Completely absorbed with his work, and committed to taking a stand against the rioters, Horace Greeley did not leave the city until Saturday to join his wife and children, who were alone at the family's farm in Chappaqua, New York. Greeley, whose paper reported on the full scope of the rioting in the suburbs, might well have known that his wife, Mary, and daughters, Ida and Gabrielle, were in danger.
He soon learned that a drunken mob from Sing Sing, nearby on the Hudson River, had threatened the farm but was stopped at the gates by a neighbor, who declared that the property was protected by a trail of gunpowder, easily ignited if they came any closer. "Heed my warning, my brethren," the Quaker farmer reportedly said, "Horace Greeley is a man of peace, but Mary Greeley will fight to the last." The crowd moved off, while Mary, isolated on the farm and suffering from chronic mental illness, closed all the shutters and kept a lonely vigil until her husband's return.18
Greeley did not remain with her long, however. He headed back to the city the following day. Tribune editorials denounced Irish immigrants as infidels for not observing the Lord's Sabbath, but the paper's founder stuck to his habit of working on Sundays. On that day, Unitarian minister Octavius B. Frothingham, a friend of Greeley's for twenty-five years, told his congregation, "The one man who, before and above all others, was a mark for the rage of the populace . . . the one man who was hunted for his blood as by wolves . . . was a man who had been the steadfast friend of these very people who hungered for his blood."19
The effort to help the city's black victims began with individuals like Joseph Choate and his wife bravely providing shelter to their own servants and the servants' relatives. Henry Raymond of the Times spurred the effort to the next level with an editorial on Friday, and by Saturday businessmen including William Dodge had set up the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots and eventually received contributions of more than forty thousand dollars. Like Dodge, who had courageously spoken out against the rioting earlier in the week, they all risked retaliation by publishing their names as benefactors of the black community.
Blacks were cautious at first, the committee observed in its final report, but soon the streets outside the relief office on Fourth Street near Broadway "were literally filled with applicants," men, women, and children, showing signs of starvation after a week of hiding, and some with wounds from the riots. They applied for emergency aid and received small cash payments, usually no more than five dollars; they were allowed to apply repeatedly if necessary in the coming weeks. The office was not far from the police Central Office, so help could be dispatched in case of a disturbance.
The committee also made additional payments after Henry Highland Garnet, Charles Ray, and other black clergymen reviewed cases, made home visits, and sought out black refugees hiding in the suburbs to determine their level of need. Because the clergymen were trusted to evaluate the validity of claims, many blacks and their families received aid in the next month, a total of almost thirteen thousand people. At the Fourth Street office, lawyers also volunteered their services to help applicants file claims against the city.20
An office was also set up in Brooklyn, where the committee helped more than two thousand blacks and employed four black ministers to make home visits and verify need. The committee noted that an Irish American named Edgar McMullen had been helping the refugees who were still scattered in the woods near Weeksville and other free-black communities. With his help the committee supplied them with "Bread, Hams, Flour, Rice, Sugar, and Tea, and in some few cases of great need small sums of money." While most blacks promptly returned to work in Brooklyn, according to the committee, the two hundred who worked in the tobacco factories remained unemployed because the owners feared more violence.21
"Those who know the colored people of this city, can testify to their being a peaceable, industrious people, having their own churches, Sunday-schools and charitable Societies; and that, as a class they seldom depend on charity," the committee declared. Spurred by altruism—and the fear that blacks, who had been relatively self-sufficient, would suddenly become a class of paupers "dependent on the charity of the city"—the committee reassured white employers that the military would protect them while blacks resumed their former jobs.22
In a message to racist employers and white workers, the committee appealed to their conservatism and self-interest, asking them to "restore the colored laborer to his customary place" and to "restore the old order of things." The committee also pointed out that if white workers drove blacks out of the city, rural white workers would come in to take their place in the most menial jobs, enlarging the supply of white laborers and depressing wages. Blacks, rather than posing a competitive threat, in fact occupied a lowly niche that kept the Irish on a slightly higher rung of the economic ladder.23
Implicit in the praise of blacks' industriousness was the committee's disdain for the Irish Catholic poor as "loafers." Union League Club members on the committee were mostly Protestants and nativists whose efforts to cultivate the loyalty of the city's immigrant population through charitable moral reform crusades before the war had been rebuffed. In the wake of the riots, helping responsive blacks and gaining their loyalty also provided an opportunity for Republicans to rehabilitate New York's reputation, badly tarnished as a hotbed of Copperhead disloyalty and racial violence. In that vein, the Union League Club also resolved that week to raise a black regiment from New York for the Union army.24 It would be a direct challenge to Governor Seymour's long-standing refusal to authorize such regiments.
