However, Acton and Brown also faced the opposite problem of "the plague spots," as Brown dubbed them: three factory and tenement areas on the East Side where rioters had concentrated their strength behind barricades. To secure the areas they controlled, the rioters had also placed guards on street corners and made sure that no soldiers or policemen remained hidden in the buildings. In this case, the decision not to impose martial law proved helpful to Acton and Brown. Taking a conciliatory approach, Tammany officials had restored some measure of quiet in many neighborhoods, which civilian volunteers and policemen could patrol adequately, enabling the military to focus on the areas of strongest resistance.1
While the radical Republicans sought to influence President Lincoln and vilified the Democrats, Manton Marble continued his campaign for Democratic party unity by shifting the blame for the riots and lynching onto the Republicans. "There, of course, can be no excuse for the maltreatment and murder of these unfortunate people; but the hatred of the negroes has been mainly caused by the attempt of the radicals to force them into a position they never can attain in this country," the World declared. "The Tribune, whose course for the last ten years has done more than any other agency to incite the antipathy to the negro race which is working out such terrible results in the streets of New-York today, which is responsible, with the Evening Post, above all other agencies for bringing on this war, which has not omitted a single day since this war began to incite the hellish passions which are now culminating in riots, arson, and murder, quotes from our city report as follows, and dares to utter these infamous lies regarding it."2
The World's description of white mobs pulling blacks off of streetcars right in front of its offices on Fourth Avenue and beating them to death had "not a word of rebuke for this infernal exhibition of cowardly ruffianism," according to Greeley's Tribune. By this third day of the riots, the newspaper battle was also in full swing, with Democratic and Republican editors quoting from each other at length to damn the opposition with his own words and blame him for starting the riots.
Sounding much like Marble's World, Peace Democrat Ben Wood's Daily News struck back at William Cullen Bryant's Evening Post under the heading "REPUBLICAN PARTY RESPONSIBLE": "The Black Republican journals, with an unparalleled effrontery, are endeavoring to fix upon the Democracy the responsibility of the present disturbances in this city." Calling this accusation "the antipodes of truth," the Daily News went on to assert that the Evening Post was to blame for the "exasperation of the populace," because it favored policies "peculiarly distasteful to the masses of the North." While shamelessly dodging its share of guilt, the paper neatly summed up the political and social context of the riots.
[The Evening Post] has been the avowed champion of the doctrine of augmenting Union authority, and has invariably inclined toward a centralization of power and an abrogation of State Sovereignty. It has earnestly advocated the incorporation of the black element into our armies, and has at all times demonstrated such intense sympathy with the negro, at the expense of white men, that the Northern sentiment has been naturally embittered toward the unfortunate race, which is thus being accursed by the guardianship of fanaticism. And lastly, when the odious Conscription act was broached in Congress, The Evening Post was its zealous supporter and has been indefatigable in its attempts to bring about its enforcement.3
Such editorials had already marked the office buildings of Republican newspapers as targets for attack. "We were under marching orders nearly the entire night, patrolling various streets, cleaning out the rioters," wrote Major H. E. Richmond, who commanded an artillery detail from Fort Hamilton. "Our special attention was directed to the safety of the Times and Tribune buildings."4
The Tribune announced in an editorial on Wednesday that it was armed and would slaughter the rioters if attacked.5 Horace Greeley refused to alter his schedule and had come to work as usual for the third day in a row, taking a private carriage on Wednesday, however, since there was no longer any public transportation, and remained until the late afternoon.6 Taking heed of the attempt to burn the Tribune on Monday, the Times had not only fortified its offices but "established a regular garrison inside, while it brilliantly illuminated the open space all around it, in the circle of which the rioters did not dare come," Headley wrote.7"Give them grape, and a plenty of it," Times editor Henry Raymond declared.8
While the Democratic papers expressed their racism, the Republicans were unabashed, at least privately, about their disdain for the Irish and for immigrants in general. Gilmore declared: "We did not observe a single native-born workingman among the rioters. The mob consisted in about equal proportions of the more ignorant of our foreign-born population, and of the criminal class that lives by plunder, and has a hand against every man's person and property."9
