Within a few minutes, "those of the three hundred who were not on the ground dead or helpless, were fleeing wildly in all directions," according to Gilmore. Carpenter then formed his men in tight ranks, "about twenty men front and five or six deep," and plowed through the sea of remaining rioters, dispersing "the crowd of probably ten thousand like frightened deer."
Even more decisive than the empty muskets and the police, Gilmore wrote, was a heavy rainstorm "from the merciful heavens" at 11 p.m., which finished the job of "driving the ruffians to their holes" and tamed the fires raging all over lower Manhattan.
Acton sent two telegraphers out in the storm to make temporary repairs, and they restored most of the system over the next two days.26 Dressed like workmen, they melted into the mobs before splitting off to recover downed wires, threading them through alleys, over rooftops, and onto clotheslines to put them back in service. One of the men had "his boots burned off in tramping through the burning ruins of a building after the wires," and the other was nearly killed by the police, who thought he was a looter in the ruins of a building, until a captain identified him in the nick of time.
The pair also posed as hack drivers in order to get around the city quickly and penetrate areas controlled by the rioters without attracting attention. Again, the ruse worked too well, and some pistol-waving rioters hailed the carriage, insisting on a ride downtown. The telegraphers slyly tried to take their passengers to police headquarters and have them arrested but were soon told to turn around and head in a different direction. When the rioters got out at an alehouse that apparently served as their headquarters, they gave the telegraphers a drink and fifty cents before bidding them farewell.
These encounters and escapes were not always so amicable. Driving a wagon, the pair was surrounded by a mob and saved themselves only by claiming to be farmers from Westchester County. In another instance, one of the telegraphers tried to avoid a mob by flagging down the carriage of a Catholic priest. The crowd mistook the passengers for journalists and stopped the carriage, shouting, "Down with the d[amne]d reporters." Only when they recognized the priest did the rioters back off.
Along with the telegraphers, fifteen police detectives had spread out across the city, blending in with the rioters and relaying information about their intentions to headquarters. The detectives were sometimes suspected, and a shout would go up, "There goes Kennedy's spies," but skillful acting would convince the rioters they were mistaken. In the case of Detective Slowey, however, he was recognized in a crowd, apparently by a man he had once arrested, who pointed and yelled, "Detective!" Thrown to the ground and beaten by the mob, the detective struggled to his feet and reached the top of a nearby stoop, where a woman put her house at risk by letting him inside. After many loud threats, however, the rioters moved on to easier prey.27
Less reliable than the telegraphers and detectives were some of the city's volunteer fire companies, which were also helping the authorities on Monday night. Peter Masterson and his Black Jokers, having unleashed the riots, tried to get the genie back in the bottle. Beginning on Monday night, he and his men performed heroically in the upper reaches of the city, patrolling the area from Fiftieth to Sixty-second Street, between Sixth Avenue and the Hudson River, and saving the property of grateful residents.28
Other fire companies took similar action in various wards across the city starting on Monday night, fighting off mobs and saving property, including a police station, a lumberyard, and the grounds of Columbia College. However, some firemen made it clear that they continued to oppose the draft and were merely carrying out their civic duty. One engine company went so far as to print a public notice explaining its position and denouncing the conscription as "unnecessary and illegal."29
Like the firemen, many of the workers who led the strike that morning reversed course and joined the effort to restore order. These protesters tended to be skilled artisans in the building trades, not industrial workers and unskilled laborers—from the city's docks, quarries, road crews, and factories—who generally continued to riot. The journeymen in the more established trades were perhaps restrained to some degree by the clear hierarchies in their professions—by the system of apprenticeship to more experienced craftsmen.30
