Suddenly, the mob began firing from the houses, but Putnam did not retreat. "If they had been cool and steady, they might have done us great harm," Putnam wrote. "As it was, they fired wildly, running to a window and firing, and then retreating back out of danger." While Putnam's skirmishers in the street fired at the windows and rooftops to drive the snipers back, the rest of his men stormed the houses and searched them from top to bottom, killing most of the rioters in close combat and taking a few prisoners.
When every house was cleared, Putnam's force marched east to Second Avenue and drove the mob up as far as Thirty-first Street, where it was reinforced, and snipers again opened fire. Putnam had his artillerymen reply with canister, which cleared the street of rioters, except for the dozen or more who lay dead or dying. Putnam's skirmishers brought down others from the rooftops and windows, and his men once again searched the houses, flushing rioters from under beds and out of closets, chasing them down dark halls and on narrow stairways. "Some of them fought like incarnate fiends, and would not surrender," Putnam reported. "All such were shot on the spot."
Along with several prisoners, Putnam's men captured many large revolvers, which he allowed the troops to keep as trophies. The rioters had an impressive but motley arsenal, Putnam recalled, including "one blunderbuss which they fired on us," possibly a relic of the press-gang riots a century earlier. Forming a tight column with their prisoners, the troops marched back to the Central Office, where Putnam received a hero's welcome. "The loss of the rioters was great," Acton noted, "and seemed for the first time to break down the desperate spirit of the mob." As events transpired, Putnam's men had fought the last major battle of the riots.
The vast mobs that had ruled the city all week gradually and grudgingly dispersed, while those with guns made their final stand in sporadic fighting that continued into the night on Thursday. The last of the rioters—determined to hold the areas they had cordoned off with barricades and sniper nests— had to be flushed out one at a time. The Seventh Regiment pacified the East Side between Fourteenth and Thirty-fifth Streets, the last of the "plague spots," where rioters shot at them from windows and rooftops.
"One of the most determined rioters, who deliberately loaded and fired from behind a woman, was finally brought down by two of our men who are stationed on top of a house and has since died," militiaman Henry Congdon wrote. Another sniper, named Martin Moran, was one of the few suspected "ringleaders" identified by name in the newspapers. He had been trying to decapitate the militia units by firing at their officers when he was captured and nearly hanged by soldiers on Thursday night; the officers restrained their men, and Moran was taken into custody by the police. "About 10 p.m.," Congdon reported, "we formed a strong force and with a howitzer in front patrolled the neighborhood and met with no resistance." The city quieted down after midnight, and at 2 a.m., Commissioner Acton, who had not slept for four days, finally closed his eyes.16
"I suppose Abby and Sally may conclude to come home—that is, if we can be said to have a home—to N.Y., at all events," James Gibbons wrote to a relative on Thursday. "If any opportunity occur to advise them to come to our friends, the Choate's, No. 93 West 21st St., please do so. The first information they get will be by the papers, and they may leave before receiving my letters, written on the 14th and 15th, in which case, their movements will be entirely unknown to me." He continued: "The girls bear up wonderfully. Julia, at times, in her intensity, comes to a breakdown point . . . That is the whole. It is already over. Those grand widowed mothers, Dwight, Sedgwick, Putnam, Lowell, who sent their only, or all their sons, to the war, have mortal and incurable wounds—we, only a scratch. I am ashamed to have deserved no more."17
Despite his initial euphoria at being unhurt after their house was sacked, Gibbons was beginning to feel the pain of the family's losses. However, he reassured himself that they could start over—that the life of a family was above all its shared memories, not the objects that were invested with them. One object, however, was missed in particular. It was, Sally wrote, "an India china bird, given by a freed slave to Abby, when she was nine or ten years old, as a token of gratitude for the little girl's kindness and sympathy. This was carefully treasured through her childhood, becoming, in after years, a sacred plaything to her own children . . . During Friend [John] Hopper's last illness (which he passed at his daughter's house) this bird was kept on the mantelpiece in his room; he said 'I like to look at it.' "18
