Reeling from heavy Confederate losses, Bragg failed to follow up his victory, and the Federals remained in control of the strategically vital ground at Chattanooga. However, Rosecrans seemed "confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head," according to Lincoln, and the Federals soon found themselves not only bereft of leadership but besieged by Bragg's forces and running out of food. From the west, General William Sherman at Vicksburg was ordered to bring four divisions to Chattanooga, and from the east, the War Department transferred Hooker and twenty thousand troops by rail from Meade's Army of the Potomac, which for the moment seemed unlikely to bestir itself and attack Lee's forces in Virginia. Despite the reinforcements, as September turned to October, the Confederate siege of Chattanooga continued.22
With Bragg bottling up the Union forces in Chattanooga and choking off their supplies, in the middle of October Lincoln moved decisively to shake up the command structure. He created a vast, new military department, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains, and put the conqueror of Vicksburg, Ulysses Grant, in charge. The president also issued a call for three hundred thousand more troops on October 17. This was the first draft under the conscription law since its enforcement was resumed in August. Again, the call was made to spur volunteering, with the draft to follow if quotas were not met.23
Grant arrived at Chattanooga on October 23, replaced Rosecrans with Thomas, and a week later had beaten back the rebels far enough to establish a new supply line and start feeding the troops. Two weeks later, Sherman arrived with seventeen thousand troops, and the Federals were ready to start turning the tables on Bragg. On November 24 and 25, Grant's forces defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Chattanooga, driving them out of the path to Georgia. Four days later, Union forces hurled back Longstreet's attempt to seize Knoxville. To complete the grim outlook for the Confederacy, Meade had thwarted an attempt by Lee to move against Washington in October and inflicted heavy casualties on the Army of Northern Virginia during a clash in November.24
Confederate attempts to have a British firm build naval attack-vessels also collapsed in the fall of 1863. The vaunted "Laird rams"—ironclads armed with seven-foot spikes to tear apart the wooden hulls of the Union's blockade fleet—were supposed to hold New York City at their mercy until the North sued for peace. However, intense diplomatic pressure from the American ambassador, Charles Francis Adams, persuaded the British government not to let the ships leave Liverpool. His son, and secretary, Henry Adams, called the diplomatic victory "a second Vicksburg."25
A slender reed of cheer for the Confederates in the late fall of 1863 was the stunning escape of John Hunt Morgan and half a dozen of his men from their prison cells in Columbus, Ohio, on November 27, after just four months behind bars. Following a plan hatched by one of Morgan's aides, Captain Thomas Hines, the men used knives from the prison cafeteria to chip a hole through the six-inch concrete floor, crawl through a ventilation shaft into the prison yard, and scale the wall with an improvised grappling hook at the end of a rope made of bedsheets.
