The Devil's Own Work

by Barnet Schecter

  "All this time," Headley wrote, the arsenal at Thirty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue "wore the look of a besieged fortress," since Sandford "evidently thought he had as much as he could do to hold that building, without doing anything to quell the riot in the city." Some of General Brown's men "were there cooped up as useless as in garrison—for if seven hundred men with cannon sweeping every approach could not hold it, seven thousand could not. 48

  Late on Tuesday night, Governor Seymour's declaration of "a state of insurrection" in the city seemed to augur more aggressive action. However, the effect was to forestall federal intervention and martial law by putting Seymour in charge of restoring order—and thus to endorse the Democrats' more conciliatory approach toward the rioters.49 Seymour's strained relationship with Acton and the other police commissioners, resulting from his attempt six months earlier to remove them, also compromised the effort to put down the riots.

  With Seymour and Acton not speaking to each other, and General Brown still hoping to extricate his remaining troops from Sandford's grip at the arsenal, the clerk of the police commission, Seth Hawley, who knew the governor, was sent to enlist his help. Hawley arrived at the St. Nicholas Hotel, where Seymour professed total ignorance of what was transpiring at the arsenal, since Sandford had not kept him informed. When Hawley asked the governor to send a messenger there with an order to release Brown's troops, Seymour remained aloof, saying he could not spare one, but finally relented and agreed to send Hawley, who was careful to deliver the order not to Sandford but to his adjutant.50

  Worried that the rioters would "attack a Negro tenement house some blocks below us, as they had attacked others, I ordered the doors to be shut and no gas to be lighted in front of the house," Maria Daly wrote. The Dalys lived just west of Washington Square. "I was afraid people would come to visit Judge Daly, ask questions, etc. I did not wonder at the spirit in which the poor resented the three-hundred-dollar clause . . . This is exceedingly unjust. The laboring classes say that they are sold for three hundred dollars, whilst they pay one thousand dollars for Negroes."51

  While Maria Daly's political sympathies and opinions led her to view the violence against blacks in terms of her own safety, abolitionists and others took some grave risks. From the Jewish family's house at the end of the street, Joseph Choate had bundled Lucy and Julia Gibbons into the carriage he had waiting on Eighth Avenue and had taken them to his parents' home on Twenty-first Street, where Lucy learned that her aunt and uncle's "warmest sympathy and kindness" also extended to "five colored refugees in the kitchen."52

  John Torrey, the botany professor at Columbia College, was about to leave for the country when the riots broke out. He had planned to go directly to the train from his second job, at the government assay office downtown, but a colleague "came in & said he saw a mob stop two 3rd Avenue cars to take out some negroes & maltreat them," Torrey wrote. "This decided me to return home, so as to protect my colored servants."

  Torrey boarded a Fourth Avenue streetcar, heading for his house on the Columbia campus at Fifth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, but the car went no farther than Thirty-fourth Street. "I found the whole road way Sc sidewalks filled with rough fellows (& some equally rough women) who were tearing up rails, cutting down telegraph poles, & setting fire to buildings," he reported. "I walked quietly along through the midst of them, without being molested. In 49 st. they were numerous, & made, as I was passing near the College, an attack upon one of a row of new houses in our street."

  At home, Torrey found his two grown daughters "a little alarmed, but not frightened." Later in the week he noted that the police stations were overflowing with black refugees and hundreds had fled to Central Park, where they huddled without any shelter from the heavy rains. Expecting an assault on his own household, Torrey wrote, "We are all quite calm & are chiefly concerned about our servants."53

  Republicans like the Choates and Torreys were not the only ones who took in blacks. An elderly woman from Cannon Street later reported that she and her husband, along with about a dozen other blacks, were sheltered and fed in the home of an Irish Catholic family for two days before a police escort was arranged to conduct them to the station house.54

  Safe at the Choates' house, Lucy Gibbons and her sister nonetheless passed a fitful night on Tuesday: "Julia and I had a room together, but of course we could not sleep, and after a few hours we got up and stood at the open window. The dead silence of the night was dreadful. Once we heard a faint cry, three times repeated, far away: 'Murder! Murder! Murder!' "55

