The Confederate cause appeared increasingly hopeless, but the saboteurs were intent on revenge for Sherman's and Sheridan's scorched-earth campaigns. From a chemist on the west side of Washington Square, Headley had procured a suitcase containing twelve dozen four-ounce bottles of "Greek fire." A combination of phosphorus and bisulfide of carbon, the clear liquid would ignite when exposed to the air: Each jar was a firebomb ready to be smashed against a wall or floor.1
That evening, each of the half-dozen arsonists took a supply of Greek fire and checked into several of the city's best hotels, which included the Astor House, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the St. Nicholas, and the Hoffman House, where General Butler had stayed—a new building off Madison Square that replaced burned-out stores torched during the draft riots. After piling all the flammable material in his room on the bed, each arsonist threw a firebomb on the floor to ignite the pyre, locked the door, and left the key at the front desk before moving on, without appearing rushed, to the next hotel.2
Between them, the Confederates checked into nineteen hotels, and the streets were soon filled with angry crowds watching the flames pour out the windows and vowing to hang the rebels. Firemen raced up and down Broadway with bells clanging and black smoke pouring from their steam engines. Barnum's Museum was also on fire, and the caged circus animals in the basement were bellowing in terror. The firemen rescued a woman from the second floor with a ladder but were unable to calm Barnum's panicked giantess, a woman seven feet tall who charged through the crowd howling and knocking aside anyone who tried to help her. Five firemen, a few bystanders, and a doctor finally subdued and sedated her, putting her in a room at a nearby hotel.3
In the mayhem, the Confederates moved through the streets unnoticed. Headley's mission included a trip to the Hudson River piers, where he fire-bombed several vessels, including a hay barge that exploded, shooting flames into the night sky. The other saboteurs struck theaters, stores, factories, and lumberyards in an effort to burn the whole city. The plot failed, for the most part, but the city suffered more than four hundred thousand dollars' worth of damage. It might have been worse if the conspirators had opened the windows in the hotel rooms, giving the flames enough oxygen to increase and spread. Several hotels, including the St. Nicholas—headquarters for General Dix, and for General Wool before him, during the draft riots—were largely destroyed nonetheless.4
Within hours, police superintendent John Kennedy had made two arrests and declared, "There will be many more before long." After finishing their tasks, the saboteurs regrouped briefly, and Martin had them divide up into pairs to avoid detection. Another blaze the following night, probably set by local Copperheads, triggered mass arrests throughout the city. McMasters and other members of the Sons of Liberty were seized by federal detectives, but Martin and his squad boarded a train the next night, hid in the berths of the sleeper compartments, and escaped back to Canada.5*
While the fires in New York made front-page news across the globe, in the South, Sherman's juggernaut rolled on. By mid-December, his forces were approaching Savannah when the Confederates evacuated, allowing the Federals to march in unopposed and enabling Sherman to present the city to President Lincoln as a Christmas gift. At the same time, General Thomas smashed Hood's army at Nashville, leading the Confederate general to resign less than a month later.6
On December 19, 1864, Lincoln issued a call for 500,000 more troops—the fourth and final call after the resumption of the draft in August 1863. By this time Lee's forces were nearly surrounded, and another round of the draft seemed unlikely. After tens of thousands of men claimed to be exempt from military service, paid their three hundred dollars, furnished substitutes, or failed to report when drafted, of the 1.2 million men who entered the Union army between 1863 and 1865, only 46,000 were conscripts and 118,000 were substitutes. While the draft thus accounted for only 13 percent of the men raised in this period, it served its purpose by prodding many more to join the Union ranks as volunteers.7*