On Wednesday afternoon, Mayor Opdyke issued a proclamation, addressed "to the citizens of New York," in which he blamed the chaos of the previous two days on the "temporary absence" of the local militia units but declared nonetheless that the riot was largely under control. "What now remains of the mob are fragments prowling about for plunder," the mayor claimed, but in the next line admitted that the police and military were on the point of "exhaustion from continued movements" and asked residents to form "voluntary associations" to protect their own neighborhoods. He also urged people to go back to their jobs and ordered the "various lines of omnibuses, railways, and telegraphs" to resume full service right away, while promising them military protection.10
Opdyke, along with Seymour, hoped that an announcement of the draft being suspended would also help bring order to the city. They summoned Colonel Nugent to the St. Nicholas Hotel on Wednesday and asked what orders he had received. Fry had telegraphed Nugent from Washington on Tuesday, telling him to "suspend the draft in New York City and Brooklyn," but had also forbade him to publish the order, which could be interpreted as a retreat by the government in the face of the mob. Opdyke and Seymour urged Nugent to publish the telegram, but he refused, insisting that he needed Fry's permission. However, Nugent agreed to sign his own name, not Fry's, to an informal bulletin for the following day's newspapers, declaring, "The draft has been suspended in New York City and Brooklyn."11
Clearly frustrated by Fry's orders from Washington and a lack of military support, Nugent offered his superior some advice. "I would suggest that when an adequate force is sent here, the draft should be resumed in one district at a time, and rigidly enforced there . . . I trust the Government will see the necessity of instructing the major-general commanding in this department to give me all the assistance he possibly can to sustain its authority," Nugent wrote on Wednesday. "The mob spirit must be put down by the strong arm of the military power. There is no use in trying to conciliate or reason with it. It has now assumed the character of an organized mass of plunderers, and the public generally have lost all sympathy for it; so that now is the time to crush out rebellion. This can be easily done, if the proper force is placed at our disposal."
Nugent added a bitter postscript: "I inclose you an extract from the World—Copperhead—by which you will see that the mob have paid their respects to my residence."12
Despite advice like Nugent's, and appeals from Republican leaders, martial law was never declared in the city. Opdyke's fear, shared by other local leaders and the administration, was that such a step would alienate Democratic leaders, who may have led the working classes into disloyalty, but who could also bring them back into line again, as they were demonstrating through their speeches to the mobs across the city. Without their influence and cooperation, Opdyke felt, the city might descend even farther into chaos, and the military would be spread thin trying to subdue the entire metropolis, not just discrete affected areas.13
At last, around 4 p.m., General Sandford went on the offensive for the first time, sending Lieutenant Ryer out from the arsenal to help the police fight a mob, some two thousand strong, that was reportedly setting fire to buildings near Forty-second Street and Tenth Avenue.14 Ar
riving at the scene, Ryer recalled, he and his fifty men were "saluted with groans, hisses, etc." and "received a storm of bricks, and missiles of every description, and shots from the roof and windows of the buildings."
When the rioters ignored Ryer's warning to disperse, he ordered his riflemen to pour one volley after another into the crowd. After five or more volleys the mob finally broke and fled, but the soldiers were still under attack from gunmen inside and on top of buildings, so Ryer detached a lieutenant and ten men, who cleared the houses. When they returned with two prisoners, Ryer decided his job was done and started marching his unit back to the arsenal. The rioters, however, had been reinforced by a second mob and charged the soldiers from behind. Ryer "faced the second platoon to the rear, and fired two more volleys into them."
Ryer noted proudly, "[It was the rioters'] last gathering in that locality. There were at least fifty killed, and a large number wounded, and I marched off with my command, without hardly a scratch." The accounts of participants and witnesses like Ryer, taken together, suggest that the actual death toll for the riots was much higher than the official count of 105. Even allowing for some overstatement of casualties, Ryer's action on Forty-second Street by itself accounts for a large percentage of the total.