Word of the Gibbons family's losses spread rapidly as stories of the riot were reported in the newspapers of other cities. The family received numerous offers of help from their friends, one of them writing that they had clearly been "the victims of the senseless rage, and love of plunder, of the crew whom the Devil, with Governor Seymour for his Prime Minister, seems to have let loose in New-York. For mercy's sake, write a line and let us know how it is with you all."19
From Boston, where the mayor had put down the riot quickly on Tuesday night, a friend wrote to James Gibbons that the country had now "learned how to deal with mobs": "In this matter, I cannot help thinking that our example will have precedence. In mercy to the rabble, bullets and canister first, blank cartridges afterwards."20
Another friend, writing to James Gibbons from Washington, agreed: "But what is to be said of the miserable authorities of your city? All the alleged imbecility, tenderness for rebels, and mismanagement of the United States Government and Generals, sink out of sight compared with that of New-York officials. Five hundred men, armed with rifles, could have prevented all this disgrace. We are all very much cast down by the event—the glorious successes of Vicksburg &c. &c, do not relish, with such a bitter draught as New-York sends us."21
Both friends voiced a widespread Republican view that the New York riots could have been prevented if authorities had responded decisively and with overwhelming force. George Smalley, a veteran of the battle of Antietam and a member of the Tribune editorial staff, who remained at his post throughout the week, considered the riots "the flank movement of the Rebellion; an attempt not only to prevent the enforcement of the draft, which President Lincoln had too long delayed, but to compel the Unionist forces to return northward for the defense of their homes. A mad scheme, yet for near four days New York was in possession of the mob. I never understood why, since a couple of good regiments would at any moment have restored order, as the event showed. For want of them New York had to defend itself, and did it rather clumsily, enduring needless disasters and losses both of property and life."22
The riots also inflicted diplomatic damage on the North, boosting not only the South's morale but its status among supporters in France and England, who assumed that an apparently divided North could neither enforce the draft nor subdue the Confederacy. Reacting to news of the riots, one French newspaper called for an armistice and southern independence. Another characterized the riots as a "revolution" which would lead inevitably to chaos across the North and Lincoln's resignation or ouster. Two other papers declared that the North was on the verge of its own civil war.23
"Everything is quiet this morning and the city has generally resumed its normal appearance," Joseph Choate wrote to his mother on Friday. "General Brown now has about 12,000 troops and police under his command and some five thousand more are expected before tomorrow. General [Hugh] Kilpatrick, also, has arrived and is organizing a strong cavalry force. The disturbance yesterday was confined to the East Side of the city but it ended last night in a very desperate conflict in which a large number of rioters were killed & wounded and some thirty were taken prisoners."24 Despite further small clashes on Friday, Mayor Opdyke announced in the papers that the city was under control and had enough troops to meet any contingency.
Governor Seymour had asked Archbishop Hughes on Tuesday to intercede, but aside from his appeal in the newspapers on Wednesday, he did not do so until 2 p.m. on Friday. Drawn by announcements in the press and flyers, some six thousand people gathered under the balcony of Hughes's residence at Madison A
venue and Thirty-sixth Street. Too feeble to stand, the archbishop, accompanied by a dozen Catholic priests, remained seated during his hour-long speech. Republican critics felt his belated call for peace, restraint, and order might have saved lives had it been delivered several days earlier.25 However, the archbishop had clearly been reluctant to address his flock about the riots, since the very act could have been construed as a validation of bigoted claims that the rioters were all Irish Catholics, and all Irish Catholics were brutes who needed to be reprimanded by their own ethnic and religious leader.
"Men of New York," Hughes began. "They call you rioters, but I cannot see a rioter's face among you (applause)."26The archbishop then stoked his listeners' Anglophobia, saying that "if the city were invaded by the British or any other foreign power," he knew they would behave like real men. The remark also served notice that Catholics were loyal American citizens, despite the long-standing nativist claim that they were subversive agents of European despotism, beholden to the pope.
