The Gangs of New York

by Herbert Asbury

  THE situation was considerably improved when Mayor Wood finally dissolved the Municipal Police, but the Metropolitan Board experienced great difficulty in recruiting the new force to full strength. By autumn, when the financial panic began in earnest, no more than eight hundred patrolmen were available for duty throughout the district, approximately one to each eight hundred and four inhabitants. Although the actual criminal element had by this time been brought fairly well under control, and even the gangs had wearied of continual brawling, there were still frequent outbreaks of rioting and looting, which increased in numbers and seriousness as banks, factories and other business houses closed their doors and filled the city with idle men. And in November, as winter came on, mobs of hungry and unemployed, frightened at the prospect of starvation, surged violently through the streets crying for bread and work. Several threats were made against the State Arsenal, wherein huge quantities of muskets and ammunition were stored, and the building was guarded by a police detail, while troops of the United States Army were on duty day and night at the Customs House at the Battery and the Assay Office in Wall street. It was not until the financial skies had cleared and business had returned to normal that the Metropolitan Police Board was able to proceed with the reorganization of the department.

  THE DRAFT RIOTS

  THE FIQHTING which raged through the streets of New York City from Monday to Saturday during a hot week in July, 1863, began as a protest against the Conscription Act which had been passed by Congress in March, but that phase of the struggle was soon forgotten, and thereafter the riots were an insurrection of the criminal element against the estabUshed order. The disturbances were the natural end of the ruinous road along which the city had travelled during the preceding fifteen years, and the logical result of the governmental corruption which had permitted Manhattan Island to become the Mecca of criminals from all parts of the United States and the slums of Europe. “This mob is not the people,” wrote Henry J. Raymond in The New York Times, “nor

  Civil War Draft Riot Sacking a DrugStore in Second Avenue, ca. 1863

  does it belong to the people. It is for the most part made up of the vilest elements of the city. It has not even the poor merit of being what mobs usually are—the product of mere ignorance and passion. They talk, or rather they did talk at first, of the oppressiveness of the Conscription Law; but three-fourths of those who have been actively engaged in violence have been boys and young men under twenty years of age, and not at all subject to the Conscription. Were the Conscription Law to be abrogated tomorrow, the controlling inspiration of the mob would remain the same. It comes from sources quite independent of that law, or any other law—from a malignant hate toward those in better circumstances, from a craving for plunder, from a barbarous spite

  against a different race, from a disposition to bolster up the failing fortunes of the Southern rebels. . . . The mob must be crushed at once. . . . Give them grape and plenty of it.” The New York Herald at first described the rioters as “the people,” and The World as “the laboring men of the city,” but these papers soon adopted the viewpoint of The Times. From the beginning of the riots Horace Greeley’s Tribune advocated the employment of the greatest possible force in suppressing the mobs.

  The census of 1860, the last official count before the riots, fixed the population of New York City, which then comprised only Manhattan Island, at 813,669, of which a little more than half were foreign-born. Among the aliens the Irish were overwhelmingly in the majority with a total of 203,740, while the next highest were the Germans, with 119,984. The Irish had settled principally in the Five Points and Mulberry Bend districts, which contained 310 persons to the acre, while the Germans were massed aJong the middle East Side. The Germans caused little or no trouble during the riots; on the contrary, they organized patrols which rendered effective aid to the police and military units. Other races clustered in similarly national colonies, keeping to themselves, maintaining their own languages and customs, and making no pretense at amalgamation except to become naturalized citizens at the behest of shady politicians who voted them like sheep.

  During the year ending July 1, 1860, the total number of persons actually convicted of crime in New York was 58,067. Of these about eighty per cent, had been born in Europe. In 1862, the year before the riots, the police arrested 82,072 men and women, approximately one-tenth of the population, and the number of criminals in the metropolis during that year was estimated at from 70,000 to 80,000, an increase of about 20,000 within ten years. These figures do not take into account the keepers of the myriad low dives and resorts, nor the political protectors of thieves and murderers, who were themselves criminals however much they may have been within the law. The number of rioters actively engaged in looting, murdering and burning during the week was variously estimated at from 50,000 to 70,000 while some of the individual mobs which swarmed through the streets contained as many as 10,000 frenzied men and women. For the most part they were the human sweepings of European cities who had been packed into ships during the forties and fifties and dumped in ever-increasing numbers upon American shores. A vast majority landed in New York and remained there, and soon found their natural levels in the great gangs of the Bowery, the Five Points and the other areas into which the gangsters had spread and become firmly entrenched. It was these gangs, swarming from their holes at the first indication of trouble, that formed the organized nuclei around which the rioters rallied.

