Earlier in the week, rioters in Manhattan had destroyed two newly patented street-sweeping machines owned by the city, denouncing them and the grain elevators as "laborsaving machines" that cost workingmen their jobs.23
By improvising solutions, and concealing their repair work from the mobs, the telegraphers who had set out in the storm on Monday night had made a good deal of progress. Carrying lines over the tops of houses, or around them through backyards, and supporting the wires on clothesline poles, by Wednesday evening they had fully restored the system in Lower Manhattan. Farther north, they had reconnected most of the precincts to police headquarters. 24
Union soldiers in New York City during the riots
"We are overrun with Negroes," the station houses telegraphed to the Central Office. "Give all people protection," came the reply.25 By 10 p.m. on Wednesday, Acton had been at police headquarters for three days and nights, never stopping to sleep or change his clothes, while he fired off and received some four thousand telegrams.26"The police and the military here have been very effective," Mayor Opdyke telegraphed Stanton, "but their duties have been so arduous that they are greatly exhausted."27
Just when the police and soldiers were succumbing to fatigue, reinforcements began to arrive. The Seventy-fourth Regiment of the New York State National Guard arrived in the city at about 10 p.m., followed, before midnight, by the Sixty-fifth Regiment. The 152nd New York Volunteers as well as the 26th Michigan Volunteers would soon follow, a total of more than four thousand troops. At about 4:30 a.m., Acton received a telegram from the Twenty-eighth Precinct: The Seventh Regiment, some six hundred strong and the city's mainstay in the recent decades of rioting, had arrived from Pennsylvania and disembarked at the foot of Canal Street.28
In the gray, predawn light, "the steady ranks were seen marching along Canal Street towards Broadway, and soon drew up in front of the St. Nicholas Hotel," Headley reported. "It was the beginning of the end, to the minds of many thousands who speedily heard of their arrival," Stoddard wrote. "Loud cheers brought us to the window to see the glorious returning 'Seventh' marshaled before us," Ellen Leonard recalled, "and with all our hearts and voices we joined in the welcome which greeted them."29
*The men under Winslow were drawn from the Duryea Zouaves, and those under Jardine from the Hawkins Zouaves. The Zouaves dressed in colorful North African-style uniforms.
CHAPTER 15
The Final Days: Thursday and Friday
he heavy military presence came too late for Albro and Mary Lyons. Having failed on Monday and Tuesday, on Wednesday night the rioters managed to storm their house. "This sent father over the back fence to the Oak Street station, while mother took refuge on the premises of a neighbor," Maritcha Lyons wrote. "This was a friendly German who in the morning had loosened boards of intervening fences in anticipation of an emergency. This charitable man, some weeks after, was waylaid and severely beaten by 'parties unknown.'" Maritcha's parents were safe, but their home, and the business that had brought Albro and his family to the verge of middle-class affluence, had essentially been destroyed.
Not until after the rioters had entered the house did the police take action against them, Maritcha Lyons recalled bitterly.
In one short hour the police had cleared the premises and both parents were at home after the ravages. What a home! Its interior was dismantled, furniture was missing or broken. From basement to attic evidences of the worst vandalism prevailed. A fire, kindled in one of the upper rooms was discovered in time to prevent a conflagration. The dismayed parents had to submit to the indignity of taking refuge in the police station house. A three days' reign of terror disgraced a city unable to protect its inhabitants.1
Despite the arrival of four thousand troops, reports to the Central Office from various precincts early Thursday morning "indicated another sharp day's work," Stoddard noted. On the East Side, fifty rioters had chased a black man named Samuel Johnson to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry, "beat him very badly," and then pitched him into the East River, where he drowned. Blacks were hiding "in cellars and garrets, hardly daring to venture out for food," Stoddard wrote. Then they fled to the nearest police station as soon as the mobs passed on. "Receive colored people as long as you can" was Acton's consistent message, telegraphed again on Thursday to all station houses, many of which overflowed with refugees. "Refuse nobody."
Fear continued to grip the city. The gas companies were under heavy military guard to prevent sabotage. The huge Delameter Iron Works, which produced ironclads for the navy, refused to start up again without similar protection. Through another announcement in the papers, Mayor Opdyde called on residents to return to work, and some streetcar and omnibus lines reopened, but a mob of one hundred men "stopped the Second Avenue cars on the corner of Twenty-third Street, and made them turn back," the precinct reported. Two other lines were also targeted by rioters. On Fourth Avenue, the conductor and passengers were robbed of their valuables; on First Avenue, the mob decided to let the car proceed when someone shouted that the owner was a staunch Democrat, unlike the abolitionists who operated the Third Avenue line.2
Like the many underutilized officers and men stationed at the arsenal on Seventh Avenue, Horatio Seymour had lost confidence in General Sandford's leadership. The governor had sent the panicked Colonel Winslow to the police Central Office the night before, and on Thursday he also instructed the New York State regiments, just back from Pennsylvania, to report to General Brown.3
By 8 a.m., Brown had dispatched Colonel William Berens with three companies of New York militia to guard three foundries on the East Side that produced guns and ammunition, including James Jackson's foundry, which rioters had threatened and forced to close on Monday morning. While Berens stationed about twenty men with a cannon at each of two bombshell factories, menacing crowds began milling around his column. With one company left, Berens was heading up First Avenue toward Jackson's foundry on Twenty-eighth Street at about 1 p.m., when rioters attacked.
