*In the Tulsa, Oklahoma, riot of 1921, according to an official estimate, 10 whites and 26 blacks were killed, while later reports, never verified, raised the number of dead to 300. In the 1992 Los Angeles riots, during which violence broke out in other cities around the country, and military forces were called in, an estimated 50 to 60 people were killed.
CHAPTER 17
Aftermath: Sitting on Two Volcanoes
hen the riots were over, James Gilmore took a train up to Lake George to spend a few days in the country at the estate of his father-in-law, Judge John W. Edmonds, who had presided at the trial of Isaiah Rynders and other leaders of the Astor Place riots a dozen years earlier. As usual, Gilmore was a man with a mission. He and Sidney Gay had already written to President Lincoln, asking if he would appoint Judge Edmonds as "a special commissioner to investigate the origin of the riots," with the aim of exposing the high-level Copperheads the Tribune men believed were "the secret instigators and directors" of the revolt. Gilmore asked his father-in-law to take on the task.
"Do you know, my dear boy, what you are asking of me?" the judge replied. "If I should undertake that work my life wouldn't be worth a bad half-dollar. There's not a rough in New York who wouldn't shoot me on sight; but my time is about up, and it may serve the country. You can tell Mr. Lincoln that I will accept the appointment." However, Lincoln's reply about launching an investigation was equivocal, so Gilmore brought up the subject when he went to see the president in Washington.
"Well, you see if I had said no," Lincoln said to Gilmore, "I should have admitted that I dare not enforce the laws, and consequently have no business to be President of the United States. If I had said yes, and had appointed the judge, I should—as he would have done his duty—have simply touched a match to a barrel of gunpowder." Lincoln calculated that martial law in the city, and a full investigation of the riots, would provoke still more violence. "You have heard of sitting on a volcano. We are sitting upon two; one is blazing away already, and the other will blaze away the moment we scrape a little loose dirt from the top of the crater. Better let the dirt alone,—at least for the present. One rebellion at a time is about as much as we can conveniently handle."
For Lincoln, the blazing volcano was the war as a whole, and the smoldering one was the seismic headache presented by New York's Democratic politicians and seething mobs. Gilmore undoubtedly left the meeting dissatisfied but later concluded that "Mr. Lincoln was right," when the president told him the hidden meaning of the second volcano: Federal agents had detected an active conspiracy to trigger riots and free Confederate prisoners in the Midwest, where discontent had been rumbling throughout the war but had yet to erupt on a large scale. The trouble seemed to have passed in New York, and the president was focused on disrupting the threat that loomed in Chicago. While many criticized Lincoln for moving too slowly, Gilmore came to believe that Lincoln's deliberative style saved the Union from defeat at more than one juncture during the war.
In the case of the New York draft riots, Lincoln chose to overlook Gilmore's conspiracy theory. Gilmore reported that Sidney Gay had a friend and informant—"a prominent Copperhead politician"—who was privy to the plot but mortified by the violence once it had been unleashed. This man, according to Gilmore, had come to the managing editor on the first day of the riots, warning him to flee the uprising, which was "a revolution intended to further the cause of Southern independence." Each day that week, he had visited Gay to ease his conscience and provided, without naming names, enough information "to identify and single out the secret leaders of the riots from among the prominent men of the Copperhead party." If Gilmore provided the president with any names or proof of these assertions, they have never come to light.1
The invitation for Lincoln to prosecute and overthrow the Democratic machine in New York, tempting as it may have seemed, was unrealistic for other reasons aside from a lack of evidence. By doing so, he would have surpassed all of his previous extensions of federal authority over the states and individuals and threatened the very fabric of the nation's federal system, already strained by the war and his earlier edicts. No matter how corruptly the Democrats had been elected and retained power, the use of martial law not simply to maintain order but to unseat them from the local government would also have been a subjugation of the civil to the military authority, a violation of the defining tenets of republican government that distinguished it from dictatorship.2
While Republicans still hoped for martial law, Seymour, Tilden, and other powerful upstate Democrats continued to believe the courts might declare the draft unconstitutional. Seymour spent several weeks after the riots trying to convince Lincoln that the quotas for New York State were too high, the draft law was illegal, and that New York City would never tolerate it.