  THE Confederate armies under General Robert E. Lee began their northward movement early in June, and the Federal government at Washington called upon the states of New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Maryland for 120,000 soldiers for emergency service until the Conscription Law could be put into operation. Seventeen New York city and Brooklyn regiments were rushed to the seat of war in Pennsylvania, and the most important city on the American continent was denuded of troops, except for some two hundred men of the Invalid Corps, a thousand members of various National Guard and Volunteer units and of companies in process of organization, and approximately seven hundred sailors, marines, and soldiers of the Twelfth and Third infantry regiments, comprising the crews of the warships anchored in the Hudson and the garrisons of the Navy Yard, Fort Hamilton, Governor’s Island and other posts. These units had a few pieces of artillery, including both howitzers and field guns. But none was available during the first two days of the fighting except the regular army detachments and the Invalid Corps, composed of crippled and wounded soldiers who had been doing guard duty at arsenals, armories and munitions factories. During this period the brunt of the fighting was borne by the Metropolitan Police force, numbering 2,297 men of all ranks, of whom only 1,620 were patrolmen. In some of the fights the policemen were outnumbered at least five hundred to one, but not more than half a dozen times did they fall back before the mobs. By Tuesday night a thousand citizens, armed with nightstick and pistol, had been sworn in as Volunteer Specials, and Wednesday morning regiments of infantry and cavalry began to arrive from the battlefields of Pennsylvania. Soon between seven thousand and ten thousand troops were marching against the rioters, among them the 152nd, Fifty-second, Eleventh, Fifty-fourth and Eighty-third infantry regiments of Volunteers; the Thirteenth Cavalry, of Rochester; the Twenty-sixth infantry of the Michigan state Volunteers; the Sixty-fifth infantry of the National Guard of New York from Buffalo, and the Seventh, Old Guard, Eighteenth, Seventy-fourth and Sixty-ninth National Guard regiments, which had been recruited principally in New York and Brooklyn. A dozen batteries of artillery had also gone into action, and were pouring grape and canister into the frenzied mobs which surged through Manhattan.

  A vast majority of the rioters were Irish, simply because the gangsters and the other criminal elements of the city were largely of that race. In some quarters it was declared that the riots were a Roman Catholic insurrection, the statement being based on various circumstances, one of which was the burning and looting of the Methodist Episcopal Mission at the Five Points by a mob whic
h shouted the glories of the Pope and carried banners inscribed “Down With the Protestants!” There was, of course, no truth in the charge, for the riots, while criminal, were in no sense religious. Yet much significance was seen in the fact that no Roman Catholic property was destroyed or even threatened; that on several occasions lone Catholic priests turned back mobs plainly bent on murder and loot; and that Archbishop Hughes, although repeatedly requested by Mayor George L. Opdyke and Governor Horatio L. Seymour, refused to counsel the rioters to disband until the morning of Friday, the last day of the fighting. He then issued a proclamation, but prefaced it with such a bitter and undignified attack upon Horace Greeley of the Tribune that it defeated its own purpose. Later the same day the Archbishop appeared on the balcony of his residence and addressed a large crowd which had gathered in response to a pastoral letter entitled “Archbishop Hughes to the Men of New York, who are called in many of the papers rioters.”

  IN April President Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 300,000 men, and within a month the War Department announced that the draft would begin in New York City on Saturday, July 11. The city authorities were not requested to cooperate, nor was the police force asked to provide a guard for the Provost Marshals’ offices which were opened at various points in the city. The Invalid Corps, under command of Colonel Ruggles, was directed to detach men from duty at the armories and arsenals and furnish whatever protection might be required. Throughout New York, as well as in many other parts of the country, there was bitter opposition to the Conscription Act, based principally on the clause which exempted any drafted man who paid the government three hundred dollars. This operated in favor of the rich man, and made it certain that the poor would form the bulk of the conscripted army. Some of the newspapers published inflammatory articles as the time for the draft drew near, and a political organization called the Knights of the Golden Circle was very active in opposition to the law. This society was believed to have formed the nucleus of the first mob which gathered, but there is little historical support for the belief; at any rate it was quickly swept away and forgotten as the gangsters and other criminals poured out of the Five Points and other slum districts and began looting and burning. Workmen, especially the unskilled laborers, were violently opposed to the draft, for few if any of them possessed three hundred dollars, and it was obvious that if their names were drawn they would have to go to war. Several of the Provost Marshals were threatened when they went about collecting names, and only a few days before the drawing began Captain Joel B. Erhardt, Provost Marshal of the Ninth District, was attacked by several men armed with iron bars when he visited a new building at Broadway and Liberty street. He sent for aid, and for three hours confronted them with drawn pistol, but was finally compelled to retreat without the names.

  Early on the morning of July 11 the police received a report that the Knights of the Golden Circle and others opposed to the new law planned to seize the Arsenal at Seventh avenue and Thirty-fifth street, and Superintendent John A. Kennedy sent Sergeant Van Orden and fifteen patrolmen to guard the property. A crowd had begun to gather when the police arrived, but soon dispersed when the patrolmen marched into the building and closed the doors. A few hours later the actual drawing of names began in the Ninth District draft office at Third avenue and Forty-sixth street, and passed off quietly, although crowds gathered outside the building and muttered ominously as the wheel was turned. On this day 1236 names were drawn, and the work was then abandoned until the following Monday, when, it was announced, 264 additional names would be chosen to complete the quota of the district.

