Fortunately for Acton, Carpenter's route immediately brought him face-to-face with the throng. When the police turned onto lower Broadway, the sea of rioters "armed with clubs, pitchforks, iron bars, and some with guns and pistols" was only a block away and filled the avenue, "far as the eye could reach," Headley wrote. The marchers in front carried a huge board bearing the words NO DRAFT. The sky was darkened by black smoke from the numerous houses they had torched along their route. "Pedestrians fled down the side streets, stores were hastily closed, stages vanished, and [the rioters] had the street to themselves," according to Headley.26 The marchers stopped in front of Lafarge House, but the police did not give the rioters time to attack the many black waiters employed there.27
Carpenter quickly realized that he could not allow the battle to take place on the narrow side streets, where the police would be penned in and trampled by the mob. He sent a flanking party of fifty men up each of the parallel side streets on the left and right of the mob as far as Seventh Street. When they were in place, he shouted, "By the right flank Company front, double-quick, CHARGE!" With his remaining men, Carpenter pressed forward, exhorting them to take no prisoners. After he felled a gigantic rioter at the head of the procession in single combat, the well-disciplined policemen closing in from three sides were able to disperse the mob by clubbing them relentlessly with sometimes lethal blows, Headley wrote. "For a few minutes nothing was heard but the heavy thud of clubs falling on human skulls, thick and fast as hail stones upon a window pane."28
As the rioters in front tried to turn and flee, they were trapped by the crowd behind them which still pressed forward, until the police attacked from the sides. The sea of rioters heaved back and forth up and down Broadway and against the buildings that hemmed it in. As the marchers tried to escape through the side streets, the police were waiting to strike them down. When it was all over, "Broadway looked like a field of battle, for the pavement was strewn thick with bleeding, prostrate forms," Headley wrote. Carpenter left the rioters to care for their wounded and withdrew to assist his own. He then proceeded up Broadway toward the mayor's house on Fourteenth Street.29
Strolling along Fourteenth Street at that moment were Horace Greeley's friend and biographer, James Parton, and his wife, who had just reached Fifth Avenue when they were nearly struck by a large stone hurled at a black man galloping by on horseback.30It had been thrown by one of about two hundred rioters "streaming down Fifth Avenue," a loose column, about a quarter of a mile long, of "ill-dressed and ill-favored men and boys, each carrying a long stick or piece of board, and one or two of them a rusty musket," Parton recalled. On seeing him, one of the rioters shouted, "There's a three-hundred-dollar fellow," but did not attack.
"I had lived in New York from childhood, and supposed myself acquainted with the various classes of inhabitants," Parton noted. "But I did not recognize that crowd." They were not dressed like "laborers or mechanics," and he guessed they might be "dock-thieves, plunderers of shipyards, and stealers of old iron and copper." Fury at class discrimination, coupled with the anarchy of the riots, had brought into broad daylight the scavengers, the deepest layer of the city's underclass that normally scrambled for survival invisibly, in the slums and in the dark of night.
Parton waited for the column to pass before asking a straggler where the mob was headed. "To the Tribune office," he replied. Indeed, the mob soon began singing, "We'll hang old Greeley to a sour apple tree!"—to the tune of the abolitionist song "John Brown's Body."31Parton and his wife were then about a mile and a half from the Tribune building on Printing House Square, opposite City Hall Park, and hoped he could get there before the mob by catching an omnibus down Broadway, just a block or two away.
However, "the omnibuses being full," Parton wrote, "I strode on at a great pace down-town, and thus had the exquisite satisfaction of seeing that crew of villains put to flight near the corner of Tenth Street." The Fifth Avenue mob that had passed Parton and his wife on their way to the Tribune had turned onto Broadway and run head-on into Carpenter's patrolmen, fresh from their victory at Bleecker Street and on their way uptown to Opdyke's house. A minute later the mob had scattered, leaving only one wounded man on Broadway. Parton recalled: "[The rioter] staggered into a drug store as I got into an omnibus. He was evidently in a damaged condition about the head, and his face was covered with blood."