Having given up on capturing Charleston, on January 15, 1865, Union forces aboard the largest fleet assembled during the war bombarded and seized Fort Fisher at the mouth of the Cape Fear River in North Carolina. Nearby Wilmington was thus blockaded and soon surrendered, depriving Confederate soldiers of badly needed supplies of food and putting most of the state's coastline under Union control. On February 1, Sherman left Savannah and marched into South Carolina, on his way north to Virginia. With Union forces advancing on all fronts, General Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan to strangle the Confederacy, laid out at the beginning of the war, was nearly complete.8
Legislative triumphs went hand in hand with Union military successes. Preferring not to wait for the Thirty-eighth Congress to end in March and for lame-duck Democrats to be swept out of the House, Lincoln appealed to them for help in approving the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery in the United States. The Senate had passed the amendment in 1864, and it needed House approval before going on to the state legislatures; once ratified by three-fourths of the states, the amendment would protect the Emancipation Proclamation against judicial or presidential attempts to repeal it in years to come.9
All but four of the eighty Flouse Democrats had helped defeat the amendment in the previous session, but Lincoln's reelection, along with other Republican victories in November and Union momentum on the battlefields, helped mute criticism of the president's agenda. Moreover, a few Democrats blamed the election results on the party's failure to "cut loose from the dead carcass of negro slavery." Both in his annual message and in face-to-face meetings at the White House, Lincoln asked wavering Democratic and border-state congressmen for their votes, telling them, "[The amendment] will bring the war, I have no doubt, rapidly to a close."10
Rumors abounded that the president engaged in corrupt horse-trading to win support, promising federal jobs, relief from railroad regulation, and other favors, none of which was ever documented. In any event, enough Democrats were swayed, and the House approved the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865.11
Sixteen Democrats voted "Aye," and the final tally prompted an outburst of cheering from spectators in the gallery unlike any the House had ever seen. "Members joined in the shouting and kept it up for some minutes," George Julian of Indiana recalled. "Some embraced one another, others wept like children." The roar of a hundred-gun salute filled the air in Washington, and the House declared the rest of the day a holiday, to celebrate "this immortal and sublime event." Julian, a longtime abolitionist, wrote in his diary, "I have felt, ever since the vote, as if I were in a new country."12
While African Americans celebrated the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, their leaders began to set forth the definition of full equality under the law that they argued had to accompany the liberation of the slaves. Henry Highland Garnet, who had escaped slavery as a boy of nine and had labored as an advocate for blacks for more than twenty-five years, was recognized as "the most eloquent black man in the land" by the chaplain of the House of Representatives, the Reverend William Henry Channing, who invited him, with the approval of Lincoln and his cabinet, to deliver a sermon celebrating the Thirteenth Amendment.
At the special Sunday morning service in the House chambers on February 12, 1865, which also happened to be the president's birthday, Garnet became the first African American to deliver a sermon there. The sight of a black choir, from Garnet's church, was also unprecedented. At 11 a.m., every seat on the House floor was filled, and the galleries overflowed with guests, both black and white. For an hour, beginning at noon, Garnet held the breathless attention of the audience. The sermon, and the setting—with a full-length portrait of Washington on Garnet's right and one of Lafayette on his left— recalled the American Revolution and celebrated the completion of the task the founders had left unfinished.
"These worthies," Garnet said, "if they looked down on the scene which transpired in this hall a few days since, when the great National Work was consummated, they must have responded with the angel c
hoir, an hearty amen!" Since applause was not appropriate during a sermon, the audience voiced its approval periodically with a passionate "amen."13
Garnet began by denouncing slavery, "this demon, which people have worshipped as a God." He defined it as "the highly concentrated essence of all conceivable wickedness. Theft, robbery, pollution, incest, cruelty, coldblooded murder, blasphemy, and the defiance of the laws of God." He described the terrible toll slavery had taken on the country.