Longshoremen and other manual laborers, by contrast, had more autonomy in negotiating the terms of their employment, though without more leverage and with far less job security. As a cartman, Thomas Fitzsimmons might have been expected to fall into this category. Instead, after leading the group that pressured James Jackson to shut down his foundry in the morning, Fitzsimmons returned home to Twenty-eighth Street and patrolled the area with a group of neighbors around the clock starting on Monday night. In addition to protecting their homes, they were able to fend off a mob trying to lynch a black man.31
• • •
When Commissioner Acton learned just before midnight that the charred body of William Jones still hung from the tree on Clarkson Street, he ordered the closest precinct, "Take it down forthwith; and if you can't, let me know." Half an hour later, the precinct reported, "The mob won't let us have the body." Only after a second attempt—this time with one hundred patrolmen—was the body finally recovered.32
Acton had not taken a break since the riots began and had no plans to do so. General Sandford, by contrast, "who for some reason did not wear his uniform at any time during the riot, put on his hat, and bidding us good-evening, took his departure for his private residence" around midnight, Lieutenant McEIrath recalled, "leaving two of his staff to act during his absence." At the Thirty-fifth Street arsenal, "there appeared to be constant uncertainty throughout the night as to which of these officers was really in command."33
Captain Walter Franklin, another regular army officer dispatched to the city from the harbor forts by General Brown on Monday, later reported to McEIrath: "On arriving at the arsenal, I found everything in a great state of confusion. No one seemed to know who was in command; some said Colonel Nugent, and others, some colonel whose name I do not recollect. There was no officer of the day on guard, and no guard stationed, except one at the arsenal door."34 Colonel Nugent took Franklin's suggestion that the immediate area be cleared of rioters and guards posted at all four streets leading to the arsenal. With the help of the marines, these basic steps were taken, and toward midnight they and Franklin's men marched through the rain to 300 Mulberry Street, as ordered.
Franklin then proceeded to the St. Nicholas Hotel and reported to General Wool. "The room at this time was full of gentlemen, and the general seemed to be very much confused . . . and worn out, and I should judge unable to perform any duty." Sometime after midnight, Wool, like Sandford, retired for the night, but instead of going home, dismissed his visitors and staff. "I think only one orderly remained with him" at the hotel suite, Franklin wrote, "and he on the outside of the door."
At 2 a.m., when additional federal troops arrived at the Thirty-fifth Street arsenal with some of Lieutenant McElrath's artillery, he asked one of Sandford's staff officers if he could place the cannon outside, since there were no openings to fire through, and the general "already had too much ordnance hidden in the building." Permission granted, McEIrath positioned the guns at the street corners so they dominated the approaches to the building. "One hundred infantry and those two guns," McEIrath reported to Brown, "could have defended the arsenal against any mob that was concentrated in the city during the riot."35
*The Eighth Precinct was at the heart of today's SoHo district, south of Houston Street.
† The Fourth Precinct was near today's Brooklyn Bridge.
*At Third Avenue and Twenty-second Street.
*Samuel Sinclair was a relative of Greeley and the publisher of the Tribune. Greeley was a friend of the Gibbons family and stayed at their home often, once when he was ill, so some of the rioters mistakenly believed that he was a boarder there.
CHAPTER 11
Government in the Hands of the White
Race Alone
t the
Seaman's Home, Albro and Mary Lyons continued to guard their own property on Monday night. "Lights having been extinguished, a lonely vigil of hours passed in mingled darkness, indignation, uncertainty, and dread," Maritcha Lyons wrote.