Having checked the rail schedule in a newspaper, Morgan and Hines caught a 1 a.m. train to Cincinnati, while the others took different routes to foil the ensuing manhunt. After crossing the Ohio in a small boat and mounting a friend's horses on the Kentucky side, Morgan and Hines were more than one hundred miles away before prison officials noticed they were gone. Two escapees were captured in Kentucky, but Morgan and Hines eluded the Union cavalry long enough to get beyond their reach, in North Carolina. The two men would soon be back in action with the Confederate forces.26
As the November elections approached in 1863, Republican strategists capitalized on Union battlefield victories and public outrage over the draft riots, which focused on Fernando Wood and the Peace Democrats. While Wood claimed he was not even in the city during that bloody week, New Yorkers remembered the police riot of 1857 and associated his name with attempts to manipulate urban violence for political ends. Given his prosouthern remarks during the secession crisis and at the beginning of the war, many believed Wood and the Peace Democrats had plotted with the Confederacy to spark the insurrection during Lee's invasion of the North. Irish and German workers, once Wood's core constituency, abandoned the Peace Democrats in order to cast off the stigma of treason left by the riots.27
Across the North, the Peace Democrats struggled to regain lost ground by protesting, as they had successfully a year earlier, the administration's civil rights abuses, the war for abolition, and the draft's exemption clause. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, the stakes were high, since the Democratic nominees for governor—Clement Vallandigham and George Woodward—were both Copperheads. Lincoln "had more anxiety in regard to [them] than he had in 1860 when he was chosen," according to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. If either were successful, this would encourage the Confederacy, damage northern unity, and prolong the war. Exiled from the northern states by Lincoln in May, Vallandigham at the time of the draft riots had been making his way from the South up to Windsor, Ontario, where he carried on a long-distance campaign for the Ohio governor's office. Woodward, a state supreme court judge in Pennsylvania, was less vocal in his prosouthern sympathies than Vallandigham, but equally fervent.28
No longer able to denounce the Republicans' incompetent prosecution of the war, Ohio Democrats instead played the race card, fanning the same flames of resentment and fear that had led to the draft riots and to earlier riots in the Midwest. Whereas William Seward, as a senator before the war, had famously called the slavery issue an "irrepressible conflict" between the states, Ohio Democrats called the struggle an " 'irrepressible conflict' between white and black laborers." They urged supporters to vote for "the white man, and against the Abolition hordes, who would place negro children in your schools, negro jurors in your jury boxes, and negro votes in your ballot boxes!" Pennsylvania Democrats also campaigned against emancipation and equal rights for blacks.29
However, voters across the North were also disgusted by the lynching of blacks and the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum during the draft riots— and favorably impressed at the same time by the valor of black troops at Fort Wagner, Milliken's Bend, Port Hudson, and other battles. Their bravery was a strong argument for emancipation, and both Lincoln and the Republican press drove home the point: To favor the Copperheads and deny the aspirations of loyal soldiers fighting for the Union was tantamount to treason.
In an open letter to Democrats, Lincoln warned that the Union—helped by emancipation and the enlistment of black troops—would ultimately win the war, and "there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it." Lincoln's leadership helped Republican candidates switch from an uneasy embrace of the Emancipation Proclamation to a proud, offensive strategy that turned the tables on the Democrats, questioning their patriotism and deflating their calls for white supremacy.30
Republicans trounced the Democrats across the North in the November elections of 1863, including the races for governor in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the New York State legislature, and local contests in New York City.31 The Democratic party nationally, despite its surge the previous fall, was once again in dire straits, as it had been, essentially, since it split apart on the eve of the Civil War. "The old Democratic party is dead as the old Whig party," the Herald declared.32
Fernando Wood, however, was still in Congress, which convened in early December, and he remained unrepentant. On the floor of the House, he asserted that he was not in New York City when the riots broke out, and loudly continued his opposition to the war and the draft, which he said discriminated against working-class Democrats. He blamed the riots on the Lincoln administration or its radical Republican agents who wanted an excuse to declare martial law and urged federal troops to fire indiscri
minately into the crowds.