When General Dix wrote to Seymour at the end of July, saying the draft would soon resume and asking for New York State militia to enforce it— preferring them to federal troops whose presence might spark more rioting— Seymour said he would talk to Lincoln before deciding. The president told the governor he would address the glaring disparities between quotas for certain districts and allow Seymour's representatives to observe the reenrollment process. Lincoln also agreed to have the Supreme Court consider the constitutionality of the draft law but insisted the draft must continue while the decision was pending.3
With the lottery looming, the aldermen's hope of preventing more violence with a commutation fund seemed stalled. At the height of the riots, Mayor Opdyke had condemned the Common Council's hurried approval of a $2.5-million bond issue to give poor draftees the three-hundred-dollar exemption fee. Ten days later, he had formally vetoed the bill on the grounds that it would "nullify the draft"—even as his own son bought his way out of military service. The Democrats, however, would not be denied and took the issue to the twelve-man New York County Board of Supervisors, which was essentially run by Tweed.
In mid-August, Tweed conferred with Orison Blunt, a Republican supervisor whose gun factories had been damaged in the riots, and with Mayor Opdyke, to work out a deal that would appease the public and avoid another riot without depriving the army of conscripts. They agreed that the Board of Supervisors should appropriate three million dollars to purchase substitutes for police, firemen, and militia who were drafted as well as for New Yorkers who could demonstrate that their absence would impoverish their families. If these draftees decided to serve, they would receive a three-hundred-dollar bounty, just as if they had volunteered.4
Governor Seymour issued a proclamation on August 18, advising New Yorkers to accept the draft, and warned there would be no tolerance of riots. Seymour had persuaded Lincoln to reduce New York's quota and was still negotiating to get credit for volunteers up to the day before the lottery. The draft resumed on August 19, with ten thousand federal troops camped in New York City. Kennedy had resumed his post as police superintendent and had "scant mercy" for mobs, police telegrapher Charles Loring Chapin wrote: "Clubs were trumps."5
The draft went off peacefully, in part because of the federal troops at the provost marshals' offices, and in part because Tammany officials were on hand too, reassuring their constituents that the county supervisors would take care of any conscript who needed relief. When Tweed himself was drafted, the drawing of his name from a wheel in the Seventh Ward drew much appreciative cheering for the Tammany chieftain in the crowded office.6
"The draft in the state of N.Y., as in other northern states, is progressing quietly," Edmund Ruffin noted with disappointment in his diary. "No violent resistance now seems probable anywhere. Much has been done by Lincoln, &also by the city authorities, to smooth down the opposition spirit in New York— which measures have been so much yielding to the popular discontents."7
Tweed, Blunt, and Opdyke had taken their plan for a three-million-dollar fund to the full Board of Supervisors and won approval. Then Tweed and Blunt traveled to Washington, where they secured Lincoln's and Stanton's agreement. In September, the County Substit
ute and Relief Committee, consisting of two Democrats and two Republicans, including Tweed and Blunt, questioned some one thousand draftees applying for relief and procured substitutes for virtually all of them. Because of the fund, substitutes entering the army from New York City soon outnumbered draftees two to one. The city of Brooklyn adopted a similar plan.8
Republicans, who had equal representation on the Board of Supervisors, hoped to bask in the public gratitude for this protection against the draft along with the Democrats, particularly since the bond issue avoided a tax increase. Ultimately, however, the Democrats were associated with relief from the draft, and the county committee that furnished substitutes and fees for drafted men helped the Democrats consolidate their power in the wake of the riots. At the top of the Democratic hierarchy, County Supervisor and Deputy Street Commissioner William Tweed was well on his way to becoming the most legendary of urban machine "bosses."9
Because the public money attracted men to volunteer as substitutes, the County Substitute and Relief Committee that administered the fund effectively became a recruiting agency for the army and was aptly renamed the Volunteer Committee. The Board of Supervisors took credit for helping to fill the city's federal quota of volunteers and sounded the Democratic refrain that a draft was unnecessary.
