As the police left with the carbines, crowds filled the streets again "and from every window women again looked out," the World reported.25 "The dead bodies of the killed were to be seen being borne away by their friends, the blood trickling on the pavement. Pools of blood would be met at frequent intervals, and in a large number of houses lay the wounded writhing in pain." Many were killed and wounded, according to the World, including innocent bystanders, some of them women and children struck by bullets "half a mile away." On the street corners clusters of people swore vengeance and called for coordinated action against the police.
A "middle-aged Irish woman" addressed one of the larger crowds in the area, "expressing in strong terms her contempt of the behavior of the mob when attacked by the police," the World reported. "After such an exhibition of cowardliness, they ought to be ashamed ever again to show their heads. There were as many of them with carbines in their hands as there were of the police, she said, but instead of bravely defending themselves they threw down their weapons and with abject whines allowed themselves to be pummeled and struck to the ground."
One man got the attention of the crowd by shouting, "All we want is a leader, and then we will go to victory or the devil!" He drew loud cheers, but when he tried to lead them west along Twenty-second Street to "punish the aristocrats of Fifth Avenue," he had trouble gathering more than a few dozen boys and men, and a general consensus was reached that they should meet that night to make further plans.
Throughout the day, the rioters had systematically stopped streetcars and stages to deprive the police of vehicles they needed to reach the mobs all over the city. Anticipating this tactic, Acton had already gathered enough streetcars from Third and Sixth Avenues, and stages from the Bowery and Broadway, to form a long line in front of police headquarters on Mulberry Street, and had thrown at least one uncooperative driver into a holding cell.26
Captain Franklin and his men had rested for an hour or two after their return from the Union Steam Works when Acton put them in stages and sent them to Eighth Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street, where trouble had been brewing all afternoon. At 2 p.m., half a dozen drunken rioters, including a bugle-blowing Irish peddler named John Corrigan, had each taken a horse from the stables of the Red Bird stage line on West Thirty-fifth Street and joined the "riotous and disorderly men and boys" looting stores up and down the West Side "armed with clubs sticks and other missels," a witness reported. The horsemen named Patrick Burke their "colonel," but Corrigan, sounding his brass horn, at times appeared to be the "ringleader," as when he rode his mount into a corner saloon and the mob burst in after him to drink the place dry.27
Nearby, on Twenty-ninth Street, Lucy Gibbons and her sister Julia continued to prepare for the worst.28 Going through the house, Lucy recalled, "[we were] trying to think of things my mother and sister Sally,—who were nursing the soldiers down South,—would like saved; but it was very hard to think." Their father had told them that the whole row of houses was threatened, and not to bother shifting their possessions from one house to another. They did not attempt to move the family's library of some two thousand books, even though, according to Lucy, it was "very dear" to them.
Nonetheless, they did take baskets of clothing and some documents. A cousin, Sarah Powell, came in to help them. "[We] carried all the things we had packed up to our attic and over the roof, down into Uncle Samuel's house . . . We worked hard until we dropped everything on the floor of Uncle Samuel's attic," Lucy remembered. "In fact, we were busy all day, but so little alarmed, that, at about 5 o'clock, when we were going into Aunt R's, I proposed taking a bath."
However, they were not to have the leisure of a good soak. Indeed they were lucky to have left their own house in the nick of time. "We heard a sudden uproar in the street," Lucy wrote. "We ran to the window and looked out through the shutters, and saw two men on horse-back galloping down the sidewalk, waving swords and shouting 'Greeley! Greeley!' A crowd of men and women that seemed to fill the middle of the street followed the horsemen past our house to Ninth Avenue, then turned back, shouting 'Greeley! Gibbons! Greeley! Gibbons! Gibbons!'"
Mounted on the horses from the Red Bird stables, two of the rioters stopped at the Gibbonses' courtyard gate and faced the mob. They selected about a dozen men with pickaxes, who entered the yard and climbed onto the balcony, broke through the parlor windows, and disappeared into the house. While the crowd waited and chafed, the axmen ransacked the interior and tossed valuables out the windows, Lucy recalled. "In front of the house all was noise, confusion, and quarreling."