Carpenter found no disturbance at the mayor's house and marched his men back to headquarters. However, between 4 and 5 p.m., roughly from the time Carpenter left the Central Office until he returned, clashes had broken out all over the city, with indications that the campaign against blacks had grown to include all prominent abolitionists.
The Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, being both black and a radical abolitionist, was a particular target, and rioters charged down Thirteenth Street, where he lived, calling his name. Llowever, his daughter had cut down the nameplate on the door with an ax.32 The Reverend James Massie, a British abolitionist touring the United States, was scheduled to give a lecture to hundreds of parishioners at Garnet's church on Monday evening. Unable to find a streetcar, Massie and his companion walked down Broadway to Shiloh Presbyterian Church, only to find the premises in total darkness, "an instance of forethought which greatly relieved us," Massie recalled. "We ultimately found the sexton, who did not at first recognize us, and with great reluctance he informed us where Mr. Garnet could be seen." Massie found Garnet sitting in the darkened parlor of his home with four friends, one of whom had barely escaped the mobs. They braced themselves for "the events of the evening," Massie wrote, "dreading every falling footstep which seemed to approach the door."33
The leader of a large congregation, and of the black community nationally, Garnet chose not to surrender his life by defending Shiloh Church with a shotgun as he would have in his youth. Someone, he knew, would have to care for the thousands of black victims in the riots' aftermath, and to answer the call of Lord Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which Garnet often quoted to African Americans: "Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not /Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?"34
• • •
While James Parton was rushing down to the Tribune building, John Andrews, the lawyer from Virginia, had taken James Whitten's place at the head of the mob there and was giving another rousing speech while shaking his fists at the newspaper's staff looking down from the windows of the editorial offices on the fourth floor. "Down with the Tribune!" the crowd responded. "Down with the old white coat that thinks a naygar as good as an Irishman!"35
Greeley's trademark coat, a bleached white duster, was left over from the country preacher persona he had cultivated earlier in his career. Amid the well-dressed urban gentlemen of Park Row, he had shuffled along in farmer's boots and a hat with a wide, floppy brim, sometimes carrying a basket to do his marketing, his pockets always stuffed with articles, correspondence, and other papers. The disheveled, absentminded look, the necktie askew, eyeglasses slipping down his nose, piqued readers' curiosity about the eccentric editor and promoted the unpretentious, straight-talking style to be found in his Tribune.
Sidney Gay, the Tribunes managing editor, who had risen at nine that morning and returned to the offices, confronted Greeley, who could usually be found in his cluttered, musty office on the third floor, bent myopically over his work, Graham crackers and milk at his elbow. "The authorities have taken no steps for our defence," Gay exclaimed. "The Evening Post has armed its building; we must do the same if it is to be saved. This is not a riot, but a revolution."
"It looks like it," Greeley replied. "It is just what I have expected, and I have no doubt they will hang me; but I want no arms brought into the building."
Editorial writer Charles Congdon joined Gay in urging Greeley to leave the building quietly by a back door and flee the city. Instead, Greeley insisted on going out the front and sticking to his daily routine. "If I can't eat my dinner when I'm hungry, my life isn't worth anything to me," he declared. Putting on his
hat, Greeley walked out into the street, accompanied by a colleague from another newspaper who had stopped in to see him. Arm in arm, the two men made their way calmly through the mass of rioters and into Windust's Restaurant on the corner of Park Row and Ann Street. After dinner, according to the Tribune, Greeley "at once took a carriage thence to his lodging in broad daylight and with no sort of concealment or disguise."36
A little after 5 p.m., Sidney Gay set off in search of Mayor Opdyke and a promise of police protection for the Tribune, and James Parton arrived to find the five-story building completely defenseless. All the windows and doors were open, and the offices empty, since both editors and reporters had fanned out across the city to cover the riot. James Gilmore arrived at the same time, and both men went in to see the publisher, Samuel Sinclair, who informed them of Greeley's instruction that no firearms be brought into the building. Gilmore recalled that he and Parton decided to "arm the building on our own responsibility," since "a blow aimed at the Tribune was aimed equally at free speech."37
Their first stop was the police Central Office, where they were promised a squad of one hundred men to guard the Tribune building. Next they proceeded to General Wool's headquarters at the St. Nicholas Hotel on Broadway at Spring Street. There they found the general and his staff, along with Mayor Opdyke, and Gilmore persuaded them to issue an order for one hundred muskets and a supply of ammunition that he could present at Governors Island.38
"I had mounted the top of an omnibus, and made my way with all possible speed to the Battery," Gilmore recalled. "The route was obstructed with vehicles, and it was past seven o'clock before I reached the South Ferry." He could not get across the channel to Governors Island, however, because all of the boatmen had left the waterfront, "probably to reinforce the mob." Gilmore searched the docks and finally found a pilot, "an old longshoreman, in a ragged tarpaulin and greasy trousers, quietly smoking a pipe" and leaning against the rail of a schooner.