It has divided our national councils. It has engendered deadly strife between brethren. It has wasted the treasure of the Commonwealth, and the lives of thousands of brave men, and driven troops of helpless men and women into yawning tombs. It has caused the bloodiest Civil War ever recorded in the book of time. It has shorn this nation of its locks of strength that was rising as a young lion in the western world.14
Garnet acknowledged that many people wanted to know at what point abolitionists would be satisfied in their demands for reform, and he answered:
When emancipation shall be followed by enfranchisement, and all men holding allegiance to the government shall enjoy right of American citizenship. When our brave and gallant soldiers shall have justice done unto them. When the men who endure the sufferings and perils of the battle-field in the defense of their country and in order to keep our rulers in their places, shall enjoy the well-earned privilege of voting for them. When in the army and navy, and in every legitimate and honorable occupation, promotion shall smile upon merit without the slightest regard to the complexion of a man's face. When there shall be no more class-legislation, and no more trouble concerning the black man and his rights, than there is in regard to other American citizens. When in every respect, he shall be equal before the law, and shall be left to make his own way in the social walks of life.15
Garnet's "Memorial Discourse" was widely acclaimed, and his church had the sermon published with an introduction by James McCune Smith, who described Garnet as the nation's most influential black leader.16
Garnet's hour of glory and hope would be short-lived, however. The postwar phase of Reconstruction would bring a new onslaught of murder and intimidation, aimed at depriving blacks of their basic civil rights. In his sermon, Garnet had singled out Fernando Wood as an enemy of African Americans by condemning the Copperhead congressman's recent declaration in the House that "the best possible condition of the negro is slavery"'17 Despite the triumph of the Thirteenth Amendment, in the next dozen years Wood's vision, not Garnet's, would prevail. Blacks would not be returned to slavery as such, but the Democratic resurgence, combined with the northern public's desire to put the war in the past, would make it almost impossible to enforce subsequent amendments protecting blacks' rights. As the North and South drew closer together, blacks and whites would be driven farther apart.18
Republican senator Charles Sumner lamented in 1865 that the "demon of Caste" had yet to be vanquished. "The same national authority that destroyed slavery must see that this other pretension is not permitted to survive."19 However, the use of federal troops to enforce civil rights and quell racial violence in the South would be hampered by cries of military despotism—by the same qualms that had kept Lincoln from imposing martial law in New York City and bringing the draft rioters to justice.
While the New York rioters effectively prevailed in their attack on racial equality, their demand for justice as exploited workers in an urban, industrial environment met with considerably less relief and sympathy from the managerial classes. Horace Greeley had championed the cause of the American worker since 1837 in editorials, essays, and speeches about "Association" and worker cooperatives. As a Whig and then a Republican, he had also favored protective tariffs for American industry, believing, idealistically, that as the nation prospered and expanded, fair-minded employers, negotiating with labor unions and cooperatives, would raise wages accordingly and all classes would benefit. Greeley had hoped the Homestead Act, offering public land at $1.25 per acre to settlers in the West, would be an antidote to urban slums.20
However, Greeley became disillusioned when he realized that prices had risen 100 percent between 1860 and 1865 but wages had hardly budged. An unskilled man brought home only three to five dollars a week, while a female garment worker typically earned half that amount, the Tribune reported. Buffeted by declining real wages and waves of immigration, labor unions collapsed during the war, as they had after the Panic of 1837. On the other side of the growing chasm between the rich and poor, William B. Astor had a revenue stream of a million dollars a year from his investments and properties, which included blocks of tenements where entire immigrant families were packed into airless single-room apartments and basements.21
As for homesteading in the West, big timber, cattle, railroad, and mining companies were gobbling up the land, which Congress served to them on a silver platter. Even such moral crusaders of radical Republicanism as Thad-deus Stevens and Ben Wade had soiled their hands by promoting legislation that gave away land to a mining company in which they had invested. New England's textile industry and other northeastern manufacturers also enjoyed favors delivered by their Republican representatives, in the form of tariff increases, while more and more craftsmen were drawn into the expanding factory system.22