The sisters were afraid their father might return at any moment and try to drive the looters out with his pistol, since he had sworn to defend the house. "We dared not open the shutters and saw things imperfectly, now looking, now drawing back. There was fighting. I saw one man drop like lead, drew back, looked again and saw the books falling like rain until they were heaped up and hid the fence."
James Gibbons, like his daughters, had fortunately left the house, to get a newspaper, just before the mob attacked. He had also left his revolver in his desk drawer. Returning to find the house full of rioters, James wrote, "I went in among them and up to my desk, making room, as I entered towards the library, for the villain who had our mattress; but seeing that the place was fully in possession of the mob, with my pistol in hand, I could go no further. They did not know me as the owner of the house, and I passed, unharmed, down the stairs again."29
At this point the police arrived and charged into the house, clubbing the rioters and driving them out into the courtyard, where additional officers stood ready to strike them. Captain Franklin and his troops arrived at the same time, and in the confusion, some of them fired without orders, wounding half a dozen policemen, one of them fatally.30The soldiers drove the rioters away, Lucy recalled, and "returned and drove away the mob a second time, and then marched away. As they disappeared one way, the mob returned in full force by another and the looting went on."
Lucy watched as a man carried off the keyboard of her piano, and "sheets of music seemed to be flying in every direction." She also observed: "On the sidewalk some women, laden with spoils, were leaning against the courtyard railing; one had a pot and was fanning herself with the lid. I know the police were doing what they could, but I did not see them. Suddenly smoke poured in clouds out of the windows. We learned later that neighbors, alarmed lest the fire should spread to their own houses, carried water over the roofs and down into our house and put out the fires; and I think some of our cousins worked at that."31
Ironically, in venting their fury at Horace Greeley, radical Republicanism, and abolition, these poor, mostly Irish, whites were laying waste the home of a woman who had devoted her life to lifting up New York's underclass, and caring for their sick or wounded sons and husbands in the army. "In the midst of the riot," one eyewitness reported, "a voice in the crowd was heard crying 'Shame! Don't you know what Mrs. Gibbons did for the 69th Regiment?' But nothing could restrain them."32
Fortunately for Julia and Lucy, their cousin Joseph Choate had canceled a trip to Salem, Massachusetts, and at his wife Carrie's urging had searched until he found the sisters at the Browns' two doors down. Lucy recalled that Choate "had been all through our house looking for us in the mob which filled it. He said there must have been two hundred of them there. I said, 'Don't leave us,' and he answered, 'I will only do so while I get a carriage and take you to our house.' "33
A fervent anti-Irish Republican, a lawyer, and later a prominent judge, Choate was filled more with indignation than fear by the riot. "We cannot even think of leaving until it is over," he had written to his mother that afternoon, after sheltering four black refugees in his home. "The accounts in the papers do not tell the half of the brutality of the human beasts who for the moment have control. Yesterday morning when the riot commenced in the 22nd Ward, it was headed by the Alderman of that Ward." The riots and violence against blacks, he wrote, were "the natural fruits of the doctrines of Seymour, Wo
od, Vallandigham, etc."34
Toward evening, the rioters became even better organized and took the alarming step of barricading avenues and streets on both sides of the city. Starting with wagons and carts, felled telegraph poles and lampposts, they added furniture, barrels, and crates, "the vehicles being lashed together with telegraph wires, or anything else that came to hand," Captain Walling recalled. "My orders were simply to 'clear the streets.'" The mobs' shift from roving vandalism to stationary defenses signaled an intent to seal off and control discrete areas of the city over an extended time period. Police telegrapher Charles Loring Chapin, who had stood behind the barricades in Berlin during the revolts of 1848, saw this as an ominous escalation, from riot to insurrection: "The mob were introducing the revolutionary methods of Europe."35
The police had to act quickly, before they lost the daylight needed to break up the barricades and before the rioters could strengthen these improvised ramparts any further. Walling had been battling the mob all afternoon, and as he prepared his men to storm and dismantle the barricades along six blocks of Ninth Avenue between Thirty-sixth and Forty-second Streets, he requested military reinforcements from General Brown at the Central Office and from General Sandford at the arsenal. Brown's U.S. infantrymen arrived at Walling's station house on Twenty-fourth Street near Ninth Avenue at 6 p.m. At 7:40, Brown made a final attempt to stir Sandford by sending a telegram to Walling's precinct for delivery by messenger to the arsenal but received no answer. When the sun began to set and General Sandford's promised troops had still not arrived, the police, supported by the regulars, began their assault without them.36
"Many of the rioters had fire-arms" and were posted "not only behind the barricades, but on the house-tops," Walling observed. "We advanced towards the first barricade on the 'double-quick,' with the soldiers in our rear." A hail of bullets met the police. "Fortunately most of the balls passed over our heads, but it was warm work." The patrolmen stepped aside, allowing the soldiers to aim round after round of musket fire at the rioters.