However, the pool of money was also a magnet for unscrupulous bounty brokers who set themselves up as middlemen between the recruits and the committee, collecting the substitution fees and disbursing only a small portion to the men they deceived and presented for enlistment.
The county funds in New York exacerbated a problem that existed across the North, where brokers swarmed around army recruitment offices, filling the entrances and hallways, and making it virtually impossible for a man to enlist and collect his bounty money directly. The ability of these brokers to control the supply of substitutes and volunteers—by getting them drunk, drugging or beating them, or making false promises—became a nationwide scourge, which also spilled over into Canada, where agents, particularly from nearby Detroit, sent their runners to round up men. While Manton Marble's World had compared the federal conscription to the British press-gangs of colonial times, in fact the violent bounty brokers most deserved that charge.
Transporting their victims to towns and cities that paid the highest bounties, for the rest of the war the brokers created a vast intra- and interstate traffic in men, who were "sold like mules," while various communities vainly protested that they were being robbed of the local men to fill their federal quota of volunteers. Brokers also used the threat of transporting men to squelch attempts by conscientious local officials to create new rules allowing for the payment of bounties only to the principals themselves. In New York, much of the eight million dollars the county borrowed to pay bounties in 1863—65 went into the pockets of brokers. Colluding with them were corrupt provost marshals and examining surgeons who enlisted physically and mentally unfit substitutes, thus diluting the army's strength.10
Bounty "jumpers" also abused the system by fleeing the draft at home in order to enlist, desert, and reenlist in several other locations, collecting multiple bounties. In late August 1863, Sergeant Peter Welsh wrote to his wife: "We got a lot of conscripts last Sunday, they are nearly [all] New Yorkers who went to Boston and came out as substitutes, a great many of them have been out before in two year regiments, there was about two hundred came altogether. They are a wild lot of fellows with plenty of mony. some of them got four to five hundred dollars for coming . . . My dear wife i hope you are getting better health. i wish this war was over so that i could go home to you and nothing but death should separate us again."11
Tammany Hall officials sensed the public mood of outrage in the wake of the draft riots and, as loyal War Democrats, were well positioned to take advantage of it. Not only did they cooperate with General Dix in keeping the peace across the city and enforcing the draft, but they set about prosecuting the rioters at the end of July and kept on for two more months, with City Recorder John Hoffman overseeing the tribunal and District Attorney A. Oakey Hall representing the state.* However, the Tammany-run trials were more show than substance. Hall was a less-than-zealous, often incompetent, prosecutor, and various other Democratic politicians used their influence with judges to see that the rioters, for the most part, went free. Nonetheless, the sight of New York's hardened criminals being manacled and marched through the courthouse, and the reports of their testimony in the daily press, won Hoffman and Hall plaudits from a grateful city, and they went on to seemingly brilliant careers as governor and mayor.12
Some 450 suspects were detained, but charges were brought only against half that number. Despite a five-hundred-dollar reward offered by Mayor Opdyke, evidence was hard to come by, especially since some rioters intimidated potential witnesses. Charges against ten suspects were dismissed for lack of evidence; the grand jury declined to indict in another three dozen cases; and a handful of men fled after posting bail, only one of them getting caught. Some seventy-five others were indicted, but their cases were eventually dropped. Ultimately, sixty-seven people were found guilty. Twenty-five of them were given six months or less in the city jail, while plea bargains ensured light sentences for many of the rest.13
Incongruously, under the existing laws, the punishment of thieves was equal to or greater than that of murderers. One of the men who attacked Charles Jackson and threw him into the river was put away for ten years in state prison mainly because he had stolen Jackson's valuables at the same time. This was the only harsh sentence against anyone who had beaten or killed blacks during the riot. The man who led the attack on the Derrickson family, beating the son and killing the mother, was sentenced to two years in the state prison at Sing Sing. The same sentence was given to a woman for stealing 120 pairs of gloves, while two men received ten years each for equally minor thefts. The most severe punishments—fifteen years at hard labor in state prison—came down on two Irishmen who stole a three-dollar hat.14
Edmund Ruffin noted with satisfaction that "the very mild punishments of the convicts indicate the timidity of the government. 30 days and 60 days were the penalties stated—the heavier punishment being for an Irishman who was the leader of the rioters in the attack on the Tribune office."15
Matthew Powers was one of about a dozen rioters who were permitted to join the army and had the charges against them dismissed. Indicted for arson after burning the home of Josiah and Ellen Porter, he incurred a political debt to jump from the proverbial frying pan into the fire: He wrote to Comptroller Brennan, asking to be transferred from the Tombs to the battlefront.