"Old man," Gilmore said, "I have a ten-dollar greenback in my pocket that is yours, if you will jump into that boat and row me at once to Governor's Island."
"Can't do it sir," the man replied. "The captain is away. Couldn't do it for ten times the money; but you can get a boat at the Battery."
"Well, come along and show me where. I'll pay you well for your trouble."
Gilmore struggled to keep up with the spry old man, who led him to the Battery, where they found several boats docked and not a soul in sight. "In a very few minutes," Gilmore wrote, "I was seated in the stern of a boat, with my feet ankle-deep in water, and the old man was pushing the leaky craft out into the river."39
*James McCune Smith was away from the asylum due to illness.
*At Wall and Broad Streets, today the building is the Federal Hall National Memorial.
CHAPTER 10
Monday Night: "The Fiery Nucleus
of the Entire Riot
illiam Jones, a black cartman, went out to buy a loaf of bread in the wrong place at the wrong time: Clarkson Street on Manhattan's Lower West Side, Monday evening, a little after 6 p.m. He found himself in the middle of a wild, hideous chase. Three black men walking home from work along Varick Street had been set upon by an Irish bricklayer and two accomplices lurking in a liquor store. Two of the blacks managed to escape, while the attackers and a growing mob of men and boys closed in on the third man, chanting, "Kill the nigger!" and "Kill the black son of a bitch!" They overtook their quarry a few times, kicking and beating him, but each time he rose and fled, making his final escape at Clarkson Street by shooting the bricklayer with a pistol. The enraged mob grabbed William Jones, who was heading home with his bread.l
They beat him unconscious and then "hung him from one of the trees that shade the sidewalk by St. John's Cemetery," Harpers Weekly reported. "The fiends did not stop there, however. Procuring long sticks, they tied rags and straw to the ends of them, and with these torches they danced around their victim, setting fire to his clothes, and burning him almost to a cinder." The atrocity took place "within ten feet of consecrated ground," Harpers lamented, "where the white headstones of the cemetery are seen gleaming through the wooden railing."2
The rioters' effort to purge the city of its black residents continued into the evening and soon overwhelmed the police. "Can't you send five or ten men here?" the Eighth Precinct telegraphed the Central Office at 6 p.m.* "They are driving all the niggers out of the ward, as soon as they show on the street." A little before 7 p.m., the Eighteenth Precinct station house at Third Avenue and Twenty-second Street reported that the mob controlled the surrounding streets. The Fourth Precinct wrote: "Station house being stoned. Muskets in use."† An hour later, it warned that "colored" boardinghouses were being robbed and burned, and that the police "have not force enough to prevent it." Suddenly, the telegraph line was cut.3
After Gilmore headed down to South Ferry, James Parton had gone back to the Tribune office, arriving there at about 7 p.m. "The appearance of the neighborhood had changed," Parton recalled.4 "The office was closed, and the shutters were up. A large number of people were in the open space in front of it, talking in groups, but not in a loud or excited manner. Not a policeman was to be seen." Only two or three employees were in the building, and they had heard nothing about a squad of patrolmen or any other steps taken to protect the newspaper and its staff.