  Tuesday had been far worse than Monday in the sheer scale of the violence—in lives lost and buildings destroyed. "Excuse me for saying that this mob is testing the Government nearly as strongly as the Southern rebellion," a War Department telegrapher in New York warned Stanton on Tuesday. "We are expecting momentarily that our Southern wires will be cut, as the rioters are at work in their immediate neighborhood," he wrote that evening. "The police so far report themselves as having been successful in every fight, of which they have had many, but they say they are exhausted, and cannot much longer sustain the unequal contest."56

  *Republicans claimed that Seymour addressed the crowd as "My friends," and seized on the phrase to condemn him for fomenting the riots and sympathizing with the violent mob. Some of Seymour's defenders asserted that he never used those words, and press reports varied on the issue, offering different transcriptions of the speech.

  *Today the site of Rockefeller Center. The college moved to West 116th Street in 1897.

  † Today the Federal Hall National Monument. See the Walking Tour in the appendix.

  *Founded in 1852, the Jews' Hospital, on West Twenty-eighth Street, was later renamed Mount Sinai Hospital and moved to its present location at Fifth Avenue and 100th Street.

  CHAPTER 13

  Doom or Deliverance: Wednesday

  Fuly 15— Day Three

  ayor Opdyke was unaware of Lee's escape across the Potomac on Tuesday morning when he finally telegraphed a direct appeal to Stanton that afternoon for troops to put down the riot. Stanton replied from Washington that the Seventh Regiment and four other militia units were on their way: "Five regiments are under orders to return to New York. The retreat of Lee having now become a rout, with his army broken and much heavier loss of killed and wounded than was supposed, will relieve a large force for the restoration of order in New York."

  The secretary of war added more good news, that operations against Charleston, South Carolina—the cockpit of the Confederacy—had begun well: "All but one fort on Morris Island have been captured, and that will be speedily reduced, after which Sumter must follow."1Putting a good spin on the news from the Potomac, Stanton did not mention that Meade's hesitation had allowed Lee to escape at the very moment when the rebel Army of Northern Virginia lay in tatters after the defeat at Gettysburg and might have been crushed once and for all.

  At the same time, New York's newspapers chided midwesterners for failing to repel the comparatively tiny invasion by John Hunt Morgan and his rampaging Confederate horsemen, who were still at large. Just when it seemed Morgan was retreating toward the Ohio River, the Times wrote, "the dispatches tell us that Cincinnati is in high excitement, that martial law is proclaimed, and every preparation making to repel an expected attack on that city!" Frustrated and disgusted with the authorities in the Midwest, the Times noted that no one was really sure where Morgan would strike next. "Thus three great States—Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky— are prodigiously agitated, and their military leaders apparently nonplussed by a raid of about 4,000 rebels, and four guns, through their borders."2

  Morgan's force was even smaller than the Times estimated and was getting smaller every day. Forgoing the temptation to free the rebel prisoners at Indianapolis, Morgan's cavalry had proceeded northeastward and crossed the border into Ohio on July 13, aiming instead for Cincinnati. However, having lost 20 percent of his force, and exhausted the remaining two thousand men by constant riding, Morgan relucta
ntly decided to bypass Cincinnati and finally paused at Williamsburg, Ohio, at dusk on the fourteenth.

  With federal troops drawing closer every hour, Morgan planned to rest briefly, then continue east 120 miles to Buffington Ford, where the shallow water would enable his troopers to cross the Ohio River into West Virginia. Next they would veer to the southwest into Kentucky and head for points south. Given that they had just ridden almost one hundred miles in a day and a half, and their horses were badly in need of rest, Morgan's officers were dubious, but there was no alternative. Some seven thousand Union cavalry and infantry had joined the hunt, while residents along the rebels' path took shots at them and felled trees as roadblocks. The raid had become a retreat, and they had to keep moving.3