Just after midnight, a yell announced that a second mob was gathering to attempt assault. As one of the foremost rioters attempted [to] ascend the front steps, father advanced into the doorway and fired point blank into the crowd. Not knowing what might be concealed in the darkened interior, the fickle mob more disorganized than reckless, retreated out of sight hastily and no further demonstration was made that night.1
At daybreak on Tuesday, the couple heard footsteps of a single person approaching the doorway, and a voice cried out: "Don't shoot, Al. It's only me." An Irish policeman, Officer Kelly of the local precinct, had heard reports of the attack on their home and had come to check on them. "This kind hearted man sat on our steps and sobbed like a child," Maritcha Lyons recalled.2
Blacks were mostly left to fend for themselves again on Tuesday, with the added element of neighbors looking on without helping or calling the police. "On Tuesday, the second day of the riot, I was at Cavanagh's liquor store in Leroy Street corner of Washington at about six o'clock in the morning," Edward Ray, a local schoolboy, testified.* I was standing in front of the store when a colored man came to me and asked me where a grocery store was. I told him." The black man had just come ashore at the foot of Leroy Street from a vessel in the Hudson River where he undoubtedly served as a cook or in some other menial job; he carried a bag and a basket on one arm.3
"A man named Edward Canfield came out of Jones's liquor store and asked the colored man what he wanted," Ray continued. Several other white laborers and boys had gathered around. "He answered that he wanted a grocery store." Without another word, Canfield hit the man and knocked him down. He then kicked the man, jumped on him, and "kicked his eyes out" while leaning on the shoulder of another man for support, Ray said. "Go into him! Let him have it!" a passing neighbor heard the men shout, but he was too frightened to do more than go home and watch through the windows with his family.
Yet another tormenter came up and stuck a knife in the black man's chest. "He could not get it in," Ray noticed. "He threw it into the street. I ran and got it, and some big boys took it away from me." From the stoop where he stood with two of his sisters, Ray saw a next-door neighbor, James Lamb, throw some small stones, before dropping a chunk of flagstone the size of a man's head on the victim's chest several times and declaring that "he would like to kill some white niggers." Three of the men then took turns jumping on the prone man's chest, before they all retired to Jones's liquor store, cheering and swearing "vengeance on every nigger in New-York." Canfield, drunk and with "blood on the front of his pants," later walked to a nearby stable and warned the owner "not to put any niggers to work."
Several other residents and shopkeepers witnessed the attack or saw the man lying on the pavement but did nothing to report it. One resident said that a group of firemen came by, looked at the victim, who was still alive, and then left the scene, where a crowd of women and children had gathered around the body.4 Finally, two passersby asked the same resident for directions to the precinct station house, and the police soon arrived to put the injured man in a wagon and send him to the hospital, where he died two hours later having answered almost inaudibly that his name was "William" or "Williams."5
Like "Williams," the rest of the city's black residents had been targeted by the rioters since Monday, "and today it became a regular hunt for them," wrote journalist Joel Tyler Headley, whose sympathy for blacks was enhanced by his long-standing hatred of the Irish. "A sight of one in the streets would call forth a halloo, as when a fox breaks cover, and away would dash half a dozen men in pursuit. Sometimes a whole crowd streamed after with shouts and curses . . . If overtaken, he was pounded to death at once; if he escaped into a negro house for safety, it was set on fire . . . If he could reach a police station he felt safe; but, alas! If the force happened to be away on duty, he could not stay even there." Headley described the corpse of a black man at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, "stripped nearly naked, and around it a collection of Irishmen, absolutely dancing or shouting like wild Indians."
The pillaging of entire black neighborhoods that had begun the previous night continued on Tuesday. On Sullivan and Roosevelt Streets, where blacks lived in great numbers, boardinghouses, a grocery, and a barbershop were burned down since they either were owned by blacks or catered to them.* Station houses soon overflowed, and hundreds of refugees had to be sheltered and fed at the arsenal and police headquarters, where they slept on the floors.6
Some blacks were chased all the way to the rivers and off the ends of piers. If they did not drown or swim out to a ship, they clung to the pilings under the piers until the mob had left. Occasionally they were rescued by whites. The workers at a brickyard on the Hudson shore at Thirtieth Street put a black refugee into a rowboat on Tuesday morning, enabling him to escape to New Jersey.
