The Gangs of New York

by Herbert Asbury

  Meanwhile Superintendent Kennedy had left Police Headquarters on a tour of inspection, not knowing that the riot had grown to such proportions. Wearing ordinary citizens’ clothing and carrying a light bamboo cane, he drove in a light carriage to

  Burning of the Provost-Marshal's Office in Third Avenue

  Forty-sixth street and Lexington avenue, where he saw the crowd surging about the burning building and columns of smoke rising high into the hot July air. He left his vehicle at the corner and walked through Forty-sixth street toward Third avenue. Halfway down the block he was recognized, and a gang of bruisers rushed upon him. Before he could defend himself he was knocked down by a man in an old army uniform. He scrambled upright and slashed his assailant across the face with his light cane, but the next instant was again beaten to the ground, where he was stamped and kicked. He managed to regain his feet, but the crowd rushed him to the edge of an embankment where street grading was being done, and flung him onto a pile of rocks at the bottom. Once more he struggled to his feet, and with the howling mob at his heels, fled across a vacant lot toward Forty-seventh street. But another gang met him, and he was mauled and pushed toward Lexington Avenue, where a huge thug hit him with a club and knocked him into a deep mudhole. Others leaped after him, but Kennedy, with his face and body bleeding from a score of wounds, splashed through the muck to Lexington avenue, where he collapsed in the arms of John Eagan, an influential citizen of the vicinity, who persuaded the mob that the Superintendent was dead. After the crowd had surged back toward the burning houses, Kennedy was loaded into a wagon and covered with old sacks, and was then driven to Police Headquarters. There a surgeon found seventy-two different bruises on his body and more than a score of cuts. He was able to take no further part in the fighting.

  With Superintendent Kennedy lying unconscious in a hospital, the command of the police and responsibility for the suppression of the riots devolved entirely upon Police Commissioners John C. Bergen and Thomas C. Acton, the latter a prominent Republican politician and one of the founders of the Union League Club.

  The third member of the Board, James Bowen, had been appointed a Brigadier-General of Volunteers, and had gone to join his division several weeks before the riots began. Bergen took charge of the situation on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, while Acton assumed command in Manhattan. From Monday morning until Friday afternoon Acton neither slept nor removed his clothing, and except for brief tours of inspection, did not leave his office at Police Headquarters, which had been removed from White street to No. 300 Mulberry street upon the organization of the Metropolitan Police District. During this period Acton received and answered more than four thousand telegrams, and directed the disposition of both the police and the military forces, for the army officers kept in close touch with him and generally deferred to his judgment concerning troop movements.

  Before leaving Police Headquarters Superintendent Kennedy had ordered detachments from various precincts, including those which had dispersed the mob before the Broadway draft office, to march to the rescue of the hard-pressed policemen who were trying to protect the building at Third avenue and Forty-sixth street.

  The first of these details to encounter the mob was a squad of thirteen men under command of Sergeant Ellison. They were attacked at Third avenue and Forty-fourth street, and, outnumbered more than two hundred to one, were compelled to retreat before the savage onslaught of the rioters. Sergeant Ellison was cut off from his command and his club wrested from his hand, but he knocked a gangster down and captured the man’s musket, with which he cracked several skulls before he was knocked senseless by a thug armed with a club. He lay unconscious on the sidewalk while the fighting surged back and forth, and was not rescued until another detachment commanded by Sergeant Wade appeared and clubbed a passage through the mass to his body.

  While the police under Sergeant Wade, and the remnant of the force with which Sergeant Ellison had gone into action, were engaging the rioters, a third detachment arrived under the command of Sergeants Mangin and Smith. But the mob was too strong even for their combined forces, and the police were retreating slowly down Third avenue, with half their number badly wounded, when Sergeant McCredie, known on the force as Fighting Mac, charged into the mêlée with fifteen men, and Sergeant Wolfe attacked from another corner with ten. McCredie took command of the entire body of police, and was able to muster forty-four clubs. With this force h^ turned and struck at the mob, and by hard fighting drove the rioters back to Forty-fifth street. But thousands still roared down from the north, and McCredie and his men were soon overwhelmed by a great throng which assailed them from all sides. Every policeman in the battle was disabled, and Sergeant McCredie, forced onto the steps of a house by the rioters, was dealt such a terrific blow that he hurtled through the panels of the front door. Dazed and badly hurt, he staggered to his feet and ran up the stairs to the second floor, where a young German woman secreted him between two mattresses and persuaded the mob that he had leaped from a window. The rioters set fire to the house and departed, and the young woman then hoisted McCredie to her back and carried him across lots into Lexington avenue, where a carriage took him to the police station.