Unlike many of the most violent rioters, Powers was literate and a skilled craftsman. "Sir, I have made up my mind to Enlist if you will be so Kind as to Arrange it So I am not under the Impression that I will be Convicted. But laying in here another month I do not like. I Can get a number of Respectable Citizens to give me a character [reference]."
Powers understood the give-and-take that greased the wheels of the political machine. "I would Rather Stand on the Battle field Any time than in Court," he wrote to Brennan. "By complying with The above you will Confer a favor that will Never be forgot on your humble Servant." Ironically, his participation in riots aimed at disrupting the draft had brought him to the extremity of choosing enlistment as the lesser of two evils.16
Peter Masterson—the fireman whose company attacked the Ninth District draft office and ignited the riots before trying to contain them—far from being prosecuted, emerged as a hero, at least to those whose lives and property he saved. Residents on the West Side presented him with "a case of beautiful pistols, and the company with a large purse of money."17
Apparently under some sort of pressure or intimidation, the Commercial Advertiser retracted an earlier statement that Masterson had helped spark the riots and declared that he had been out of town on July 13. The paper also heaped praise on the Black Joke for its efforts to contain the rioting on the West Side.18
The Times, however, den
ounced Masterson for acting on his "party prejudices instead of his public duties" during the riots. "He favors burning down a Provost-Marshal's office because he does not like the draft, and he opposes burning other buildings because he can make a little political capital by so doing."19 Nonetheless, the Masterson brothers—Peter, William, and John—all remained active and influential in the Tammany political hierarchy for years to come.20
While the draft resumed in New York and the rioters were prosecuted, Lincoln had pressured Rosecrans to move forward again in middle Tennessee. He had driven the rebels eighty miles south toward Chattanooga in early July but then stopped to repair bridges and amass supplies for his next march.
In mid-August, Rosecrans advanced in league with Burnside, and by early September, they had outflanked the Confederates under Braxton Bragg, causing them to evacuate both Knoxville and Chattanooga without a battle. With these twin disasters, morale in the South hit a new low, similar to the despondency after Union successes in the first half of 1862. Confederate desertions were rampant.
While Edmund Ruffin anxiously studied news reports about the intensified Union bombardment of Charleston's forts in early September, he also noted that "the draft throughout the state of N.Y. has been carried out, quietly, & without resistance . . . All Gov. Seymour's pledges & threats have come to nothing. It is very likely that the bad condition & prospects of the [Confederate states], indeed their desperate condition . . . has served as the main inducement to mollify the opposition. For if persuaded to believe in the early & certain subjugation or submission of the South, the democratic party will be as ready to support the war as the abolitionists."21
Remembering how Lee and Stonewall Jackson had turned the tide by attacking McClellan in 1862, Jefferson Davis reinforced Bragg and urged him to strike back. Davis sent two divisions to Bragg from Johnston's force in Mississippi and brought Longstreet and his corps over from Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. On September 19 and 20, the Confederates whipped Rosecrans at the Battle of Chickamauga, sending the Union general fleeing to the fortifications in nearby Chattanooga, while his subordinate, George Thomas, "the Rock of Chickamauga," took charge on the field to protect the retreat.
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