Nonetheless, in the midwestern mining industry and on the railroads, falling wages in 1874 prompted strikes and deadly clashes. In 1875, a strike by some fifteen thousand textile workers in the Northeast dragged on for two months before it finally collapsed.70 A protracted strike in the coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania that year also failed after the governor secured legal injunctions against the miners and called out the militia.71
By 1877, some of the striking Pennsylvania miners—from the same community of unskilled Irish Catholics that had rebelled against the Republican draft fourteen years earlier—had been exposed as members of the secretive Molly Maguires and were tried and convicted for assassinations and other acts of revenge against Protestant mine owners, foremen, and skilled workers. Twenty of the Mollies were convicted of murder and hanged, paving the way for a broad crackdown by mine owners on all the workmen's groups they had wanted to crush, including those that were moderate and nonviolent.72
Railroad workers, too, were unable to prevent deep wage cuts, and on July 16, 1877, a strike in Martinsburg, West Virginia, quickly spread across the country and reached massive proportions, uniting labor groups that had become estranged during the depression. Steel workers and some forty thousand miners in Pennsylvania joined the work stoppage, along with sympathetic citizens. They held protests and took over railroad switches, shutting down the major lines serving every region except New England and the Deep South.73
In Chicago and St. Louis, the Great Strike brought all business to a halt and revived calls for an eight-hour day, along with adequate wages, a ban on child labor, public ownership of the railroads, and an end to the vagrancy laws that enabled local authorities to arrest the many unemployed workers who were crisscrossing the country in search of jobs. In St. Louis, Louisville, and elsewhere, blacks and whites joined forces, as did workers of every ethnic background. San Francisco was the exception: Strikers ended up attacking Chinese laborers, who made up about 25 percent of the city's workforce and, like blacks in the Northeast, were deemed a competitive threat.74
While local militias tended to side with their neighbors, ten governors mustered state troops willing to fire on the crowds, and President Hayes sent federal forces—some of them redeployed from Louisiana and other parts of the South—to six major cities and several smaller ones across the North to break the Great Strike.75* The harbor forts around New York City were emptied of federal troops to meet the emergency, leading Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Thomas Hillhouse to fear a repetition of the Civil War draft riots.
The government had one hundred million dollars stored in the Custom House and Sub-Treasury, he warned, and "the city is filled with the most inflammable materials for a riot, if an opportunity should occur." Some troops were brought back to New York, and Secretary of the Navy Richard Thompson sent an ironclad to "clear the streets around the Custom House." The curving streets of Lower Manhattan did not lend themselves to such tactics, but Secretary of State William Evarts declared: "The big guns will straighten them."76
Working-class solidarity was matched by that of middle- and upper-class groups in the large cities. They joined local officials and veterans' associations to form heavily armed "citizens' militias" to defend their property and disperse the strikers. In St. Louis, the Committee of Public Safety mustered a large civilian force commanded by two retired generals—one Union, and the other Confederate. The leading citizens of Louisville volunteered to supplement the police force and were issued weapons at City Hall, which was used as an arms depot during the insurrection.77
The Great Strike of 1877 lasted for almost two weeks, leaving one hundred people dead and hundreds of others wounded. After the violence subsided on July 29, President Hayes wrote emphatically in his diary, "The strikers have been put down by force."78 The wrath of the hungry, exploited American worker, paired with the anxiety of the middle and upper classes, turned the rest of the nineteenth century into the most violent period of labor protest in American history.79 In the space of twenty-five years, governors called out the National Guard more than one hundred times to deal with confrontations between workers and management. Federal troops were sent, not to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in the South— where the rights and lives of African Americans were still under attack—but to industrial trouble spots, easily reachable from new fortresslike armories constructed in large cities across the North.80
The Great Strike of 1877: Soldiers fire on strikers at the Halsted Street viaduct in Chicago
