The Devil's Own Work

by Barnet Schecter

  "Wednesday begins with heavy showers, and now (ten a.m.) cloudy, hot, and steaming," George Templeton Strong noted in his diary. "Morning papers report nothing specially grave as occurring since midnight. But there will be much trouble today. Rabbledom is not yet dethroned any more than its ally and instigator, Rebeldom."

  However, news of the war effort was encouraging. "Port Hudson surrendered. Sherman said to have beaten Johnston somewhere near Vicksburg. Operations commencing against Charleston. Bragg seems to be abandoning Chattanooga and retiring on Atlanta. Per contra, Lee has got safely off. I thought he would."

  Strong visited the U.S. Sub-Treasury on Wall Street and found it "in military occupation—sentinels pacing, windows barricaded, and so on." He was shown a "live shell ready to throw out of the window and the 'battery' to project Assay Office oil-of-vitriol and the like." The Custom House was also well supplied with "shells, grenades, muskets, and men," but Strong was disappointed to find the collector of the port "doubtful about his right to fire on the mob, and generally flaccid and tremulous—poor devil!"

  At the Union League Club, however, Strong learned that the police were unable to spare a squad to protect the premises. One alarmed club member was predicting disaster: that the Croton water mains would be cut and gasworks destroyed that evening along with the houses of prominent club members. Strong dismissed this as "the loudest and most emphatic jawing" but was glad to have taken the precaution, nonetheless, of having "the bathtubs filled, and also all the pots, kettles, and pails in the house."19

  In response to Governor Seymour's request, on Tuesday afternoon, that Archbishop Hughes exert his "powerful influence" to help quell the riots, an appeal from the prelate appeared in the Herald on Wednesday morning. Republican critics noted that if Hughes had taken the initiative to denounce the riots on Monday, he might have forestalled much of the violence that ensued on Tuesday and Wednesday. Hughes, however, had always promoted and defended the rights of Catholics in absolute terms, provoking rather than avoiding controversy. He had never been one to scold his own flock publicly, and the message in the Herald hardly seemed calculated to pacify the city's Irish Catholic working class.20

  George Templeton Strong

  On the contrary, the one-paragraph call for peace was tacked on to an open letter defending the Irish and attacking Horace Greeley—a lengthy rebuttal to comments about Hughes that appeared in Tuesday's Tribune. Greeley had pointed out that the archbishop was one of the first to support a draft as a way of equalizing the burden of the war, since reliance on volunteering drew a large proportion of the poor into the army. With the passage of the exemption clause, and the shift to a war of conquest and emancipation, Hughes no longer wanted to be associated with a prodraft stance and tried clumsily to distance himself from it. Greeley mocked Hughes's statement that he favored conscription, but not a "coercive conscription." Was there any other kind? Greeley asked.21

  In order to explain his initial support for conscription, Hughes revisited the same fear of labor competition that had helped generate the riots in the first place. Pointing to the heavy casualties suffered by patriotic Irish American regiments, he asserted that when the war broke out, devious factory owners had temporarily shut down in order "to compel these Irish and Catholic operatives to enlist, in order that their families might not starve." Once these nativist employers had driven the immigrants out, they promptly replaced them with American-born workers, according to Hughes.

  Meanwhile, he noted, "such manufacturers and traffickers upon the public calamities of civil war have been vastly more prosperous than ever before." The butchery of the Civil War, prolonged for the sake of such profiteers, must be brought to an end as quickly as possible, Hughes declared. As for the riots, he urged any Catholics who might have been involved to "retire to their homes" and to "dissolve their bad associations with reckless men, who have little regard either for Divine or human laws."22

  As if to further embolden the mob, the notoriously corrupt Tammany judge John H. McCunn's ruling that the draft was unconstitutional also appeared in the morning papers. The case, decided the day before, involved a man who had refused to give his name to an enrollment officer. McCunn asserted that withholding one's name was not a crime under the draft law, and the officer had no right to make the arrest. McCunn's convoluted opinion then invalidated the entire draft law by arguing that the conscripted men constituted neither a standing army nor a militia force, and therefore fell outside the authority of Congress to "raise and support armies." The administration would soon have the flimsy ruling overturned on appeal; the real danger lay in McCunn's ability to foment more violence, even as he professed dismay that people were not seeking redress through legal channels.23

  "I think things begin to look better now," Joseph Choate wrote tentatively on Wednesday morning to his mother in Salem, Massachusetts. "Powder and ball are beginning to tell . . . but the riot is yet to be suppressed. This morning before breakfast I walked over to the 5th Ave. Hotel, and met a man who had just seen a negro hung by the Irish on the corner of 32nd St. & 6th Avenue. There has been nothing like this I think since the French Revolution. The barbarity and the extent of the mob you have no idea of. But we shall get the upper hand. Carrie and the girls are very brave and fear no danger."24

  Lucy and Julia Gibbons wanted to return to their uncle Samuel's to get some clothes, but Choate gave them strict orders not to answer the door and with a male friend went to run the errand for them.25James Gibbons went to report the attack on his house and remained upbeat. "You will see by the papers that our house has been sacked," he wrote to a friend on Wednesday. "Our daughters saved most of their best clothing by previous removal. Everything taken. If you have any means of communication with Mrs. Gibbons, please say we are all well and in jovial spirits. It is our contribution to the war"26