Before an appreciative, vocal crowd, Hughes continued to extol the good character of the Irish people and recalled his unstinting service to them. He denounced the "wretched tyranny" of the British that had destroyed their homeland, but urged them to value the relative freedom and opportunity to be found in America. Then, after another denial that the rioters were Irishmen, the archbishop gradually and gently admonished the crowd to bear their troubles patiently. "In this country the Constitution has made it the right of the people to make a revolution quietly every four years" with "ballots not bullets."
Archbishop John Hughes
Hughes praised the American form of government while pointedly refraining from comment on the current leaders, which provoked a cry from someone in the crowd: "Let the nigger stay South," followed by shouts of "order." As the speech continued, Hughes repeatedly denied that his listeners were rioters but also became increasingly direct in advising them to refrain from violence. "At least let such of you as love God and revere the laws of the country, of which not a single statute has been enacted against you either as Irish or as Catholics, withdraw from crowds; because you have, as well as others, suffered enough already."
Hughes also appealed to the audience to live up to the proud history of the Irish people, who resorted to arms only in self-defense. He asked:
That if, when the smoke clears away, the responsibility of these so-called rioters shall be thrown upon Catholics, especially Irish Catholics, and centred upon my heart, I wish you would tell me in what country I should claim to have been born (voices, "Ireland"). Yes but what do you say if these stories are true? What do you say? Ireland! That never committed by her own sons, or on her own soil, until she was oppressed, a single act of cruelty. Ireland, that has been the mother of heroes and poets, but never the mother of a coward (applause). Perhaps you will think that this is blarney . . . it is a fact . . . [W] hen St. Patrick came, he spoke to the multitude, and they listened to him; to the doctrines of Christianity, just as you have been patient enough to listen to me to-day.
The military acknowledged the power of Hughes's leadership by keeping troops nearby but out of sight during the address, ready to contain violence but not be accused of provoking it. The archbishop's address capped the process that began with Seymour's City Hall speech on Tuesday: Republican officials gave Catholic and Democratic leaders some room to carry out their policy of conciliation on the assumption that it would make their own job of putting down the riots a little easier.27
Radical Republicans, however, were furious and still hoped for martial law. "Archbishop Hughes has behaved like the Devil during all this, and Gov. Seymour not much better," Joseph Choate complained in a letter to his mother. "Witness their public acts and proceedings. The only hope for the redemption of this City is for Mr. Lincoln to come to our aid and declare martial law. That alone will displace Seymour. Then by a summary trial the ring leaders of this riot can be punished. By the ordinary courts nothing effective will be done. They are all in the hands of the Irish."28
Republican denunciations of "the Irish" notwithstanding, rioters and corrupt politicians were distinctly a minority of the two hundred thousand Irish Americans who comprised nearly a quarter of the city's population. Indeed, Irish Americans were among those most angered by the riots and most adamant about punishing the mobs' leaders. Sergeant Peter Welsh, at the front with Meagher's Irish Brigade, wrote to his wife, Margaret, from the front: "I am sorry to hear that there is such disgracefull riots in New York, i hope it will not get near to you nor anoy you . . . i see they tried the virtue of grape and canister on them and it had a very good efect. the originaters of those riots should be hung like dogs, they are the agents of jef davis and had their plans laid [to] start those riots simultanesly with Lees raid into Pensilvenia. i hope the authorutys will use canister freely, it will bring the bloody cutthroats to their censes."29
Welsh emphasized that the majority of rioters must have been misled by Confederate agitators, but the Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Port Hudson would at last convince New Yorkers of dubious loyalty that the North had the upper hand: "A pretty time they are getting up mob riots when one unanimous efort might finish up this acursed war in a few weeks, jeffs agents have been working very slyly and cuning but they will be foiled in all their skemes. every leader and instigator of those riots should be made an example of. there was hundreds no doubt mixed into them that did not know what they were doing caried away by excitement and under the influence of traitorous cut throats who made them believe they were resisting a great wrong."30
Welsh also told his wife he was "very sorry that the Irish men of New York took so large a part in them disgracefull riots. God help the Irish. They are to easily led into such snares which gives their enemys an oppertunity to malighn and abuse them."31
In a letter to the Times on July 29 another Irish American, A. F. Warburton, declared that "for the honor of Old Ireland," New York's Irish community, not the Common Council, should raise the funds to rebuild the Colored Orphan Asylum. Fie hoped the "smoking ruins of passion, prejudice and crime may be converted, by Ireland's sons, into a noble monument of liberal reparation and justice." Since its destruction, he wrote, "my blood has tingled with shame to know that this deed of fiendish atrocity was perpetrated mainly by parties (I cannot dignify them with the name of men) who claim to have come from that dear old Isle, which has given birth to those whose names are loved and honored in every land, and whose gallant sons are even now showing their devotion to the country of their adoption by shedding their blood bravely for her defense."