  The next day, July 12, was Sunday, and although the city appeared to be quiet, beneath the surface there was a dangerous undercurrent of fear and excitement. Groups of men gathered on the street corners, and the wide-spread discussion of the exemption clause of the Conscription Act increased in bitterness when it was rumored that several rich men whose names had already been drawn had promptly paid the government three hundred dollars each, and had been released from their military obligations. Detectives found unusual activity among the gangs. Messages were constantly being exchanged between the chieftains, and detachments of gangsters were busily engaged collecting great quantities of clubs, brickbats, paving stones and other weapons, and carrying them into the dives. That night several fires were started in the lower part of the city, and the throngs which gathered to watch the firemen were larger and more boisterous than usual. Notwithstanding these circumstances, the police authorities professed not to be alarmed, and except for retaining the guard at the Arsenal, Superintendent Kennedy made only the routine assignments for the next day.

  Monday dawned hot and clear, and the sun was not two hours above the horizon before it was apparent that trouble was brewing. About six o’clock groups of both men and women marched out of the dives and slum centers of the lower half of the island, and began to assemble at various points along the middle West Side. As rapidly as these gatherings reached large proportions they moved northward along Eighth and Ninth avenues, while small detachments spread into the side streets and visited factories and large construction jobs, intimidating the laborers and compelling them to quit work and join the hurrying throng. Several employers and foremen who protested were beaten. Thus, while the respectable portion of the city’s population was at breakfast, the elements of a savage mob, armed with weapons of every description, were assembling at an appointed rendezvous in a vacant lot east of Central Park, in what is now the most fashionable residential section of the city. As the lot began to fill agitators harangued

  Rioters Marching Down Second Avenue

  the crowd with inflammatory speeches against the draft, and about eight o’clock the huge mass surged into the street and moved southward in two columns along Fifth and Sixth avenues, brandishing their weapons and shouting defiance of the government and the police. At Forty-seventh street the columns joined, turned east and proceeded steadily toward Third avenue, and then down that broad thoroughfare to the draft office at Forty-sixth street. The strength of the mob has been variously estimated at from five thousand to fifteen thousand. An accurate idea of its size may be obtained from a statement by the son of President King of Columbia College, who timed the marchers and found that they required between twenty and twenty-five minutes to pass a given point, and filled Forty-seventh street from curb to curb.

  A crowd had already begun to form in front of the Third avenue draft office, and another was milling and shouting threateningly before the office at Broadway and Twenty-ninth street. Half an hour after the mob had swept out of the Central Park rendezvous. Superintendent Kennedy dispatched sixty-nine patrolmen, commanded by Captain Speight and Sergeants Wade, Mangin, McCredie and Wolfe, to guard the Broadway office, and at the same time directed Captain Porter to send sixty men to the threatened point on Third avenue and reinforce the squad on duty there. Fifty men of the Invalid Corps also stood to arms and marched to the rescue of the latter office. At nine o’clock so many alarming reports had been received at Headquarters that the Superintendent sent the following message over the police telegraph system:

  To ALL STATIONS IN NEW YORK AND Brooklyn: Call in your RESERVE platoons AND HOLD THEM AT THE STATION HOUSE SUBJECT TO FURTHER ORDERS.

  The force under command of Captain Speight was sufficiently strong to prevent trouble at the Broadway office, and the drafting continued there without interruption until noon, when it was adjourned for twenty-four hours. But in Third avenue the mob had grown to huge proportions, and while the Provost Marshal drew from the spinning wheel the slips of paper bearing the names of those chosen in the draft, the crowd pushed and yelled and milled furiously up and down the thoroughfare, packing the avenue for half a dozen blocks on either side of Forty-sixth street. Horse cars and private carriages which attempted to make their way through the swarm of men and women were stopped, the horses unhitched and the drivers and passengers driven from the vehicles. Placards on which were inscribed “No Draft!” appeared at various po
ints, and were paraded back and forth amid cheers. The excitement increased, and by ten o’clock the front rank of the mob pressed closely against the thin line of policemen who stood with drawn clubs and their backs to the building, waiting for the riot to burst into flame. The fire had been laid and required only the touch of a match.

  This was provided by Volunteer Engine Company No. Thirty-Three, popularly known as the Black Joke, an organization of noted street brawlers. Their leader had been drawn in the draft on Saturday, and his followers had announced their intention of smashing the wheel and destroying the records. The entire company was massed in front of the building when the great crowd surged howling through the street from the vacant lot near Central Park, and as the mob became more boisterous the firemen crowded closer. Suddenly someone raised a pistol and fired into the air, and the next moment the men of the Black Joke made a concerted rush for the door. The police fought valiantly, but were soon overwhelmed, and Captain Porter ordered a retreat into the building. But they were not quick enough to close and barricade the doors, and the firemen swarmed inside and wrecked the wheel, although the Provost Marshal was able to save his documents. Behind the firemen swept the mob, yelling and brandishing firearms and clubs, and after a short but fierce struggle in the hallways the police fled into an alley and thence to Second avenue, leaving the rioters in possession of the building. They promptly applied the torch, and when other fire companies arrived the mob would not permit them to put out the fire, assaulting Chief Engineer John Decker when he tried to run hose lines into the building. The firemen were compelled to stand by and watch the destruction of the entire block from Forty-sixth to Forty-seventh streets.