Wood and his third wife, an heiress he married in 1860 when she was sixteen and he was forty-eight, held numerous lavish dinner parties at their elegant Washington home, winning new friends for the embattled congressman and polishing his image among colleagues as a gracious host instead of a "vulgar, treacherous New York politico in hot pursuit of graft and patronage." Nonetheless, the draft riots were a watershed for Wood, signaling the decline of his power in New York politics. He remained on the national stage but was confined, for the moment, to the role of vocal dissenter in the minority party, denouncing the fact that "any man who speaks of peace is called a traitor."33
In an effort to salvage the fortunes of the Democratic party, Manton Marble—who played a growing role in plotting strategy with Barlow and Belmont—wooed ousted Union general George B. McClellan to run against Lincoln in 1864. The great issue of the day, as the Herald put it, was "war for the Union or peace at the price of dissolution," and Marble calculated that in order to survive and rebound, the Democrats had to divorce themselves completely from the peace men.34
Tweed came to the same realization and opposed the Wood brothers by forging an alliance with Tammany War Democrats. By rewarding them with appointments to the committees he and his right-hand man Peter B. Sweeny chaired, and purging longtime rivals while retaining key decision-making powers, Tweed solidified his grip on the city Democracy, setting the stage for his rise as "Boss" Tweed in the coming years. In the words of one historian, Tweed had taken the first step by creating "the possibility of bossism; he could discipline Tammany, but Tammany could not discipline him."35
While Tweed identified himself with the War Democrats inside Tammany, he courted the Irish vote outside the organization that had defected from Fernando Wood in the wake of the draft riots. Tammany could point to a number of prominent Irish Americans in its ranks: Comptroller Matthew Brennan; County Clerk John Clancy, who also edited the organization's newspaper, the Leader-, and John Kelly, who had served both as sheriff and as a congressman.36
William "Boss" Tweed
In appealing to the immigrant community, Tweed also had the benefit of two Irish American lieutenants, Richard Connolly and Peter B. Sweeny.
Some said the B stood not for Barr but for "Brains" since Sweeny was the intellectual of Tweed's inner circle—a friend of Baron Haussmann and Victor Hugo—and the mastermind of Tweed's political machinations. The son of an Irish saloonkeeper, a lawyer, and former district attorney, Sweeny was born in New York and had succeeded in the arena of Democratic politics while downplaying his ethnic origins.37
Connolly, by contrast, was born in Ireland and had come up through the rough-and-tumble world of New York's Democratic ward politics in the 1830s, where he served as one of the "Hooray Boys," stirring up the enthusiasm of the newly enfranchised immigrant population and delivering the Irish Catholic vote for Tammany. Connolly's marriage into an established, Protestant, New York family did not diminish his standing with immigrant voters and furthered his career by introducing him to the city's bankers and financiers. Both Connolly and Sweeny would soon share in Tweed's rise to power.38
Nonetheless, securing the Irish vote for Tammany remained a challenge in the wake of the draft riots. Having distanced themselves from Fernando Wood's Peace Democracy and the stigma of disloyalty, the Irish were wary of being labeled an "ignorant," monolithic voting bloc and resisted control by any Democratic organization. Tammany would not be able to take the Irish vote for granted. In the fall of 1863, C. Godfrey Gunther, a German merchant, became the mayor of New York, supported by both German and Irish Democrats, the latter forming a movement behind the Irish attorney John McKeon and John Kelly, who had defected from Tweed's Tammany Hall. Like the McKeonites, Gunther and his German supporters—largely middle-class merchants— rejected both the growing power of the federal government under the Republicans and Tammany rule in New York, with its corruption and high taxes.39
While Tweed and the Tammany Democrats worked to stage a political comeback by highlighting their patriotism, and Irish Americans flexed their political muscles, many blacks, both poor and middle-class, were deciding to leave New York for good. Within two years, the city's black population had dropped below 10,000—a 20 percent decline from more than 12,500 in I860.40 The draft riots inaugurated an exodus of African Americans from New York City that lasted for seven years.41
"When the late autumn arrived," Maritcha Lyons wrote, "we left our hospitable refuge to reluctantly take the trip back to New York, the house having been temporarily arranged for our accommodation. We were to remain only till plans could be made for a permanent removal." Mary and the children moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where the schools had a reputation for excellence.
Taking on the school board over segregation, Mary Lyons won, and by an act of the state legislature, Maritcha became the first black student to enter Providence High School, where she graduated in 1869. While ensuring a better future for her daughter in the wake of the riots, Mary Lyons was thrown back in time to the trades she had given up twenty-five years earlier when she got married: working as a clerk in a candy store and as a hairdresser.