During the draft riots in 1863, Mayor George Opdyke could still proclaim that, unlike other countries, American society had no "ruling class," and that "here, where the suffrage is universal," all protest should be made through the ballot box.81 With industrial capitalism still in its infancy, Republicans could deny that class conflict was an American phenomenon and confidently expound the tenets of free-labor ideology, which envisioned the United States as a land of equal opportunity and upward mobility.82
Of the rioters, presidential adviser William Stoddard could declare that "these fiends in human form are in no wise to be confounded with 'American working-men.' This conduct left no stain upon us, for they were not and are not of us. Whether born on the soil or born elsewhere, they were foreigners to every idea and hope and instinct which at all belongs to this free country. In shooting them down, afterwards, the police and military were destroying a hellish raid from the slums of Europe."83
After the Great Strike of 1877, Americans fearfully began to view class conflict as a fact of life. Industrial capitalism had perpetuated in the United States what the Nation called "the great curse of the Old World—the division of society into classes." Few Americans continued to insist on a harmony of interests between labor and capital. "The days are over in which this country could rejoice in its freedom from the elements of social strife which have long abounded in the old countries," the New York Times declared in July 1877. "We cannot too soon face the fact that we have dangerous social elements to contend with."84
The rags-to-riches Floratio Alger stories, and Herbert Spencer's theory of "social Darwinism," applying the evolutionary principle of the survival-of-the-fittest to human society, were put forward to deny any fixed hierarchy in America; nonetheless, for many people, the vision of nineteenth-century America as a fluid, classless society had been challenged by the draft riots and was exploded by the Gilded Age with its undeniable and ever-widening chasm between rich and poor.85
The draft riots were, in part, a labor protest—demanding economic justice for working-class men, women, and children—but the white perpetrators of violence in July 1863 fared little better than their black victims in the decades after the Civil War. With the end of Reconstruction, African Americans would have to struggle for almost a century to gain effective legal protection of their civil rights, while enduring, through the 1930s, waves of reactionary violence of a type that began in 1863 in response to the first momentous act of Reconstruction, the Emancipation Proclamation. For the white northern worker, what began as an outcry against the three-hundred-dollar commutation clause would continue into the next century as a crusade against class discrimination, a quest for fair wages and safety of life and limb on the job. In that quest would come the slow, painfully belated recognition that racial harmony could mean strength in numbers and progress for all.86
*Until the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression of the 1930s, the economic contraction following the Panic of 1873 was known as the Great Depression.
*Credit Mobilier was the name of a construction company created by Union Pacific's stockholders. The directors of the combined companies profited by awarding padded railroad construction contracts to Credit Mobilier. To deflect government scrutiny, several congressmen were drawn into the arrangement with gifts of stock. After the scandal broke in 1872, Americans no longer accepted elected officials' conflicts of interest as an innocuous part of business as usual.
*The Electoral Commission's rulings could be
overturned only by a vote of both the House and Senate.
*Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, St. Louis, Louisville, and Chicago.
Appendix: A Walking Tour
of Civil War New York
The following is a partial list of the sights included in the complete Walking Tour, available at http://www.walkerbooks.com. The Web site provides detailed directions, phone numbers, and other information for this self-guided tour.
MANHATTAN
LOWER MANHATTAN: In Battery Park, at the southern tip of the Manhattan,1 the Castle Clinton National Monument is a circular stone fort from the War of 1812 that served as New York State's immigrant landing depot from 1855 to 1890, receiving more than eight million people before it was replaced by the federal facility at Ellis Island. The Great Famine of 1845-52, the potato blight that spurred more than a million Irish emigres to leave for America, is commemorated by the Irish Hunger Memorial, at 290 Vesey Street, one block west of the former World Trade Center site. Federal Hall National Memorial, at Broad and Wall Streets, was a branch of the U.S. Treasury during the Civil War, and its stores of gold were a target of the draft rioters. The New York City Police Museum, at 100 Old Slip Street (between Water and South Streets), chronicles the service of "New York's Finest" while also displaying tools and weapons used by the city's nineteenth-century gangs and criminals.