Berens's men swung from a column of march into a line of fire and blasted away, accompanied by their howitzer, which quickly cleared the avenue. However, when the troops advanced from Twenty-second to Twenty-third Street, they came under fire from two sides. Berens kept his men moving forward and firing at the same time, while he sent one man to the Central Office to request help.
At Twenty-eighth Street, the militiamen charged through the dense mob around Jackson's foundry only to find that the doors were locked. They broke in and stationed themselves inside, fending off the mob with a steady barrage of gunfire and a charge into the street until Berens's messenger returned with two more companies to help guard the foundry.
Displaying their intense hatred of the Metropolitans, several rioters came forward to demand that the four policemen inside the foundry with the soldiers be turned over to the mob. Only if the patrolmen were "delivered up" would the mob disperse. "The committee stood at a respectful distance while delivering their message, and took to their heels, on an intimation to do so or they would be shot," David Barnes reported. The policemen exchanged their uniforms for workmen's clothes discovered in the foundry and slowly made their escape through the crowds in the street. The rioters had not given up, however, and as the day wore on, they hovered nearby, waiting for a chance to attack.4
Even though such skirmishing continued, and entire areas of the city remained under the mobs' control, in the early afternoon Mayor Opdyke telegraphed Stanton that the riot was over "for the present," and "Andrews, one of the chief leaders, is arrested."5 John Andrews had egged on the mobs throughout the week with his speeches, most visibly at the Ninth District draft office where the riots began on Monday. Four detectives entered a house on Eleventh Street and approached Andrews while he was in bed with his mistress, a black madam who had been a prostitute for a dozen years. The plainclothesmen duped Andrews into leaving with them, and after a brief stop at the police Central Office, he was shackled and transferred to Fort Lafayette, off the Brooklyn shore.
Thus he became a political prisoner—the only rioter in federal custody—awaiting trial for conspiracy.
As the most clearly identifiable leader of the riots, Andrews became the focus of public anger, even though he appears to have been an associate of small-time criminals, not grand Copperhead conspirators. True to its white supremacist credo, the World was more dismayed that Andrews was a "practical amalgamationist," consorting with a black woman, than that he had fomented so much violence and destruction. The Tribune, by contrast, condemned Andrews as one who had "roused the fierce passions of the mob, and turned men into incarnate devils."6
Mayor Opdyke believed the arrival of the regiments on Thursday "removed all doubt as to our ability to promptly quell the riots and restore the supremacy of law." Indeed, people began to resume business as usual, opening stores that had been shuttered for two days and braving the streets to buy fresh milk and ice.7 Joseph Choate wrote to his mother: "Law and order appear to be getting the upper hand again, although up to day-break there was not much to reassure us . . . The cruelty which has for these three days been perpetrated on the blacks is without a parallel in history . . . Several of our city regiments have now actually arrived and retribution awaits the rioters."8
Colonel Robert Nugent was not convinced. "Apparently everything is quiet, but it is the opinion of well-informed persons that this state of things will not last long," he reported to Fry, the provost marshal general. "It is well, also, that you should be aware that so far as the protection of the public property in my possession, and of my own life and the lives of those attached to my office, I am utterly powerless."
Wool had given Brown "command of all the United States forces, including the Invalid Corps," Nugent complained, while Sandford and Acton were, of course, in charge of the militia and police, respectively. "Though it is a well-known fact that the hostility of the mob has been directed against me personally, and against this office, though threats of the most diabolical kind have been made against my life, I am unable at this moment to procure a guard for the protection of this office against even ordinary danger." Nugent went on to deliver a verdict on the incompetence of the military in handling the riots.
It is a very delicate matter to complain of officers intrusted by the authorities with high responsibility, but I cannot help saying that the confusion, vacillation, and conflict of orders which exist among the general officers of the regular, volunteer, and militia force at present in this city, have the effect of encouraging the rioters and lessening the confidence of the public in the Administration . . . Subordinate officers . . . have been so annoyed and perplexed by conflicting orders that half of their efficiency is destroyed. To enforce the draft properly . . . we must have a force of at least 15,000 men, under the command of some decisive, energetic officer, who is neither afraid nor ashamed to execute it.9
The riots were not over, and the war of words in the press still flared as well. Marble's editorials in the World on Thursday continued to blame the Republicans while pursuing his political agenda of portraying the Democracy as united in favor of the war. "Negroes are cruelly beaten in New-York because mock philanthropists have made them odious by parading them and their emancipation as the object to which peace first and the Union afterward, with the lives of myriads of Northern men, are to be sacrificed. Upon this the abolitionists of the Post and Tribune call out to all mankind that the overwhelming majority of people of New-York are in sympathy with secession! If this be not practical treason, what shall be so styled?"10
Henry Raymond of the New York Times had a reply. The World did not name the Times along with the Tribune and Evening Post because Raymond's paper was more conservative and downplayed the issues of slavery and abolition, but he took up the challenge nonetheless.11
"The World, with an eager ferocity which finds its proper counterpart in the ranks of the mob, seizes the opportunity to denounce those journals which support the Government as responsible for the riot, and to point them out to the mob as proper objects of its vengeance," Raymond declared in an editorial on Thursday. The charge that the city's radical Republican newspapers had precipitated the riots was ludicrous, Raymond replied: "The World knows better."