Because of the $250 property requirement for black voters in New York, they sought to enter the middle class for political as well as economic reasons. The riots were a setback on both levels for the city's black community, and Albro Lyons, like his wife, saw his own hopes for advancement shattered. "Father lingered in the city till the last vestige vanished concerning the possibility of reviving his business there," Maritcha wrote. "Dismissing what to him was a veritable 'lost cause,' he emulated the example of his wife and took up again in exile—for it was never anything else to him—the trade he had learned in his you[th], the manufacture of ice cream." Unlike William Powell, who eventually reopened his boardinghouse for black sailors, Albro and Mary Lyons never made Manhattan their home again.42
For blacks who remained in New York or were scattered to its suburbs, their suffering from the riots did not end with the quelling of the mobs in July. The process of expelling blacks from the city continued, taking different forms. Blacks had trouble getting their old jobs back, particularly on the docks, where white longshoremen drove them away. Blacks could not get to jobs that were available, because conductors and passengers on street railroads, both from prejudice and fear of renewed attacks by white mobs, refused to let them onto the cars. Blacks also continued to be assaulted sporadically by bands of white youths.
The Common Council, meanwhile, had come to the rescue of poor white conscripts with millions of dollars before the riots were even over, and done nothing to help the black community.43 The winter of 1863-64 fell hardest on the many blacks who had been left destitute by the destruction of their homes and property during the riots—and to whom the city failed to pay damages. "Nearly one thousand persons, most of them the heads of families, lost all they had, excepting what they took with them in their flight, or had deposited elsewhere," according to Henry Highland Garnet's colleague, the Reverend Charles Ray of the Bethesda Congregationalist Church.
Ray called the city's failure disgraceful and unjust: "Could they have witnessed the sufferings I have witnessed . . . for the want of this act of justice toward them, they must have had hearts of stone not to award to them the amount to make good their losses." Ray, who had worked extensively with the black victims of the riots, stressed that their claims were modest and reasonable, "the value of articles lost laid at about half the cost of new, and much below their worth to them."44
Ray had arrived in New York from New England more than thirty years earlier, proud of his mixed-race ancestry dating back four generations: aboriginal Indian, English white settler, and the first black in New England. Ray started at the Crosby Street Congregational Church, remaining there for a dozen years, and joined the New York Committee of Vigilance (the Committee of Thirteen) composed of black and white men, which was formed in 1835 to launch legal investigations into the arrests of blacks said t
o be escaped slaves. Ray also edited the Colored American for several years.45
The riots affected Ray's work as a pastor and missionary, as it did the work of all of the city's black clergymen. The riots "broke up the homes of our people for a time, and scattered them indiscriminately and closed our schools, so it also closed our churches and for several weeks they were not opened," Ray noted. "This week of terror increased rather than diminished our missionary work, not only to hunt up our flock and bring them together again, but to look after the people generally. Many of them were not only broken up in their homes and despoiled of their goods, but deprived, for a time, of their usual employment and reduced to want."
After traveling "to all parts of the city and among all classes of the people" so that claims could be verified and the merchants' committee funds disbursed, the black ministers' work in many cases "had just begun," since people sought them out for help during the winter, for advice in resolving their claims.
Ray assailed the rioters as "fiends in human shape" and asserted that the week of pandemonium "scarcely has a parallel in this or any other country, unless it were in the Sepoy massacre in India.* It was for a brief time the reign of an infatuated mob—the Reign of Terror."46
As they had done after the assault on Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863, Republican journals like Harper s Weekly and the New York Tribune, along with black voices in the Christian Recorder, continued to contrast the disgraceful draft riots with the heroism of black regiments in the Union army.47 At the same time, desertions and massive Union losses on the battlefield increased the demand for black troops, and opposition to their enlistment melted away.48 By January 1864, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had finally listened to the appeals of Garnet and a committee of sixty other prominent New Yorkers and overridden Governor Seymour to approve the formation of a black regiment from New York. The Union League Club helped raise the funds as it had sworn to do during the draft riots.
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