The Devil's Own Work

by Barnet Schecter

  in many wards of the city, the Irish were during the late riot staunch friends of law and order; that Irishmen helped to rescue the colored orphans in the asylum . . . that a large proportion of the police, who behaved throughout the riot with the most exemplary gallantry, are Irishmen; that the Roman Catholic priesthood to a man used their influence on the side of the law; and that perhaps the most scathing rebuke administered to the riot was written by an Irishman—James T. Brady. It is important that this riot should teach us something more useful than a revival of Know-Nothing prejudices.35

  However, Harper's also stated that the ignorance and impulsiveness of the Irish had led them to riot: A revival of nativism was precisely what the Irish-American feared. Its editors saw Republican attempts in other newspapers to blame the riots on the Irish as a political maneuver to bolster the party's ranks by creating a frenzy of Know-Nothingism. Irish volunteers in the army had hoped to overcome nativist discrimination, and the stigma of the draft riots seemed poised to wipe out whatever progress they had made. Trying to stem the tide, the Irish-American maintained that New York would continue to provide plenty of volunteers and that the draft was unnecessary. The paper blamed radical abolitionist journals for insulting Irish Catholics and generating the hostility that fueled the riots.36

  The slowness with which federal authorities had responded to the riots, and President Lincoln's choice of a Democrat, General John A. Dix, to replace General Wool on Friday, clearly disgusted those New Yorkers who had hoped for General Butler and a declaration of martial law. "The folk at Washington have, I perceive, with their usual promptitude, dispatched Gen. Dix, who with Gens. Wool and Sanford are to 'cooperate'with our city fathers and 'take measures' to quell the riots," photographer Clarence Eytinge wrote sarcastically to a friend. "If they could make it convenient to send to Holland for my Paternal Grandmother to consult with our Generals we would then have four old women equal to the Emergency, and no more negro children would be necessarily thrown out of 3 story windows as a pleasing amusement for the juvenile portion of the mob. (vide Herald.)"37

  However, while Dix's appointment signaled that Lincoln was willing to work with the War Democrats of Tammany Hall instead of sweeping them aside, the president also intended to put a stop to the rioting and enforce the draft in New York—and the Democrats would have to cooperate. As commander of the Maryland Department, Dix had tolerated no disloyalty, a fact which recommended him for his new post.38 Maria Daly reported in her diary that some of Judge Daly's colleagues had gone to Washington "to see what can be done," and the prognosis was not good. "New York, being a Democratic city, may expect little indulgence from the Administration," she wrote. "The Judge went up to see General Dix, now in command here, who says that government is determined to carry the draft measure through at all costs."39

  Dix, a New Yorker, had the confidence of the city's financial leaders, since he was himself an attorney and financier to whom they had turned before in moments of crisis. They had gotten him appointed secretary of the treasury in 1861 to help the feckless lame-duck president, James Buchanan, as he stumbled through the secession crisis. At that time, Dix had also persuaded eastern capitalists to lend the federal government five million dollars to shore up its finances. The choice of a conservative War Democrat with a national reputation for integrity, nonpartisan leadership, and toughness as a military commander seemed to confirm President Lincoln's mastery of political compromise.40

  By appointing Dix, Lincoln kept conservative, loyal Democrats in his war coalition and also pleased many ardent Republicans. "The announcement that General Dix has been ordered to take command here . . . gives us all great confidence," Joseph Choate reported to his mother, "and the fact that the power is to be transferred from Governor Seymour to him is encouraging."41

  While the retirement of General Wool was expected and hoped for, the War Department's replacement of General Brown, despite his central role in rescuing the city, seemed gratuitous, insulting, and unjust. General E. R. S. Canby, also an aggressive officer, who had prevented a confederate invasion of the New Mexico territory, took charge of federal troops in New York City and the harbor forts.