  "If Lee had been annihilated, Richmond was a ripe apple waiting to drop into our hands," the Tribune lamented on Wednesday morning. Perhaps it was not too late to catch Lee's army if a "vigorous pursuit" into the Shenandoah Valley was launched, the paper suggested, withholding judgment against Meade and blasting General in Chief Halleck for "the imbecile strategy which kept the forces of Gen. [John] Dix promenading on the Peninsula, while a decisive struggle was pending in Pennsylvania," where he might have cut off Lee's retreat by moving north from Virginia. In any event, Greeley's paper concluded, the Confederate army had "seen the Northern elephant and felt his tusks . . . we have doubtless seen the last serious invasion of the North by the Rebels."4

  The fire continued to rage in the rear, however. "Albany, Troy, Yonkers, Hartford, Boston, and other cities have each their Irish anti-conscription Nigger-murdering mob, of the same type as ours," wrote George Templeton Strong. "It is a grave business, a jacquerie that must be put down by heroic doses of lead and steel."5

  In Boston's North End on Tuesday night, a mob of almost a thousand people attacked an armory on Cooper Street. Ignoring warnings from the soldiers inside, the crowd smashed the windows with bricks and rocks and forced open the door. On the verge of losing all to the rioters, the defenders fired a cannon loaded with canister, an exploding container of shot, killing four or five people and wounding about a dozen others, some seriously. One of the dead had eleven pieces of shot in his head and body and his arm was nearly taken off. When the rioters persisted, the soldiers scattered them with a bayonet charge.6

  Smaller mobs of "several hundred persons" raided gun shops in Dock Square and Faneuil Hall Square, stealing dozens of muskets, pistols, and knives, before the police and militia descended on them. The mayor, along with the police chief and his deputy, arrived promptly and stationed troops and officers, including cavalry and artillery units, at strategic points throughout the city to forestall any further rioting. The New York Times praised Boston's handling of the outbreak as "The Way to Deal With the Mob" and urged more aggressive measures in Manhattan.7

  However, no militia or regiments from the Army of the Potomac had arrived yet, and the military forces in the city were exhausted. Draft riots had also broken out in Newark, Jersey City, Hastings, Tarrytown, Rye, New Rochelle, Jamaica, and on Staten Island.8 Wednesday thus became a turning point at which the city had to be saved or fall to the mob completely.9

  The hottest day of the year dawned with black smoke from sixty charred buildings filling the air. The roads in Westchester County were jammed with refugees, as were the docks and railroad stations. People fled on the assumption that New York City would soon be completely destroyed. Many others could not flee because the rioters had torn up the railroad tracks. For those who remained in the city, especially blacks, danger lurked around every corner, particularly if they dared to show themselves in the street. The rioters continued to purge the black neighborhoods.10

  After long marches, policemen returned to Mulberry Street for brief rest breaks in the predawn darkness and were sent out again across the city. Acton stood in front of the Central Office and shouted encouragement. "Go on boys! Go on! Give it to them now! Quail on toast for every man of you, as soon as the mob is put down. Quail on toast, boys!"11

  Like the day before, Wednesday began with the grisly murder of a black man who had the gall to defend himself. At about 6 a.m., James Costello, a black shoemaker, was chased down West Thirty-second Street by William Mealy, a volunteer fireman. Costello was known as "an active man in his business—industrious and sober," and Mealy, also a shoemaker, may have resented the incursion of a black man into the trade. When Costello turned and shot Mealy in the head with a pistol, his mother and brother arrived on the scene with at least a dozen others, "howling and yelling." They quickly attracted a mob of two or three hundred rioters, who chased Costello and grabbed him before he could enter a nearby house.

  "Dragging him into the middle of the street they jumped upon him and pounded him with their fists and with stones until life was extinct," the Tribune reported. A fourteen-year-old butcher's boy named Jacob Long threw several stones at the body. "Hang him—hang him," the mob chanted. The owner of a nearby stable provided a rope, and they hanged Costello from a tree. Soon, "his fingers and toes had been sliced off, and there was scarcely an inch of his flesh which was not gashed."12

  Thinking the house they had pulled Costello from was his own, the mob gutted and burned it, then moved on to a row of tenements behind it, which a local woman had informed them were full of black families. Warned by a neighbor of the impending attack, the tenants had fled, and the mob burned the buildings. At other black homes in the neighborhood, the rioters carted away furniture, bedding, clothes, and other humble possessions, before torching the buildings. Two young black children had their clothes stolen straight off their bodies.