  Knowing that despite the sabotage of the railroads her mother would try to come back from the front, Julia wrote to her that day: "Now about thy coming home! Thee had very decidedly, better not come." Emphasizing she could do nothing even if she managed to return, Julia continued: "Uncle Samuel is this morning having the windows indoors boarded up so that we may have an opportunity of going down through the roof and seeing if there is anything left . . . We are so glad to get off with our lives and dearest possessions, that we can only be satisfied with the result. Many lives have been endangered, and our just having left the house, and father having been out of the neighborhood, are such fortunate circumstances that we can regret nothing . . . and the only thing left for us to do is wait. "27

  Choate and his friend "returned each with a pillow-case full of things they had picked from the floor of Uncle Samuel's attic," Lucy Gibbons recalled.

  They had seen a doctor's gig before the house of our next door neighbor, Mr. Wilson, and asked if they might borrow it to carry some things to us; but Mr. Wilson refused to do anything for people "who had brought so much trouble into the neighborhood." So Mr. Choate and Mr. Carter walked back to us with stuffed pillow-cases under their arms.

  This Mr. Wilson was so bitter against the abolitionists that he was called an "iron head" instead of a "copper head," and during the riot, when there was danger of his house catching fire from ours, he had gone out on his doorstep and tried to address the mob. The mob thought he was Horace Greeley, and beat him badly.28

  Between 10 and 11 a.m., Josiah Porter looked out the front windows of his house at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-first Street and saw four armed men approaching. They were all young, unskilled laborers, Irish like himself, and he knew them by name: Patrick Kiernan, Barney Fagan, Frederick Hammens, and Michael Dunn. They began shouting when they saw him: "You damned old black republican Orange Son of a bitch. We'll burn your house down and murder you this day."29 They started to throw rocks at the house.

  The attack was planned by a laborer named Doherty, employed in Central Park, who had wanted to build a shanty on Porter's property. When Porter turned him down, Doherty convinced his fellow Irish Catholi
c laborers that Porter was an enemy on two counts: He was both an Orangeman (an Irish Protestant) and a Republican.30Doherty exploited the nexus of the current political crisis, and the centuries-old hatred between Irish Catholics and Protestants, a perennial source of friction that sparked riots on ethnic and national holidays, particularly the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne.*

  When Ellen Porter boldly strode outside to see who was threatening her husband, Fagan aimed his gun at her, saying, "Hold on till I shoot the damned Orange bitch." He did not shoot, but the men threw stones at her, before going to the corner to add two more men to their group. Shouting that they would cut Josiah Porter "in four quarters and throw him in the flames," they entered the house through the back door, while he slipped out the front and entered the basement through an exterior door. Porter holed up in the cellar with an old musket and listened to their footsteps above him as they searched the house.

  They told Mrs. Porter they did not want to harm her or her children and to clear out her possessions because they would set fire to the house that evening. When the men left, they stole an ax from the house, and Mrs. Porter followed them down to Sixtieth Street, where she overheard them making plans to burn the house that afternoon instead.

  They fulfilled their threat to return and burn the house, but with a different leader. Matthew Powers, a twenty-four-year-old brass finisher from Ireland who lived a dozen blocks to the south, came to search the house in the afternoon with six or seven men. He warned Ellen Porter that she had two hours to clear out, and returned in the early evening, this time with a bundle of papers and a box of matches.

  Anxious neighbors had joined Ellen Porter in the house, and one pleaded with Powers "in the name of God and in honor of the blessed Virgin Mary not to burn the house," but he refused. Another neighbor warned that they "were laying themselves liable to the law," to which Powers retorted that "there was no law in New York," and chased him out the door. Powers and one accomplice then set the house on fire.

  While the lynching and looting continued that morning, the Common Council focused on creating a $2.5-million fund to pay for any drafted New Yorker who could not afford the three-hundred-dollar commutation fee. The aldermen instructed the city's corporation counsel to challenge the constitutionality of the draft law in the hope that the courts would strike it down; if they did not, the fund would provide relief. The money was to be raised with bonds paying up to 7 percent interest and maturing in 1880. Direct aid to the poor at public expense—using charity to solidify political power—was a classic Tammany-style maneuver. Moreover, debt financing—to pay for soldiers' bounties at the beginning of the war, and for labor-intensive infrastructure projects in the growing city—was rapidly becoming the Democrats' preferred method of greasing the political machine.31

  "The city gover[n]ment has by this action completely submitted to the mob," Edmund Ruffin rejoiced when he read about the appropriation in the southern press. He called it "a signal victory for the rioters . . . as the payment for their exemption is fixed in advance, & at the expense of other people—of the class whose goods they have been plundering & destroying, & whose houses they have been burning." It was like "offering a reward of $300 . . . to every rioter who would have been liable to conscription. This is enough to induce like riots in every Yankee town."32