  Headley noted that Stanton's order for Brown's removal was issued before Washington had news that the rioting was over: "Why General Brown should have been removed at this critical moment, when he and the Police Commissioners were performing their herculean task so faithfully and well, is not so plain; unless it was the result of one of those freaks of passion or despotic impulse, for which the Secretary of War was so ignobly distinguished."

  Given Wool's abiding dislike of Brown, and the fact that he dismissed him once during the riots, Brown's removal may have been a concession to Wool to help him save face as he left the service. Whatever the true reason, when the riots were over, only the least effective and most counterproductive of the three generals in charge—General Sandford—had retained his post.42

  *Comptroller Matthew Brennan and Police Justice Joseph Dowling were both Irish Americans who had risen from humble beginnings in the Sixth Ward to prominence in the Tammany hierarchy.

  CHAPTER 16

  A Plot to Make the Northern

  States a Battle- Field

  iot, murder, and conflagration have begun in New York," the Richmond Enquirer rejoiced on Saturday, July 18, under the optimistic heading "BEGINNING OF CHAOS." The Confederate paper considered it "a world's wonder that this good work did not commence long ago; and this excellent outbreak may be the opening scene of the inevitable revolution which is to tear to pieces that most rotten society, and leave the Northern half of the old American Union a desert of blood-soaked ashes. We bid it good speed." The paper predicted that the riots would be "the parent of other and still worse convulsions."1

  Edmund Ruffin also looked forward to further rioting and used a grand historical analogy to pronounce the imminent demise of the North. Noting that Philadelphia was considering a commutation fund like the $2.5-million appropriation in New York, Ruffin wrote:

  I hope that the measure may be adopted there & in other cities. For instead of allaying the disposition for mob violence, it must greatly stimulate its action. It will operate like the policy of the sinking western Roman empire in buying the mercy, & the retreat, of the invading hosts of barbarians, when threatening to enter & to sack & burn the city of Rome. Temporary relief would . . . thus be dearly purchased, only to invite other hordes, or the same, to come again in search of the like payments for forbearance, or to merely divert the destruction to other localities.2

  In fact, the riots in New York were the culmination, not the beginning, of resistance to the draft, as the South hoped. By Saturday, the city was largely quiet. No great Copperhead uprising had materialized in the Midwest, where John Hunt Morgan's raid through southern Indiana and Ohio was in its third week. Instead, the rebel horsemen had all they could do to escape across the Ohio River into West Virginia. They approached Buffington Ford on Saturday, July 18, but three hundred Federals patrolled the crossing, so the horsemen rested overnight before advancing again at sunrise. The Union infantry had moved on, so the Confederates began crossing the river, only to fall into a trap.

  Two gunboats suddenly appeared, blasting the rebel column with their artillery, while five thousand Union cavalry moved in for the kill. Morgan managed to escape northward with a thousand men after ordering one of the brigades to stay back and protect his retreat. The Federals killed 120 Confederates and took 700 prisoners, nearly half of Morgan's command. Attempting to cross the river at a different ford later that day, Morgan was separated from three hundred more of his men, who made it across despite another ambush by Union gunboats. Morgan was halfway across the river but turned back to rejoin the seven hundred men stuck on the Ohio side.

  After fleeing to the north and east for an entire week, the rebel horsemen were finally surrounded and captured by Union troops near the Pennsylvania state line. They had covered more than a thousand miles in three and a half weeks, only to l
and in the state prison at Columbus, Ohio. General Burnside and Ohio's governor refused to treat them as prisoners of war, subject to parole and exchange. Instead they were jailed as criminals, deprived not only of their uniforms, their hair, and their beards but of visitors of any kind, including Morgan's mother, who made the trip from Kentucky in vain.3

  George Wingate of the Twenty-second militia regiment recalled that "on the 18th day of July we found ourselves swinging up Broadway, glad to be home once more, but sorry enough to think that we were denied the pleasure of a shot at the rioters in general, and our worthy ex-mayor [Fernando Wood] in particular."