When the mob finally retreated to the next barricade, one block north, the police broke up the first barrier, "which of course occupied time, and exposed them to the missiles of the mob," the infantry captain, John Wilkins, reported. The soldiers started to pick off the snipers from the rooftops, including a rioter who kept "dodging behind one of the chimneys," Walling recalled. "He tried this once too often. Suddenly, while I was watching him, he threw up his arms and fell headlong to the street with a rifle ball through the very centre of his forehead."37
Another relentless stream of gunfire from the troops dislodged the rioters from the second barricade, and the combined force advanced until it had eliminated every obstruction from the avenue. Defenseless, the rioters scattered, and the soldiers broke ranks to pursue and shoot them on the side streets.38More rioters remained on the rooftops, however, and the infantry found themselves "suddenly assailed with a terrific shower of brick-bats, thrown by unseen hands," Wilkins wrote. The soldiers fought back briefly, and then proceeded to the station house since it was by then "almost too dark to operate with any success."39
"A carriage will be here instantly," Gilmore told Greeley at 8 p.m. "We want you to leave the office." When Greeley insisted on staying, Gilmore became adamant. "A hundred and fifty of us are risking our lives to defend this building, and you have no right to add to our danger." Greeley finally gave in, saying he would take a streetcar home instead of a private carriage. Pointing to the mob outside, Gilmore informed Greeley that he would never make it to a streetcar, and the reluctant editor allowed himself to be spirited out the back door and into a shuttered carriage on Spruce Street.
When Gilmore turned to go back inside, the longshoreman who had rowed him to Governors Island tapped his arm and asked to join him: "I told ye I'd see the dance out, and ye'll have warm work before morning." Gilmore brought the old sailor into the building, but the arsenal being fully manned, asked him instead to repeat his mission of the night before. It would be "a Christian deed" and save many lives, Gilmore told him, if he would spread the word throughout the mob that Greeley had departed and the building was "so thoroughly armed that the first discharge from it would slay a thousand of the rioters." The night wore on, and the warning appeared to have worked. The mob "surged and howled around the building," Gilmore recalled, but they did not attack.40
Elsewhere around the city, however, in their continued campaign to terrorize and expel the black population, the rioters pursued more vulnerable targets. On Roosevelt Street, where the many black residents had fled their homes, mobs burned two black tenements to the ground and pulled down three wooden buildings which were then made into a bonfire. In Greenwich Village, a gang on a looting spree tried to burn "the Arch," a row of tenements full of black families. The rioters ignited a barrel full of straw and wood shavings treated with camphene and placed it in the open archway under the buildings. The block was saved only because a fire company responding to a call uptown happened to be passing by and smothered the flames.41
Not as fortunate were the Derricksons—a black man with a white wife and two children—who were viciously attacked in their cellar apartment on Worth Street that night. When the mob announced they would lynch Derrickson and broke down his door, he fled out the rear window, thinking black men were the rioters' targets and that his wife and children would be safe. Instead, the intruders beat Derrickson's young son with an ax and with a spoke from a cart wheel. "For God's sake, kill me and save my boy," his mother shrieked, while covering her son's body with her own and absorbing most of the blows, but the assailants hauled him into the street and stripped him as he lay unconscious.