Parton walked across Park Row to the small police station inside City Hall and learned from the officer on duty that the promised squad of more than one hundred men had been there briefly, before they were dispatched to quell rioting that had broken out suddenly in the First Ward. Calculating that Gilmore would need at least two more hours to get back from Governors Island, Parton mingled with the crowd in front of the Tribune, trying to overhear their plans. A police sergeant, in plain clothes, was also circulating through the crowd. At dusk, when he learned that the rioters planned to set the building on fire, the officer dashed back to the station house nearby on Beekman Street to get help.5
To Parton, the crowd seemed to be composed of rather harmless, curious bystanders, including newsboys no more than twelve years old. However, Parton wrote, "one good-natured-looking bull of a man was declaiming a little, 'What's the use of killing the niggers?' said he. 'The niggers haven't done nothing. They didn't bring themselves here, did they? They are peaceable enough! They don't interfere with nobody!' Then, pointing to the editorial rooms of the Tribune, he exclaimed, 'Them are the niggers up there.' Others were holding forth in a similar strain."
Gradually the crowd pressed forward and besieged the building, "which loomed up in the dusk of the evening, unlighted, and apparently unoccupied,"
Parton recalled. The crowd remained quiet until a gang of toughs similar to the one Parton had seen on Fifth Avenue that afternoon arrived and mingled with the crowd, eliciting "laughter and cheers which appeared to work the mob up to the point of committing violence." Someone threw a stone, which hit one of the shutters on the building and provoked "a perfect yell of applause." At that moment Parton felt certain for the first time that "the office was in danger."
Parton hurried back to the police station in City Hall. "The mob are beginning to throw stones at the Tribune office," he told the six patrolmen on duty. "Five men can stop the mischief now; in ten minutes, a hundred cannot." Five of the officers came with Parton and found the mob breaking the Tribunes windows and howling with delight while the young boys ran back and forth, retrieving stones that had bounced off the shutters and fallen in front of the building. Brandishing their locust wood clubs, the patrolmen interposed themselves between the crowd and the entrance.
The stone-throwing stopped for a few minutes as the rioters shrank back, but resumed as soon as they realized the officers were alone and had no revolvers. The mob pressed forward and swept the policemen aside. "Amid the frantic yells of the multitude, the main door was forced, and the mob poured into the building," Parton reported. "I supposed then that the Tribune was gone."
Just then, how
ever, a pistol shot rang out, and the panicked mob not only evacuated the building but crossed the street and tried to flee through the gates of City Hall Park, which quickly became congested by the stampede. In the next moment, the promised squad of one hundred patrolmen suddenly arrived, Parton recalled, and "in the dim light of the evening it seemed as if Nassau Street was a rushing torrent of dark blue cloth and brass buttons."
In a few minutes, the police had cleared Printing House Square of several thousand rioters and disrupted "whatever of organization they had in the lower part of the city," one officer concluded. By saving the Tribune, they had also saved the Times and Post buildings, as well as the "massed and hoarded wealth collected below Canal Street."
The Tribunes managing editor, Sidney Gay, had set out from the office at 5 p.m. to find the mayor, who had left City Hall and joined General Wool at the St. Nicholas Hotel.6By the time Gay arrived at Wool's suite, Gilmore and Parton had already come and gone, and the managing editor was neither well received nor impressed by what he found: "A secretary, in a captain's uniform, was writing orders at a tall desk perched against the wall, and a score or more of army officers and civilians were talking together in low tones in various parts of the room. Anxiety and irresolution were depicted on every countenance; and even the scarred veteran [General Wool] who had ridden through a score of battles, seemed, for the moment, mastered by the occasion." Having already released one hundred muskets to "some importunate gentlemen"—whom the confused general remembered as being from the racist Herald instead of the abolitionist Tribune—Wool declined to help Gay, saying that the guns would end up in the mob's hands anyway.
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