  While the militia had been criticized as "Broadway troops, good for playing soldier" but unfit for the hardships of the real army, Wingate wrote, their campaign around Gettysburg had proven the critics wrong. "Marching one hundred and seventy miles in less than three weeks, in the most inclement weather, through mountain passes and over abominable roads, on ten days rations, without a change of clothing, in expectation of an attack at any moment (our regiment alone forming line of battle over nineteen times), they point with pride to the thanks tendered to them by General Meade in his official report, and claim that they have done all that could be expected of them—if not more."4

  Despite Meade's victory at Gettysburg, and the patriotism of the militia, Lincoln was furious about Lee's escape across the Potomac on July 14—at the very moment when Union forces were gaining ground elsewhere. Port Hudson, Louisiana, had fallen five days after Vicksburg, giving the Union control of the Mississippi and dividing the Confederacy. In middle Tennessee, Rosecrans had finally moved against the rebels, who fell back to Chattanooga. Seizing Chattanooga would place a strategic rail hub in Union hands and leave Georgia open to invasion, presenting another chance to split the Confederate states, east from west. Together, these advances suggested to Lincoln that destroying Lee's army right after Gettysburg would have ended the war. Instead, Lee continued to block the road to Richmond.5

  Also frustrating the North was the lack of progress in capturing Charleston, where the Union navy attacked the forts at the mouth of the harbor with little result except casualties. Sergeant Robert Simmons, a black New Yorker in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, died in the Union assault on Fort Wagner on Saturday, July 18. Earlier in the week, the draft rioters had destroyed his family's home and killed his nephew.6

  Harper s Weekly praised the brave black troops and condemned the Irish rioters. "It was at the very hour when negroes were pouring out their blood for the stars and stripes on the slopes of Fort Wagner that naturalized foreigners, who hauled down the Stars and Stripes whenever they saw them, tried to exterminate the negro race in New York."7 Because of such Republican outrage, the blacks at Fort Wagner did not die in vain: The juxtaposition of their contribution with the horror of the riots did much to win support for black regiments and to transform public opinion in the North in the coming months in favor of emancipation and against the Democrats' racism.8

  Southerners, by contrast, were enraged by the use of black troops. On July 20, Edmund Ruffin learned of a raid in South Carolina carried out by black troops backed up by Union gunboats in which thirty-four country estates and their groves of stately oak trees—worth two million dollars—were burned to the ground. "Is it carrying too far the desire for retribution and vengeance," he fumed in his diary, "to rejoice at the sacking & burning in New York, & to wish that the same calamities, carried out fully, & the destruction made complete, may attend every Yankee city?"9

  • • •

  "We are once more at peace in New York," Joseph Choate wrote to his mother on Saturday, July 18, "and as the government are concentrating a large military force here, we are not likely to be again disturbed. It has been a bloody enough week though. I think as many as five hundred, all told, must have been killed. The negroes have fled in all directions as from a slaughter-house."10

  Many fled for safety to free-black communities beyond Brooklyn on Long Island. As far east as Quogue, blacks took up weapons or hid wherever they could, in barns and other buildings. At Weeksville, Carsville, New Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Flatlands, armed blacks patrolled the edges of the settlements, keeping rioters away and creating havens for hundreds of refugees from New York City and Brooklyn.* Refugees overflowed from these small villages and hid in the woods for days on end without food or shelter. They also fled to the swamps along the New Jersey shore near Bergen, and north of Manhattan, to Morrisania† A charitable organization concluded that "at these places were scattered some five thousand homeless and helpless men, women, and children."11

  A black woman, her two children, and the Choates' housekeeper's brother had found shelter with them for the week. When the four ventured out, they found that the buildings where they lived and all of their belongings had been destroyed; the landlord of the man's boardinghouse, unable to flee on his crutches, had been lynched. "What is to be done for these helpless victims, I do not know," Choate continued. "We shall keep our quota for the present, and do what we can to meet their most urgent wants, but the general distress among them must be very great."12