The collection at the New York City Fire Museum, located in SoHo, at 278 Spring Street (between Varick and Hudson Streets), includes nineteenth-century firefighting equipment. A large portion of the original St. Nicholas Hotel, destroyed by Confederate arsonists in 1864, still stands at 521-523 Broadway, near Spring Street, in SoHo. Archbishop Hughes's church, the former St. Patrick's Cathedral, still stands at 260-264 Mulberry Street, near Prince Street, in SoHo.
The nearby South Street Seaport Historic District is an eleven-square-block area of Federal-style brick buildings and Belgian-block streets that preserves part of what was once New York's commercial center. This waterfront, where Irish longshoremen and African American workers clashed over jobs, was an important source of Mayor and Congressman Fernando Wood's political power. Guided tours are available through the South Street Seaport Museum. For tours of Governors Island, information is available from the Pier 17 ticket booth at South Street Seaport. During the Civil War, the forts on Governors Island held Confederate prisoners, and the supplies of arms and ammunition on the island were distributed to both soldiers and civilian volunteers who battled the draft rioters in 1863.
Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, and one of Fernando Wood's harshest critics, is commemorated by a statue next to the east wing of City Hall. The seated figure of Greeley is just across Park Row from Pace University. One block south stands the former New York Times building, which bears a plaque explaining that the Tribune was around the corner at Spruce and Nassau Streets. The Evening Post, Herald, and World were also nearby. This concentration of newspaper offices across from City Hall was known as Printing House Square. Directly behind City Hall, to the north, stands the "Tweed Courthouse." Built by the Tweed Ring at an exorbitant cost to taxpayers, it is now occupied by the city's Department of Education. North and west of City Hall, on Duane Street between Church and West Broadway, is a steak and seafood restaurant named City Hall in a building that dates from 1863.
The African Burial Ground Interpretive Center, at 290 Broadway (between Reade and Duane Streets), is adjacent to the African Burial Ground site. One of the most significant archaeological finds in U.S. history, the burial ground covered the equivalent of five city blocks. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some twenty thousand enslaved and free African Americans were buried in the cemetery. The site attests to the important role of African Americans in the founding and growth of New York City, and to the widespread use of slave labor in the northern colonies and states.
North and east of the City Hall area, court buildings and Chinatown have transformed the notorious slum called Five Points, where the poorest immigrants, especially Irish Americans, and blacks lived together during the Civil War era. The New York County Supreme Court building at 60 Center Street, built in 1913, stands on the site of the Old Brewery, a crowded rookery that reformers turned into the Five Points Mission. Directly across Center Street stood the saloon of Tammany comptroller and sheriff Matthew Brennan, one of the first Irish Americans to rise through the ranks of New York City's Democratic political machine. Three blocks north, on Center Street between Leonard and Franklin Streets, stood the city jail called the "Tombs."
Five Points was named for the five-cornered intersection of Worth, Baxter, and Park Streets, which today is partially covered by the southwestern corner of Columbus Park. What remains of Park Street is now Mosco Street, a single block between Mulberry and Mott Streets, east of the park. Some of the buildings on Mulberry Street date from the nineteenth century, as does the Roman Catholic Church of the Transfiguration, a block farther east at Mott and Mosco Streets, which the Dead Rabbits gang defended as part of their turf when the arrival of the new Metropolitan police force sparked deadly riots in 1857. A plaque on St. James's Church, on St. James Place just south of Chatham Square, tells that the church blessed the colors of the "Fighting Irish" Sixty-ninth Regiment of Volunteers and served the poor Irish community during the Civil War.