Lucy and Julia Gibbons left for the country with Abby's father, John Hopper, while their father waited for Abby and Sally to return to the city from the military hospital. Joseph Choate predicted that the Gibbons family would not suffer financially, "The Legislature of New York in 1855 passed a law making the City or the County liable for all property destroyed or injured in consequence of a riot or mob, and I do not think that the authorities of the City or County will be slow to make just amends for the losses. At any rate if there is any hesitation . . . we shall sue them."25
Choate correctly calculated that blacks would suffer immeasurably more than white victims. For Albro and Mary Lyons, the bitterly ironic finale of the riots was that they—the city's peaceful, responsible residents—had to sneak out of New York like thieves. "Under the cover of darkness the police conveyed our parents to the Williamsburg ferry," Maritcha Lyons wrote. "There steamboats were kept in readiness to either transport fugitives or to outwit rioters by pulling out into midstream. To such humiliations, to such outrages, were law abiding citizens exposed and that in a city where they were domiciled tax payers. Is it any wonder that for them New York was never after to be considered home. From one end of Long Island to the other, mother with her children undertook the hazardous journey of getting to New England by crossing the Long Island Sound."26
While Albro stayed in New York to salvage their property and document their losses, Mary Lyons took her children to New London, Connecticut, where friends put them up briefly before they moved on to Salem, Massachusetts. "Even there one was not safe from the onslaughts of an irrepressible mob," Maritcha Lyons noted, "but the authorities were prepared to forestall any suspicion of lawlessness," and rioting never materialized. Maritcha Lyons was not alone in her belief that the catastrophe in New York could similarly have been prevented if authorities had taken more precautions. "We reached Salem tired, travel stained, with only the garments we had on. Mother's fortitude never relaxed nor did her courage fail."27
However, their psychological needs were as great as their physical ones. "The Remond family, with whom we took refuge, outdid themselves in showering upon us kind attentions, anxious to cheer and to incite hope to replace despair," Maritcha Lyons recalled.
Before her marriage, mother had been closely associated with this family, as clerk in their confectionery store in the summer, and instructor of the daughters in the various branches of hair work during the winter, for she h
ad been a pupil of Martel, a noted New York French hairdresser. Maritcha Remond was mother's bridesmaid and I am named for her.
Mother had always been treated by them as a daughter of the house and their tender regard did much to arouse her from a state of apathy which threatened to overwhelm her upon her arrival at a place of refuge with the termination of her untoward journey.28
Maritcha Remond Lyons
The children from the Colored Orphan Asylum fared somewhat better than most blacks, since they had white managers to represent them. Nonetheless, they too were in miserable shape, still wearing the dirty and disheveled clothing from the night they fled to the police station, as Samuel Denison from the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People discovered when he visited the refugees on Blackwell's Island on July 22. The secretary and the manager of the asylum sent a note with Denison, and the merchants' committee responded with a grant of a thousand dollars. "Most of the Officers and domestics of the Institution lost all their clothing and other effects, so intent were they in saving the children," Anna Shotwell wrote.29
By the weekend, the city was comparatively peaceful, but the trauma of the riots persisted. The merchants' committee reported that "some four or five white women, wives of colored men . . . had been severely dealt with by the mob. One Irish woman, Mrs. C. was so persecuted and shunned by every one, that when she called for aid, she was nearly insane . . . Several cases of insanity among the colored people appear, as directly traceable to the riots."30
• • •
The financial cost of the draft riots has been calculated both officially and unofficially. By law, the city was responsible, in the event of a riot, for the damage or loss of private property, and eventually paid out $1.5 million to settle claims, including a negligible amount to blacks. Given that more than one hundred buildings were burned and two hundred others looted or damaged, various accounts estimate the actual property loss as high as $3 million and even $5 million—equivalent to $60 million or $100 million in today's dollars. The economic loss from the disruption of business and the flight of residents was never calculated in a dollar amount.31
While the committee evaluating the riot claims was part of the Tweed-dominated New York County Board of Supervisors, it does not appear to have taken the tragedy as one more chance to raid public funds and reward cronies. This uncharacteristic restraint had its downside, however, in that the claims of blacks in particular were scrutinized, reduced, and often denied, both by the committee and by the comptroller, Matthew Brennan, who made the final determination in each case.
Altogether, the claims put forward by African Americans amounted to only about $17,500, far less than their true needs, yet the Democratic city government treated these cases with suspicion and dismissed many as fraudulent. The examiners also invented an excuse to deprive blacks of compensation: If they fled their homes before an actual attack and their possessions were carried off, the loss was considered an ordinary robbery—by neighbors or thieves—and the city denied responsibility.
The Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People, which had raised some forty thousand dollars through private donations for black riot victims, demanded of Brennan that "in cases where the Comptroller calls for a deduction," from "the amount awarded by the Board of Supervisors," he "is requested to furnish a copy of the evidence upon which such deduction is claimed." The merchants' committee was a watchdog with no teeth, however, and many blacks were left destitute by the riots.32
Many poor whites, who had rioted against the draft's three-hundred-dollar clause—which aggravated their already miserable poverty—remained no better off, save for a few items they may have looted. Colonel Nugent's ceremonial sword, which disappeared when his home was ransacked on Monday night, turned up in the hands of a street urchin on Manhattan's East Side, the blade ruined and the jewel encrusted handle stripped bare. Tapestries, oil paintings, silk fabric, and sacks full of stolen gloves or shoes hung incongruously in hovels around the city, announcing the growing gap of wealth and privilege in an increasingly industrial and urban society. The deeper causes of the draft riot continued to fester, setting the stage for future strikes and riots in the decades ahead.33
The tragic depth of poverty in the nation's commercial center was underscored a week after the draft riots. The looting was over, so hungry women and children picked through the rubble of the charred Eighteenth Precinct station house, hunting for chunks of wood and coal to sell or to warm themselves through the fall and winter. The wall of the building collapsed on the scavengers, and two boys were killed.34
Once the police turned to the military for help in New York City, blank cartridges had proved counterproductive and put the soldiers in danger. However, while Protestant Republicans urged a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach to the largely Irish Catholic mobs, more effective methods of crowd control that reduced casualties were already being used successfully in England. By deploying officers mounted on horseback to dominate and corral large groups of rioters, the police might well have controlled the disturbances in the early stages, instead of stoking the fury of the mobs with direct attacks.35
In the absence of cavalry, the police had to rely on their locust-wood clubs, the military used live ammunition, and the draft riots in New York City became the deadliest in American history. Official documents confirm 105 deaths directly attributable to the riots, a figure that includes six soldiers and three policemen. The toll rises to 119 if deaths from wounds, falls, and the collapse of charred buildings shortly after the riots are included.36These conservative, documented figures are two to four times the number of confirmed deaths in other major American riots, and the true toll, suggested by contemporary accounts, was almost certainly much higher.*
Documents record that eighteen blacks were lynched, five drowned in the rivers, and seventy were reported missing. However, a week after the riots, the Christian Recorder, the official newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, published in Philadelphia, contained an estimate that "175 persons of color lost their lives." Black clergyman Charles Ray, who visited New York's black refugees to assess their damage claims, wrote that "it is a wonder, exposed and hunted as they were, that more lives were not taken."37
While a few contemporary estimates claimed as many as 1,200 deaths, those that put the toll at 500 were probably more accurate. Since most of the dead were the rioters themselves, not their intended victims, the estimate of 1,200 may have stemmed in part from an exaggeration of the number of active participants in the mobs. While there may have been fifty thousand people filling the length of Third Avenue on the morning of July 13, as Headley calculated, the vast majority were spectators. A few roving bands, each consisting of several thousand people, terrorized the city throughout the week. However, each band typically had a core of one to three hundred leaders who took the brunt of the clubbing from the police and absorbed the volleys of gunfire from the military. Most of the gangs or mobs were far smaller, numbering between twenty and fifty people.38
Thus the targets for the police and military were far fewer than many imagined, and most of the gunfire came from notoriously inaccurate muskets, aimed in the general direction of the mobs, and far less from rifles, possessed by only the best-equipped regiments. Even when artillery was brought in, the number of dead did not soar. After Captain Putnam's fiercest clash with the mobs, on Thursday night, he reported thirteen rioters killed and twenty-four wounded.39
While one account of the fire in the Second Avenue armory claimed that "more than fifty baskets and barrels of human bones were carted from the ruins and buried in Potter's Field," a more likely version had thirteen rioters killed at the armory, ten of them in the fire.40 The most exaggerated figures also reflected the political agendas of those who calculated them. The Republicans wanted to bring in federal troops, while the Democrats quoted high figures to show the excessive force and brutality wielded against their constituents by their political opponents.41
Nonetheless, the official count of 105 is almost certainly low, given that a mere handful of the skirmishes between the rioters and the military resulted in at least that many deaths, according to the reports of participants. The true death toll probably lies somewhere between the documented figure and the sober contemporary estimate of 500.
Official reports showed 73 soldiers injured in the riots, along with 105 policemen. While 128 civilians were recorded as injured, the true number was much larger. Only the more severely wounded went to hospitals, where they entered the official record, while many others were treated by doctors and pharmacists. Thousands of blacks—many with untreated injuries—went into hiding or fled the city altogether.42
Beyond these physical injuries, the legacy of the draft riots—the deeper and more long-lasting damage to the fabric of American society—would become evident in the coming decades. The rioters had succeeded in scattering free blacks to the edges of white society, a prelude to the formation of large black ghettoes in New York and other cities. Moreover, the terror campaign by hooded horsemen in the South, aimed at segregating and disfranchising blacks after emancipation and destroying their schools, would bear a striking resemblance to the racial pogrom in the streets of New York.43
*Today, four restored houses of the Weeksville settlement are open to visitors in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. See the Walking Tour in the appendix.
† Morrisania, once the estate of the Morris family, today is part of the Bronx.
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