  By contrast, Maria Daly continued to rely on an instinct for self-preservation. "Father came into the city on Friday, being warned about his house, and found fifteen Negroes secreted in it by [his housekeeper] Rachel. They came from York Street, which the mob had attacked, with all their goods and chattels. Father had to order them out. We feared for our own block on account of the Negro tenements below MacDougal Street, where the Negroes were on the roof, singing psalms and having firearms."13

  Maria Daly, like other New Yorkers, began to piece together fragments of information and rumors that suggested the riots were a conspiracy. She also heard that "among those killed or wounded have been found men with delicate hands and feet, and under their outward laborers' clothes were fine cambric shirts and costly underclothing. A dressmaker says she saw from her window a gentleman whom she knows and has seen with young ladies, but whose name she could not remember, disguised in this way in the mob on Sixth Avenue."14

  She also heard from friends in Westchester that "there was a secessionist plot to burn all the houses in the neighborhood on Thursday night . . . and that the principal instigator and mover in it was one of the richest and most influential men in the neighborhood. The purpose of the plot was to intimidate the government and prevent conscription."15

  Similarly, John Jay, grandson of the founding father and president of the Union League Club, wrote Stanton on July 18: "Apart from the Irish the copperhead element in the rural districts is ready to co-operate with them. In the usually quiet neighborhood where I live, in Westchester County, some forty miles from town, threats or murder and arson are openly made."16This was part of a larger conspiracy that had gotten out of control, Jay insisted; Governor Seymour, Judge McCunn, and Archbishop Hughes were helping to restore order in New York with the approval of the Copperhead plotters, who intended to make another attempt.

  An armed revolution in New York has been resolved on by the rebel sympathizers almost from the commencement [of the war]. Before the fall of Sumter, Fernando Wood, in a message to the Common Council, announced that by the secession of South Carolina the Union was dissolved, and it becomes every city and every community to take care of itself, and suggested that New York become a free city, like Frankfort-on-the-Main.

  A secret organization was set on foot for this purpose, and I was told by a Democrat now in the service of the Government that 5,000 names were pledged to the movement almost from the beginning.

  This organization, as I believe, has been long perfected in the different wards, and a movement for the last 4th of July was averted by the news of national victories. The existing riots were not contemplated in the shape they took and have interfered with the original plan.

  Jay offered no names or documentation, but concluded "from various suggestions let drop by newspapers and individuals" that the Copperheads' new plan was to instigate an "armed conflict between the N
ational Government and the State government." First the plotters hoped to have the state courts rule against the constitutionality of the draft. Then Lincoln's expected refusal to "obey the mandate of the State courts" would cause Seymour to call out the militia, followed by a popular uprising against federal tyranny, that would "make the Northern States a battle-field."

  This scenario matched the one described by Edmund Ruffin in his diary after Seymour was elected governor in 1862, but Ruffin was never implicated in a conspiracy; he was merely expressing his hopes, not his plans. Nonetheless, Jay saw the plot as an extension of Confederate strategy. "This is the last great card, I think, of the rebellion, and demands careful play on the part of the Government," to avoid such a confrontation without backing down on the draft. Jay suggested that the government preempt the conspirators by taking the draft law to the courts and obtaining a quick, favorable ruling; the recent victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Port Hudson gave the administration enough of an advantage to postpone the draft for a few weeks.

  Colonel Robert Nugent, in charge of restarting the draft lottery, impressed on Fry that the riots were fomented by Lincoln's political opponents, but counseled a show of force instead of avoiding confrontation.

  There is no doubt that most, if not all, of the Democratic politicians are at the bottom of this riot, and that the rioters themselves include not only the thieves and gamblers that infest this metropolis, but nearly every one of the vast Democratic majority, which has so constantly been thrown at every election against the Administration . . . Should any conflict between the Federal and State authorities occur, and it is not unlikely that it should, Seymour will most certainly side with the State, and would bring with him most of the militia . . . I would advise the proclamation of martial law, and the presence of an adequate [federal] force here, before any steps are taken to enforce the draft.17