The draft riots were, in part, a product of the festering slums in New York's immigrant neighborhoods. North and east of Chinatown, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, at 90 Orchard Street, provides tours of a historic tenement building, opened in 1863 by a German immigrant. The Tenement Theatre, at 97 Orchard Street, is in an 1863 pub, formerly Scheider's Saloon. On East Seventh Street, just east of Third Avenue, stands McSorley's Old Ale House. Established by an Irish immigrant, John McSorley, in 1854, it is New York's oldest and most famous saloon. Farther east, between Avenue A and Avenue B, and extending north from Seventh to Tenth Street, Tompkins Square Park was the site of frequent political protests, especially by Irish and German immigrants from the surrounding neighborhoods. The Tompkins Square neighborhood was part of Kleindeutschland, Little Germany. Impoverished wives of volunteer soldiers protested here in 1862 to demand overdue relief payments, and unemployed laborers demanding "Work or Bread" were dispersed by police in 1874, signaling that class conflict in America, laid bare by the draft riots, would dominate the Gilded Age. Most recently, rioting between the police and residents flared up in 1988, during the gentrification of the area and the city's removal of a homeless encampment from the park.
A few blocks west of Tompkins Square Park, on West Eighth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues, stands Cooper Union, the institute founded by industrialist and civic reformer Peter Cooper to educate the sons of the working class on full scholarships. The institute's Great Hall was the site of momentous public meetings in the Civil War era, ranging from rallies of the Peace Democrats addressed by Fernando Wood, to Lincoln's famed "right makes might" speech in 1860, to the gathering of irate citizens who formed the Committee of Seventy to investigate the Tweed Ring in 1871. Here at Astor Place, the thoroughfares of the rich and the poor—Broadway and the Bowery (here called Fourth Avenue)—came within a block of each other, creating a friction point. The Astor Place Opera House was the focus of deadly riots in 1849.
Six blocks north of Astor Place lies Union Square, the neighborhood and park named for the convergence of the Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway) and the Bowery (here called Park Avenue South). Starting in the Civil War era, frequent rallies and demonstrations were held in the park, including patriotic outpourings like the massive rally in support of the war in April 1861, and various labor protests. The bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln by Henry Kirke Brown was installed in 1868. Along the perimeter of the southern half of the park, a series of bronze tablets based on period prints and photographs is embedded in the pavement. The plaques depict Union Square in various stages of its development during the nineteenth century and major events in the neighborhood, including the flag ceremony for New
York's first African American regiment in March 1864, and Lincoln's funeral in April 1865. Madison Square Park, at Broadway and Twenty-third Street, was also the site of political rallies, including Tammany's parade for McClellan in the election of 1864. At the southwestern entrance to the park sits a bronze statue of William Seward, a governor of New York, a senator, and Lincoln's secretary of state.
MIDTOWN: During the Civil War, the site of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street was occupied by the Croton Reservoir. Two blocks north stood the Colored Orphan Asylum. Bryant Park, behind the library, is named for William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post and Horace Greeley's main Republican rival. A bronze statue of Bryant, set in a monument to him, dominates the eastern end of the park. In the middle of the park's north side stands a bronze statue of William E. Dodge, a prominent businessman who led New York's Chamber of Commerce during the Civil War. Active in his support of the Union cause and heedless of his personal safety when helping to quell the draft riots, Dodge nonetheless embodied the ambivalence of New York's merchants toward the war and their desire to compromise with the South for the sake of trade.
UPPER EAST SIDE: The Arsenal in Central Park, at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-third Street, now the headquarters of the Parks Department, was built in 1847-51 as a state arsenal. Today the Arsenal hosts art exhibits and public forums in its third-floor gallery. At Park Avenue and Sixty-eighth Street, the Seventh Regiment Armory, built in 1880, is a brick fortress typical of the armories constructed during the Gilded Age throughout the northern states in response to the draft riots, immigration, and labor unrest during the Great Depression that began in 1873, particularly the Great Strike of 1877. The Museum of the City of New York, on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, has a permanent exhibit on "Firefighters," which includes an ornament from the Black Joke engine and the engine from the volunteer company that launched "Boss" Tweed's political career—and was the source of Tammany Hall's tiger logo.
The Devil's Own Work Page 49