"Congress has been voting away the richest lands on earth," the Tribune declared, "and the wise and necessary prize of a railroad to the Pacific has been made to cover the most shameless legislation that ever disgraced Congress."23 Ultimately of less concern to Greeley were the government's broken promises about redistributing land in the South to former slaves. While Congress "appropriated land by the million acres to pet railroad schemes," one freedman protested, his people were "starving and in rags."24
In the North, urban slums continued to be a source of working-class resentment as well as middle- and upper-class anxiety, which was heightened by memories of the draft riots. Six months after the riots, a few medical reformers in New York, including Elisha Harris and Stephen Smith, with support from the new Democratic mayor Godfrey Gunther, had formed the nonpartisan Citizens' Association, with more than one hundred prominent New Yorkers such as Peter Cooper, Flamilton Fish, August Belmont, William Astor, John Jacob Astor Jr., and the highly respected Irish American attorney Charles O'Conor. Through hundreds of public meetings and millions of pamphlets, the elite Citizens' Association signaled a belief that American cities, especially New York, were in dire need of reform. Wealthy industrialist Peter Cooper attacked the county Board of Supervisors with allegations of bribery on a massive scale.25
In 1865, the Citizens' Association published a detailed study of sanitary conditions in Manhattan. In addition to linking dirty, diseased areas with vice and crime, the association's inspectors remarked on a consequence of the draft riots: the decline of New York's black population ward by ward throughout the city. The black neighborhood on Sullivan Street had been replaced by Germans, they reported, and across the city "the colored population formerly so numerous have almost entirely disappeared."26
The day after Garnet delivered his sermon in Washington, in February 1865, the state senate met in Albany for hearings on public hygiene in New York City. The association's report conveyed to lawmakers the horrors of the slums through the perspective of upper-middle-class volunteer inspectors.27
"Like the fabled vampires . . . diseases here hover about the pillow of childhood, sipping from the dewy springs of life till life itself is gone," one inspector wrote of New York City's overcrowded tenements. "On the walls of these living tombs DEATH hastens to inscribe the names of more than half of those whose hapless fate it is to be born within their dismal precincts." The tone of the report was calculated to inspire disgust and fear more than sympathy.
Adolescent and adult survivors in the city's filthy slums faced a complex of premature "physical, mental, and moral decline" known colloquially among health professionals as "TENANT-HOUSE ROT," the inspector wrote. "The eye becomes bleared, the senses blunted, the limbs shrunken and tremulou
s, the secretions exceedingly offensive." Unable to care for their children, the adults watch impassively as the family deteriorates, the inspector declared, and to all of this "may be plainly traced much of the immorality and crime which prevail among us."
Referring to the explosive draft riots, the inspector warned that the "terrible elements of society we saw brought to the surface" still lurked in the city's slums and were growing every year. "The tocsin which next summons them from their dark and noisome haunts may be the prelude to a scene of universal pillage, slaughter and destruction."
The voluminous report, and fear of a cholera epidemic, led to the establishment of the city's Metropolitan Board of Health the following year. The first such body in the nation, it had extraordinary powers insulating it from judicial interference and enabling it to enforce sanitary measures it deemed necessary. Acting on nearly thirty thousand complaints in its first six months, the board removed more than a hundred dead horses from the streets, along with some four thousand dead dogs and cats and almost one hundred thousand barrels of offal. Inspectors also intercepted and destroyed almost two hundred thousand pounds of tainted veal and fish on its way to market.28
After two decades of delay since Griscom's report, The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York, the state also passed the first housing regulations to combat overcrowding in New York's tenements. The Tenement House Law of 1867 required adequate ventilation, fire escapes, and a privy stall for every twenty residents, instead of the usual one-per-hundred. While landlords took advantage of loopholes in the law to avoid compliance, the Metropolitan Board of Health struck back with a wave of lawsuits targeting thousands of violations. In the coming years, conditions began to improve as brick tenements conforming to new standards replaced the older wooden housing in New York's slums.29
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