  James Cassidy, an Irish laborer at the head of one mob, was more intent on ridding the area of blacks than on looting. Before burning their house, he gave his black neighbors five minutes to clear out, calling them "damned niggers," and warning one woman, "Don't never show your face in this street again.13

  General Brown ordered troops to the scene, including an artillery unit under Lieutenant B. Franklin Ryer, who "marched there through a heavy rain" with one hundred men and reported seeing the rioters disperse "without having to fire a shot." Costello's body was cut down from the tree, and the troops proceeded to the arsenal on Seventh Avenue at about 8 a.m. When Ryer asked where he should go next to confront the mob, Sandford ordered him to stay inside the heavily guarded perimeter around the arsenal.

  However, Ryer was soon sent back down to Thirty-second Street, where the mob had reappeared and was attacking a house in which several black families had tried to hide. Ryer's men scattered the rioters and brought some fourteen blacks to safety in the arsenal. The rain had put the cannons out of commission, but Ryer had one platoon fan out across Seventh Avenue at Thirty-second Street and block the rioters' charge up the avenue with two rounds of musket fire. The mob fell back with "considerable loss," Ryer reported. "Soon after, one of the rioters endeavored to wrest the musket from the hands of one of my sentries, but received the contents instead."

  With at least twenty-three people, including women and children, killed or wounded in the barrage from Ryer's troops, the neighborhood was in shock, "the women and children filling the air with their cries and lamentations," the Times reported, while the men who had lost friends "sat mournful and sullen."

  At the same time, Lieutenant Robert Joyce, in command of the second platoon at the arsenal, had received a tip that rioters had a large cache of weapons in a house on Thirty-second Street and Broadway. He set off with fifteen men and stormed the house, capturing seventy-three Enfield rifles and bringing them back to the arsenal on a wagon despite the menacing crowds along his route.14

  Less fortunate was the foray by a cavalry troop into Thirty-third Street, where a gang of thugs had beaten and was chasing a black man, Augustus Stuart, who panicked and fired a pistol at the soldiers, mistaking them for rioters. Drawing his sword, one of the mounted soldiers slashed Stuart, who later died from the wound. When the various contingents of soldiers returned to the arsenal and to police headqu
arters, the defiant mob reassembled on Thirty-second Street, hanged Costello's body again, and searched for new victims.15

  Like the city's entire black population, Henry Highland Garnet had been forced to stay indoors for almost three days, but on Wednesday he ventured out of his house and found the structure of Shiloh Church on Prince Street intact; the interior, however, was thoroughly ransacked. Risking his life, he walked through the streets, where he found "marauding bands dancing and howling around the red flames of the burning buildings."16

  A black man named Charles Jackson left the hotel where he was a waiter, hoping to reach Pier Number 3 on the Hudson River and a boat to take him off Manhattan before the mobs closed in. Half a block from the river's edge Jackson counted about a dozen men grabbing and surrounding him. A blow on the head from a brick knocked him down, and "someone kicked me in the eye with the heel of his boot," Jackson recalled. He passed out and the men threw him in the river. He awoke naked, under the wharf, where he crawled up on the rocks between the pilings and waited until his pursuers lost interest.17

  At about the same time, Abraham Franklin, a twenty-three-year-old black coachman, stopped in to see his mother at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street when "the mob broke down the door, seized him, beat him over the head and face with fists and clubs," and dragged him into the street. An Irish laborer who lived nearby shouted, "Hang the damned negro!" The crowd set Franklin's mother's house on fire before they kicked and beat him nearly to death and hanged him from a lamppost while his mother watched helplessly. When soldiers scattered the crowd and cut Franklin down, he "raised his arm once slightly and gave a few signs of life." He was left on the street after the troops moved on, however, and the mob suspended Franklin's body again, "cutting out pieces of flesh and otherwise mutilating it." A sixteen-year-old butcher's apprentice "took hold of the private parts . . . on several occasions and dragged the body" through the streets.18