Soon after Ryer returned to the arsenal, Tammany police court judge Michael Connolly came in to complain that the troops had killed women and children on Tenth Avenue, and to arrest the officer who led the attack. Sandford claimed he did not know who had been in charge. Connolly insisted that he could maintain order in the Twenty-second Ward and that sending more troops would only inflame the situation, but Sandford uncharacteristically refused such an arrangement.15
At 6 p.m., a militia officer reported to Sandford that a large mob had gathered on First Avenue between Eighteenth and Nineteenth Streets and seemed to be organizing for a rampage. For a second and last time, Sandford responded with vigor, sending 150 volunteers under Colonel Cleveland Winslow and others commanded by Colonel Edward Jardine equipped with two howitzers. Neither U.S. infantry nor state militia, these troops were citizens who had joined the volunteer regiments that sprang up in the surge of enthusiasm at the beginning of the war. Thus while some were two-year veterans, they were not professional soldiers.16*
To make matters worse, they hurried to First Avenue without support from the police or regular troops and soon found themselves in a deadly trap of tenement-lined streets. Ellen Leonard was visiting from out of town and staying with relatives nearby. She recalled someone in the excited mob shouting, "They are coming!" when the soldiers appeared. Upon hearing that, "the mob seemed to swell into vast dimensions, and densely filled the whole street before them. Hundreds hurried out on the house-tops, tore up brickbats, and hurled them with savage howls at the approaching soldiers. Shots were fired from secret ambushes, and soldiers fell before they had fired. Then they charged bravely into the mob, but their force was wholly inadequate."17
Jardine's artillerymen "raked the avenue up and down" with ten rounds of canister, killing some thirty rioters and bystanders with these exploding containers of shot, the Times reported. This tactic only scattered the crowd, however, while "the more bold among them lurked behind the corners of the buildings" and darted out to fire at the troops each time they reloaded the howitzers. Winslow did not have enough men to dispatch a portion of them into the houses and onto the rooftops, and after twenty minutes of punishing fire, ten soldiers had been killed or wounded. The mob seemed "remarkably well organized, firing at the word of command," according to the Times. Ryer's estimate of casualties on Forty-second Street and this Times account strongly contradict the official death toll for the riots by suggesting that some ninety people were killed in these two incidents alone.
Winslow ordered a retreat, and the soldiers "were followed at some distance by the howling mob, who were left masters of the field," the Times reported.18 The dead soldiers fell into "the hands of the frenzied mob," while the wounded were brought into the middle-class neighborhood west of the tenement area, near Second Avenue. Colonel Jardine, whose thighbone had been fractured by a bullet made from lead pipe, was taken in by the Leonards, along with a few of his wounded men.19
Sandford's dispatch of troops had been a fiasco. When Winslow appeared at the St. Nicholas Hotel to tell Horatio Seymour the state of affairs, the governor dispensed with political jealousies and immediately sent the colonel to General Brown on Mulberry Street to get help. At 9 p.m., Brown sent Captain H. R. Putnam with 150 U.S. troops and an artillery piece to escort Colonel Jardine and his wounded men out of the besieged neighborhood.20
"Doors and windows were at once closed, and the house became a hospital," Ellen Leonard recalled. "We flew for fans, ice water and bandages."21 One of Jardine's men was a surgeon and dressed the soldiers' wounds. "Already [the rioters] were clamoring for the wounded soldiers who had escaped them," Leonard wrote. "We thought of Colonel O'Brien's fate, and could not suppress the thought that our own house might be made the scene of a like tragedy."
Jardine dismissed the idea of defending themselves; even if they fought off the rioters, the house could easily be set on fire. Instead, Jardine and another severely injured soldier were to pose as civilian bystanders accidentally caught up in the riot, while the walking wounded were to escape over the rooftops and get help. "Arms, military apparel, and bloody clothing were accordingly concealed," Leonard wrote. "The Colonel was conveyed to the cellar and placed on a mattress," accompanied by the surgeon. The other badly wounded soldier was hidden in the "rear apartment on the upper floor" under the care of Leonard and her mother.