  For that very reason, Mayor Opdyke opposed the measure. "I was strongly urged by many leading citizens to give it my official sanction at once as a means of pacifying the rioters," Opdyke wrote of the proposed fund, but he refused to sign the bill—to "bow to the dictation of the mob, and in effect nullify the draft." Opdyke also insisted that the mob was "under our control."33

  By proposing the fund while the riots still raged instead of quelling them first, Republicans charged, the Democrats were rewarding violent behavior. "It was plain that if the draft was the cause of the continued riot, it would now cease," Headley wrote. However, despite the public announcement of the Common Council's appropriation, reports of rioting continued to come in from all over the city.34 The Times declared that "the whole thing, if it continues, bids fair to become a gigantic mob of plunderers, with no more reference to the Conscription than to the Koran."35

  Beyond plunder, the final stages of the riots became a territorial struggle. The barricades on Ninth Avenue had been cleared, but on the East Side rioters had built others to cordon off three separate tenement and factory districts where they lived and worked. The women urged their men to resist the draft and "die at home" fighting the authorities. To assert their sole possession of these areas, the mobs patrolled the streets and began house-to-house searches, hunting down wounded policemen or soldiers.36

  The Wednesday headlines of Marble's World carried Governor Seymour's proclamation of the night before declaring New York City to be "in a state of insurrection." Under state law, those words empowered the governor to take charge of the crisis. The next headline read: "Law to be Maintained in New-York by the Governor of New-York," a clear message to Republicans that Democrats intended to keep the reins of power by preventing the federal imposition of martial law.37

  Some staunch Republicans not only wanted martial law but appealed to President Lincoln and members of his cabinet on Wednesday morning to send General Benjamin Butler to run the occupation and enforce the draft. Butler was known in the South as "the Beast" because of his ruthless tactics while military governor of New Orleans the previous year. Not all Republicans favored the appointment of Butler. Greeley, for example, considered General Brown to be a suitable choice.

  However, nearly all agreed that General Wool was incompetent and a stronger officer was needed to win a battle against the rioters, on one hand, and the disloyal Democratic leadership, on the other. The belief had begun to spread among Republicans that the protest against the draft was "not simply a riot but the commencement of a revolution, organized by sympathizers in the North with the Southern Rebellion."38

  The Confederacy had hoped, according to the Times, that "as soon as the Government was weakened by the secession of the Southern States, and business was destroyed by the withdrawal of Southern trade," northern mobs would "rush into scenes of violence, blood and anarchy." From the beginning of the war, the rebels, "knowing the immense value to their cause of a Northern diversion or defection, have never ceased since then to labor assiduously for that end." However, the Times confidently predicted that " 'the left wing of Lee's army,' as the mob has been so aptly styled, will come to as disastrous and infamous an end as has just befallen the centre of that army on the Potomac."39

  Perhaps the strongest advocate of martial law was Frederick Law Olmsted, a founder of the Union League Club. The club's members identified the "semi-loyalty" of New York's Democratic leadership as the pernicious influence that had led the working classes astray, and planned to root it out by persuading the Lincoln administration to conduct a full investigation of the riots' causes and instigators. "Let Barlow and Brooks and Belmont and Barnard and the Woods and Andrews and Clancy be hung if possible. Stir the govt up to it," Olmsted wrote to a friend. "I did not mean to omit Seymour."40*

  Talk of executing political opponents as traitors, in the private letters and diaries of Olmsted and Strong, may have constituted a serious policy goal or may have simply been a venting of anger. What is clear is that Union League Club members eventually hoped to reconstruct New York City much as radical Republicans in Congress would try to reconstruct the rebellious southern states. For the moment, the club's top priority was to restore order in the city—with an unambiguous show of force.41

  Anything less, they warned, would send a dangerous message to the rest of the country and to European powers, whose eyes were all fixed on New York. "The whole country is observing with interest the course of the Administration in dealing with the New York Conscription," a prominent Philadelphia Republican wrote to President Lincoln. "If not proceeded with, say, by an officer of known determination such as General Butler with military and naval forces to support him,
the Union goes up in a blaze of States Rights. An exhibition of resolution will insure Seymour's submission, the execution of the draft elsewhere and avoidance of foreign intervention."42

  *In 1690, William of Orange defeated Ireland's Catholics in the Battle of the Boyne. The Orangemen's celebration of the anniversary on July 12 was the occasion of several bloody riots in New York during the nineteenth century.

  *James Brooks was the editor of the Express; John Andrews was the agitator and lawyer from Virginia; John Clancy was the editor of Tammany's newspaper, the Leader.

  CHAPTER 14

  "Hellish Passions Culminating in Riots,

  Arson, and Murder"

  n the absence of martial law, on Wednesday Acton and Brown changed their strategy. Instead of using the Central Office as the sole launching point for their forces, they carved up the city into four zones and massed their men at a staging area in each: two uptown on the East Side, one downtown at City Hall, and a fourth at the northern tip of Manhattan. This, and the redeployment of men who had been concentrated at government buildings, made it easier to respond to the emerging pattern of more sporadic surprise attacks by smaller bands at widely distant points.