Another black man, pursued by a mob, ran down Washington Street toward the Canal Street ferry, where a white man shouted for him to get on board, which he did. The ferry pilot then shut the gates and pulled away, leaving the noisy band of rioters on the dock. At Hoboken, the white man took up a collection so the refugee could reach the home of friends in Pater-son, New Jersey.7 Since Monday the ferries had been packed with black refugees escaping Manhattan to Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey, but those who were too old, infirm, or poor to make the trip remained within reach of the rioters.8
Blacks in Brooklyn were also vulnerable, because the draft had been carried out successfully there and one hundred policemen had been sent over to Manhattan. "The riot in New-York created an intense excitement in Brooklyn, and large numbers of persons crossed the river to see what was going on," the World reported. "The colored people are having a hard time of it. They are attacked everywhere and beaten. They crowded about the police stations . . . asking for protection, being prevented from going to their homes or even walking the streets."
Authorities in Brooklyn put more effort into protecting the navy yard, which buzzed with activity. "The walls were manned and mounted with guns—thirteen 18-pounders are mounted on the Flushing Avenue side so as to sweep everything, two 32-pounders command the main entrance, and all the vessels have been hauled into the stream, the guns shotted, and everything ready for any emergency," according to the World.
Heavily armed marines were sent over to Manhattan, and the gunboats that carried them were equipped with antipersonnel ammunition for their cannon—"boxes loaded with percussion cap shells, shrapnel, canister, and grape shot," the World reported. "The marines were accompanied by 300 sailors, armed with cutlasses and revolvers."9
Many blacks, including a fair number of seamen, left the city on foot, walking along the Hudson River railroad tracks on Manhattan's West Side, heading north toward Westchester and Albany. The rioters had torn up portions of the track and threatened to burn the bridge over Spuyten Duyvil Creek to further disrupt the trains and prevent soldiers from reaching the city.10
In the midst of this acute crisis, and despite the atrocities committed, the World continued to add fuel to the fire on Tuesday, ostensibly through the voice of the people. Its editor, Manton Marble, wrote that "although the community generally condemns the plundering and cruelty perpetrated by some hangers-on of the mob, yet there is an astonishing deal of public and private sympathy expressed in public places with the one idea of resistance to the draft. The laboring classes say that they are confident that it will never be enforced in the city, and that any new attempt will meet with still more serious opposition. They believe that no force, military or civil, will be able to enforce this unpopular measure."11
After going through the motions of denouncing the violence, Marble quickly escalated his attacks on the administration's infringement of civil rights and blamed Lincoln for the riots: "Will the insensate men at Washingto
n now at length listen to our voice? Will they now give ear to our warnings and adjurations? Will they now believe that Defiance of Law in rulers breeds Defiance of Law in the people? Does the doctrine proclaimed from the Capitol that in war laws are silent please them [when] put in practice in the streets of New York?"
The World insisted that the people wanted a war for "the Union and the Constitution"—not for abolition—and that Lincoln had ignored them. Thousands of men had thronged Union Square two years earlier in support of the war effort, Marble wrote. "These are the very men whom his imbecility, his wanton exercise of arbitrary power, his stretches of ungranted authority have transformed into a mob."12
"Does any man wonder that poor men refuse to be forced into a war mismanaged almost into hopelessness, perverted almost into partisanship?" the World asked. "Did the President and his cabinet imagine that their lawlessness could conquer, or their folly seduce a free people?" Appearing at the height of mob rule, Marble's words struck his rivals as irresponsible. Bryant's Evening Post charged that the World had been "for weeks endeavoring to arouse the mob spirit in this city" and was now determined to "inflame the passions of ignorant readers, and incite such to violence."13
In two more editorials on Tuesday, Marble criticized the Times and expanded his attack both on the draft and on abolition. Surveying the country's eighty-year history, the World pointed out that Americans had prevailed in two wars—in 1812 and 1846—without resorting to a federal draft. In the war with Mexico over Texas in 1846, President Polk rejected the idea of annexing Mexico too, according to Marble, because "the addition of a mongrel race, part Indian, part negro, and part Spanish, would, it was thought, be a fatal error, as it was not fitted for, nor capable of self-government." The blacks of the South, the World declared, were no more competent than Mexicans, and the American people wanted their government "in the hands of the white race alone."14
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