Leonard's brother, "with his bandaged head and disabled arm" from a beating at the hands of rioters earlier in the week, joined a soldier with a bad foot wound who could still walk, and they set out over the rooftops. Along with Leonard and her mother, her brother's wife and her sister stayed behind. "The two heroic women, H. and her sister, remained below to confront the mob."
Having posted guards on both avenues, the rioters controlled the street and were conducting a house-to-house search. They finally arrived at the Leonards' and pounded on door, shouting, "The soldiers! the soldiers!" "Bring out the soldiers!" One of the women went out and tried to convince them that the soldiers had come and gone.
"We know the men are here, and if you give them up to us, you shall not be harmed," the mob's leader said. "But if you do not, and we find them . . . your house will be burned over your heads, and I will not guarantee your lives for five minutes."
"You will not do that," she replied. "We are not the kind of people whose houses you wish to burn. My only son works as you do, and perhaps in the same shop with some of you, for seventy cents a day." Ellen Leonard noted that this shrewd response was only partly true: "She did not tell them that her amateur apprentice boy had left his place to go to Pennsylvania and fight their friends the rebels."
The woman agreed to let half a dozen men search the house, but most of the mob pushed their way inside. While one woman led the rioters from room to room, the other befriended the sentinel they had posted at the front door. The search party discovered the surgeon in the cellar, beat him, and took him outside to be lynched. They did not believe Jardine was a civilian either and aimed four muskets at his head. Before they could fire, however, he asked for a priest, and they were stunned.
"What, are you a Catholic?"
"Yes," Jardine replied.
The rioters hesitated, and the woman upstairs, hearing the commotion in the cellar, appealed to the sentinel to save the colonel's life. He went down below and pretended to recognize Jardine. "I used to go to school with him. He is no soldier." That was enough to convince the leaders of the mob, who called off their reluctant followers, and even offered to place a sentinel in front of the house "to prevent the annoyance of any further search."
As the hours passed, Jardine's condition grew worse, and there was no sign of a rescue party. In hiding Jardine from the mob, the Leonards had also concealed him from
Putnam and his troops, who had been dispatched to battle the rioters and search the area. The women had no means of transporting Jardine to a safer location. Finally, sometime after midnight, Leonard heard "the distant clank of a horse's hoof on the pavement" and "the steady, resolute tramp of a trained and disciplined body. No music was ever half so beautiful!" When she saw "a long line of muskets gleam out from the darkness," and Putnam's men stopped outside, she rushed downstairs and out the front door. Standing there, "pale and exhausted," was her brother, who had brought the soldiers to the house.
After scattering the mob at the end of the street, the soldiers evacuated the wounded men and the women to the police Central Office. "With much state and ceremony," the heroic women were "presented to the chieftains of civic power" and then escorted to more comfortable rooms at the St. Nicholas Hotel, where they arrived at 2:30 a.m., exhausted but unable to sleep, Leonard recalled. "The exciting scenes of the night, and the incessant roar and rumble of Broadway, kept all awake."
To workingmen, the draft's exemption clause was one more example of "special privilege" conferred by government on wealthy capitalists and a confirmation of the hardworking laborer's declining status in the new industrial order. Underlining their resentment, just after 11 p.m. on Wednesday, two hundred former grain shovelers descended on the Atlantic Dock Basin in Brooklyn and took revenge on the owners for hiring strikebreakers the previous summer. The mob drove off the few workers on duty with a hail of stones and, by igniting a barrel of pitch, set fire to a pair of enormous grain elevators that had eliminated hundreds of jobs when they were built two years earlier. While the rioters disappeared into the night, threatening similar action against the Erie Basin, the towering elevators and a scow were "burned to the water's edge," the Times reported, at a cost of more than one hundred thousand dollars to the owners.22
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