on that block, the mob outside hurled rocks and paving stones at Nugent's fifty convalescent soldiers from the Invalid Corps who had belatedly converged on the scene. A round of blank cartridges did nothing to frighten the mob, so some of the soldiers, panicked and without orders, fired musket balls, which killed or wounded several rioters. Without time to reload, the soldiers were quickly disarmed by the enraged mob, which clubbed two of them to death with their own guns and chased a third to a rocky ledge near the East River and threw him off before dropping boulders on his lifeless body. These first casualties of the draft riots had barely survived the carnage of Civil War battlefields, only to meet their deaths on the Union home front.26
Most of the Invalid Corps troops, however, escaped with varying degrees of injury. John Alcock was chased along Fortieth Street toward Second Avenue, where the mob "took his musket from his hands, and struck him with their fists, with stones, and with sticks, knocking him down, fracturing his skull, and breaking his left arm, and bruising his left side." Prone on the sidewalk, Alcock was kicked by Daniel Conroy, a forty-six-year-old laborer, and Thomas Kiernan, forty, a contractor, both Irish-born residents of the immediate area, who left him bleeding on the sidewalk.
Thomas Maguire, another Irish American, had Alcock carried into his store until the soldier could be evacuated to a hospital. When a few relentless rioters entered and clubbed Alcock on the head, Maguire hid him in the basement, covered in hay, and brought in a doctor to dress his wounds, which had "bled profusely." The police later rescued Alcock with a carriage.27
Soon a second phase of the riots began to unfold, as political protest combined with sabotage of government targets gave way to street crime and looting; attacks on individuals and private property were suddenly tempting in the chaotic atmosphere. On Lexington Avenue just below Forty-fifth Street, the rioters had set their sights on several three-story houses and were throwing cobblestones through the front windows while women and children fled out the back doors. "Then men and small boys appeared at rear windows and began smashing the sashes and blinds and shied out light articles, such as books and crockery, and dropped chairs and mirrors into the back yard," Strong wrote. "The rear fence was demolished and the loafers were seen marching off with portable articles of furniture. And at last a light smoke began to float out of the windows . . . The fury of the low Irish women in that region was noteworthy. Stalwart young vixens and withered old hags were swarming everywhere, all cursing the 'bloody draft' and egging on their men to mischief."28
At 11:30 the six draft offices around the city received orders from Nugent to suspend work and transfer their records to Governors Island to keep them out of the clutches of the mob. Nugent also emptied his headquarters of all papers, weapons, and equipment, he wrote, "as the mob had threatened not only to hang me but destroy the building also."29
Most of the mob surged down Third Avenue, preventing the various reinforcements sent by Kennedy from ever reaching the draft office at Forty-sixth Street. The Metropolitans coming up from the Broadway draft office clashed with the mob at Forty-fourth Street but were outnumbered and forced to retreat. Two more police detachments were similarly beaten in rapid succession and fell back, dragging their fallen comrades with them.
Sergeant Robert McCredie, known as "Fighting Mac," arrived with a fourth squad and was soon joined by a fifth. With fewer than fifty men—those from all five squads who had not yet been wounded—McCredie turned the tide and drove the rioters up to Forty-fifth Street. However, they turned out to be just the vanguard of the mob, and its full weight suddenly pressed forward down Third Avenue while more rioters poured in from the side streets, engulfing the police and scattering them southward again.
All of them were injured; McCredie was chased up the stoop of a building and, in the process of being beaten, rammed through the wooden panels of the front door. He managed to reach the second floor, where a German woman concealed him under a mattress and told his pursuers that he had fled through the window. When the mob torched the building, the woman carried McCredie on her back all the way to Lexington Avenue, where a cab took him to a police station. She had saved his life, but the mob had disabled one of the department's most effective officers.30
While the police were battling the rioters on Third Avenue, clusters of men, women, and children from the city's slums filtered northward and looted hungrily, with few policemen to stop them.31Set in motion by the draft and Democratic denunciations of excessive federal and state power, the metaphor of class warfare—exploited for decades by Democrats like Fernando Wood and Isaiah Rynders to garner immigrant votes—had become a literal, violent eruption, far bigger than any they had provoked before.
When the feed wagon carrying Superintendent Kennedy arrived at the Central Office, Thomas Acton, president of the police commission, happened to be out front. "Around to the station," he ordered the driver, assuming the bruised and mud-covered figure under the burlap sacks was a rioter and should be locked up. When the driver told him it was Kennedy, Acton seethed with anger. Kennedy was brought inside, where a surgeon determined that no bones were broken, and that he could recover at a friend's home instead of in the hospital.32
Following the law, the Metropolitan police commissioners, who had originally appointed Kennedy, stepped in to do his job. One of the three Republican commissioners had gone to the front as a brigadier general of volunteers, and the
second, who lived in Brooklyn, managed the riots there and on Staten Island, while Acton took charge in Manhattan.33"Of a nervous temperament, he was quick and prompt, yet cool and decided, and relentless as death in the discharge of his duty," Headley wrote reverently of Acton. "Holding the views of the first Napoleon respecting mobs, he did not believe in speechmaking to them. His addresses were to be locust clubs and grape-shot."34 A stockbroker, prominent Republican, and founding member of the city's Union League Club, Acton was an unconditional supporter of the Lincoln administration's policies aimed at suppressing dissent and winning the war.35
Most immediate was the problem of the mob's growing strength and cohesion, and apparent intent to cripple if not destroy the city, starting with the communications and transportation infrastructure. Instead of confronting the rioters wherever they roamed and spreading his forces thin, Acton decided to concentrate his reserves—about a thousand men, he hoped—and deploy them rapidly to critical flash points.
Before any telegraph lines were cut, Kennedy had ordered off-duty policemen in all thirty-two precincts to muster at their station houses, so Acton, after dispatching available officers to trouble spots, telegraphed the precincts below Sixtieth Street that could still be reached by wire, summoning their reserves to the Central Office on Mulberry Street.36 Of the department's sixteen hundred patrolmen, almost half were left to protect Brooklyn, West-chester, and Staten Island, while others were unreachable, and a few were kept on guard at each of the station houses. Thus Acton could deploy no more than about eight hundred men at a time, including some fifty officers already at headquarters and in the adjacent precincts.37
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