If the motive for the riots was opposition to the draft, the Times asked, "Who stimulated that opposition? Who has day after day devoted time and talent and strength to denunciations of the law—long after it had been placed upon the statute-book, and when criticism had thus become utterly unavailing for any purpose consistent with the public good? Who has filled column after column with incendiary appeals to the poorer classes, and with utterly false and mischievous statements as to the object and effect of the national conscription?" Clearly, Raymond implied, it was the Democratic, not the Republican, press that had incited the riots.
"The World permits itself to read a lecture to the 'radical journals' for not having heeded its warnings of the 'rude vengeance' of which it gave them notice, and, with an apparent consciousness of temporary power, it deals lavishly in threats of still further punishment at the hands of the mob," Raymond asserted. Nonetheless, the Times always had and always would follow its own conscience and freedom of speech "without regard to the warnings of the World OT the menaces of the mob," Raymond declared.
In the same issue the Times also noted that financial confidence had not been shaken and the price of gold had gone down instead of up. This was due to a sense that mob rule could not last long, and to the string of Union victories in the past two weeks, the paper said. "Within a fortnight Lee has been beaten back into Virginia with a loss of two-fifths of his army—Vicksburg and Port Hudson have fallen, which gives the Government complete command of the Southwest—Bragg has been forced well down into Georgia, which secures entire Tennessee—and Charleston, which has so often baffled our efforts, has been approached so successfully that its speedy fall is probable."
While the political battle raged in the press, Democratic and Republican officials continued to exert pressure on each other face-to-face, vying to shape the course and the outcome of the riots. On Thursday afternoon, Judge Michael Connolly, still dissatisfied after his meeting with General Sandford the day before, joined forces with state senator John Bradley and called on Governor Seymour. This time they wanted to clear the Eighteenth Ward of troops and let the respectable middle-class families there use their influence to restore order. Since this plan fit with Seymour's own approach of touring the city and appealing firmly but sympathetically to the rioters, he wrote a letter of support for Connolly and Bradley, which they presented when they made their request to Acton.
"I naturally felt very indignant," Acton recalled. "It can't be done," he told them. "I would not do it to save your lives. We have been fighting a week, and are going to keep on until every man, white or black, can go anywhere on this island in perfect safety." General Brown concurred. "There's been too much tampering with rebels already," he told the two Tammany officials, "and I'll not move a man unless Mr. Acton tells me to."12
Brown was equally adamant in refusing to negotiate with rioters that afternoon at Jackson's foundry. At 5 p.m., while some four thousand rioters continued to surround Berens and his company of militiamen inside the factory, a Catholic priest relayed a message from the mob threatening to burn the building if the troops did not leave, and promising a truce while they withdrew. The building's owners, who initially wanted military protection, were suddenly eager to have the troops leave. However, when Berens requested guidance from the Central Office, Brown instructed him to stand his ground. The rioters started to assault the foundry that evening, but a fusillade from the militiamen drove them back and discouraged any further attacks.13
Captain Putnam had rescued Colonel Jardine and his men on Wednesday night and performed ably throughout the week, so General Brown naturally turned to him on Thursday evening at about 6 p.m. to redeem a dangerous mess—a reprise of the previous night—that had unfolded earlier in the day near Gramercy Park.
A colonel stationed there with
his cavalry unit had taken eighty of his men on foot to reconnoiter east of the park on Twenty-second Street when they were ambushed between Second and Third Avenues by snipers firing from the roofs and windows of barricaded houses and by rioters in the street. In their chaotic retreat, the troops left behind the body of a sergeant, while their colonel fled to police headquarters and reported the rout to General Brown. "What are you doing here, sir?" Brown shouted at the colonel. "Go, sir. Your place is with your men."14
Brown sent Captain Putnam, leading 160 infantry and artillerymen and some Metropolitans, to recover the sergeant's body and flush the rioters from the buildings.15 At Gramercy Park, Putnam's men stormed a house from which rioters were firing on the cavalrymen, but the snipers escaped out the back. Leaving the women in the house with a warning that it would be leveled by artillery if they allowed it to be used as a snipers' nest again, Putnam and his force proceeded east on Twenty-second Street, where they found the body of the slain cavalry sergeant. Putnam recalled: "I ordered a livery-stable keeper to put his horses to a carriage, and accompany me, for the purpose of carrying the dead and wounded. He replied that the mob would kill him if he did, and that he dare not do it. He was informed that he would be protected if he went, but if he refused he would be instantly shot. The horses were speedily harnessed and the body put into the carriage."
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