Warburton evidently feared a nativist backlash against the Irish in the wake of the riots. He pledged as much as five hundred dollars and suggested that "our honored fellow-citizen Charles O'Conor—whom no one will accuse of being an Abolitionist, but whose generosity and love of justice we all admire—be made Treasurer" of the fund in order to "put the matter beyond reach of any political imputation."
Indeed, the selection of O'Conor—one of the city's leading attorneys and a defender of the Confederacy—would have expressed a universal condemnation of the attack on the orphanage. Warburton also mentioned the city's preeminent Irish businessman, John Devlin, and two Tammany politicians, James Brady and Richard O'Gorman, as likely leaders for an effort to raise $50,000 to $100,000. Ultimately, however, funds to rebuild the Colored Orphan Asylum came primarily from the city.32
Some habitual critics of the working-class Irish came to their defense. Orestes Brownson, dubbed a "Catholic Know-Nothing" because of his disdain for immigrants, blamed conservative Catholic leaders as well as demagogic American politicians for leading the Irish rioters astray. A Protestant minister and prominent intellectual who had shocked his Yankee peers by converting to Catholicism twenty years earlier, Brownson was a latecomer to the antislavery cause in 1857, a switch that also put him at odds with the Catholic establishment.
He calculated that "nearly nine-tenths of the active rioters were Irishmen and Ca
tholics," and almost all were "from the lowest and most degraded social class, even when instigated by men of high social standing." He condemned "the general tone of the clergy and respectable Catholics of the city; and especially of the Catholic press," which was lukewarm in its support for the Union cause and thereby influenced the rioters. "Yet the riot was not a Catholic riot," Brownson declared. "These things they did not as Catholics or Irishmen, but as adherents of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY, as partisans of Horatio Seymour, Fernando Wood, James Brooks, Clement L. Vallandigham, and others . . . who had worked them up to uncontrollable fury."33
While George Templeton Strong was willing to "see war made on Irish scum as in 1688," after the riots, Greeley and other Republicans admitted that the mobs were a minority of the Irish community, and that the mostly Irish residents of the crime-ridden Sixth and Fourteenth Wards, which included the Five Points slum, had been peaceful, even toward their black neighbors. "This is due in great measure to the personal influence of Controller M. T. Brennan and Police Justice Dowling," the Tribune declared.* "Both these gentlemen have been unremitting in their exertions to dissuade their friends from giving way to overt acts, which could only result in calling down upon them the penalties of the law." In these famously violent wards, the Democrats' conciliatory approach had been applied preemptively to keep the peace.34
Even Harpers Weekly, the highly partisan Republican journal—which regularly printed Thomas Nast's anti-Tammany, anti-Catholic, anti-Irish cartoons— called for tolerance. The Irish had rioted not as Irishmen but as part of the city's working class, in which they happened to be the largest ethnic group, Harpers later asserted. Americans should bear in mind that
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