Mrs. Derrickson again tried to shield her son, but the men continued to beat both of them. While the rioters considered whether to lynch the boy or set him on fire, the grocer from next door intervened, saying, "It was a shame for you to hit that boy, you great big men to come here and attack a boy, why don't you hit men, if you want to fight." The rioters threatened to hang the grocer, but, armed with a pistol, he roused the German residents on the block to reinforce him. One of the mob's leaders said, "Come on boys there is no use in standing here any longer—there is another nest of niggers round in Leonard Street—let's clear them out." Mrs. Derrickson had indeed given her life to save her son: He survived the beating, and she died a month later from her injuries.42
The rioters' anger and cries for vengeance after the second battle at the Union Steam Works had continued to build all afternoon and evening; by 10:30 p.m., the surrounding ward had erupted with arson. Thwarted in their attempt to turn the Union Steam Works into an armed fortress, the frustrated rioters set fire to the five-story brick factory. They also attacked the police station on Twenty-second Street near First Avenue, where the four officers on duty barely escaped by knocking out the bars in a cell window and climbing through before the building went up in a tall plume of smoke and flames.43
"The flames soon wreathed the tower and rose in majestic columns," wrote Ellen Leonard, a young woman visiting relatives in the city. "The whole neighborhood was flooded with light. Thousands of spectators gazed upon the scene, crowning the house-tops as with statues of living fire."44
In his house nearby at Gramercy Park, George Templeton Strong stopped writing in his diary and went outside to see the blaze. He chose not to get close, however, because he found himself "in a crowd of Celtic spectators" from the surrounding tenements who "were exulting over the damage to 'them bloody police,' and so on." Strong had no sympathy for the grievances of the Irish laborer who had escaped famine in Ireland only to encounter prejudice and exploitation in America. "Paddy has left his Egypt—Connaught— and reigns in his promised land of milk and honey and perfect freedom. Hurrah, there goes a strong squad of police marching eastward down this street, followed by a company of infantry with gleaming bayonets."45
William Powell and his family, after escaping from their roof using the rope and clothesline, spent a full twenty-four hours
locked up in the police station, while every last piece of their personal property was "scattered to the four winds." Late on Tuesday night, the police took them to a boat leaving for New Haven, and they continued on to New Bedford, Massachusetts, temporarily leaving their invalid daughter with friends in New York.
"As a devoted loyal Unionist, I have done all I could do to perpetuate and uphold the integrity of this free government," Powell told William Lloyd Garrison. "My oldest son is now serving my country as a surgeon in the United States army, and myself had just received a commission in the naval service. What more could I do? What further evidence was wanting to prove my allegiance in the exigencies of our unfortunate country? I am now an old man, stripped of everything which I once possessed, of all the comforts of life; but I thank God that He has yet spared my life, which I am ready to yield in the defence of my country."46
Powell was grateful that he and his family had at least survived, and as cramped as they were in the station house, they were more fortunate than many blacks who found no room at the local precinct. Shortly before midnight, Captain Walling's station house on Twenty-fourth Street off Ninth Avenue was filled to capacity, and he had to send a group of black refugees from nearby tenements to Twentieth Street and Seventh Avenue to find shelter.
At midnight, Walling responded to a report that rioters had attacked an African American church on Thirtieth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, intending to chop it apart with axes instead of burning it so their friends in adjacent houses would not be harmed. "It happened that several fire-engines were passing through the street at the time," Walling recalled, "and mixing with the party of firemen we approached close to the church without attracting much attention." The vandals were surprised and met the police with a barrage of gunfire from "the street, alleys, and doorways," David Barnes reported. Walling noted that his men used their pistols for the first time that day and with a single shot killed a rioter on the roof who was "hacking away at the timbers with an axe." The police also used their clubs. "Scores of heads were cracked," wrote Barnes, the church was saved, and the area was cleared.47
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