  Other groups of police marched against the mob while McCredie was being rescued, and were defeated in turn with great losses, the vast mass of rioters surging tumultuously up and down the street and preventing the police from concentrating for an attack in force. By one o’clock the mob had swept southward to Thirty-fifth street, where Captain Steers and a strong force of patrolmen made a desperate stand but were finally overwhelmed and fled in disorder. Meanwhile a detachment of the Invalid Corps, numbering fifty men armed with saber and musket, marched up Third avenue, and were greeted by a shower of paving stones and brickbats, which killed one of the soldiers and wounded half a dozen others. Bewildered by the unexpected attack, the commander ordered his front rank to fire with blanks, but the volley had no other effect than to further inflame the mob and leave half the troops defenseless. With a roar the great throng

  Policeman Killed by Rioters

  charged, and the second rank of the Invalids fired with ball cartridges, killing and wounding six men and one woman. For an instant the mob was checked, and then the rioters attacked with greater ferocity than ever. Before the troops could reload, their guns had been wrested from their hands and they were being clubbed and shot with their own weapons. Hopelessly outnumbered, the soldiers turned and fled pell mell down the street, leaving a score of dead and wounded. The mob proceeded to torture and mutilate them.

  Some of the more intelligent of the rioters realized that if they could obtain firearms the police could be annihilated and the city captured and looted before effective miUtary aid could arrive. With this in mind, they planned to seize the State Armory at Second avenue and Twenty-first street, and the plant of the Union Steam Works a block farther north, which had been transformed into a munitions factory. In each of these structures was stored about four thousand carbines and some two hundred thousand rounds of ammunition. But detectives learned of the scheme, and Captain Cameron of the Eighteenth Precinct rushed a strong detachment of police to guard each building. Sergeant Banfield and twenty men took possession of the Armory, and at two o’clock were relieved by thirty-two men of the famous Broadway Squad, under command of Sergeant Burdick and Roundsmen Ferris and Sherwood. The patrolmen were armed with carbines, besides their nightsticks and revolvers, and a man was stationed at each window to await the expected attack.

  It was not long in coming. Within half an hour after the police had entered a mob estimated at ten thousand men and women swarmed before the Armory, hurling bricks and paving stones and firing pistols and muskets whenever a policeman showed his head. About four o’clock the rioters attacked, led by a giant thug who brandished a sledge-hammer, and began an assault upon the main door. Repeated blows soon smashed a panel, and a man widely known in Five Points gang circles rushed forward and started to crawl through the aperture, eager to be the
first inside the building. A policeman immediately shot him through the head. For a moment the rioters fell back, but they soon came on again with renewed fury, hammering at the doors with sledges, crowbars and small tree trunks which they used as battering rams, and dealing such terrific blows that the whole building trembled.

  It soon became apparent that the Armory could not be defended, and Sergeant Burdick prepared to lead his men out. It was obviously suicide to attempt a passage through the mob, and there was but one avenue of retreat which the rioters had not guarded. That was a hole in the rear wall, some twelve by eighteen inches and eighteen feet from the ground. Every man of the Broadway Squad was well over six feet tall and a giant in build, but they managed to squeeze themselves through the hole, and after clubbing a path through a small crowd which tried to intercept them, made their way to the Eighteenth Precinct station house in Twenty-second street near Third avenue. But within an hour this structure was attacked and burned, and the Broadway Squad fled to Police Headquarters in Mulberry street.

  The last of the Squad had scarcely dropped through the hole and left the Armory before the doors crashed in and the triumphant mob streamed into the building. There was considerable plunder downstairs, but the bulk of the carbines and ammunition was stored in the drill room on the third floor, and thither the crowd rushed. Within a few minutes the room was jammed with excited rioters snatching guns from the racks and stuffing their pockets with cartridges. To prevent interference from the police, the mob barricaded the door of the drill room, an act which was to have frightful consequences. While the Armory was being sacked the detachments of police which had been fighting the throngs in Second and Third avenues had effected a junction, and more than a hundred men launched an attack upon the crowd which still milled about in front of the Armory. The thudding locust clubs soon cleared a pathway, and the police formed a lane four deep in front of the broken door.

  Scores of the rioters rushed from the building to aid their fellows, and as fast as they tried to run the gauntlet the police clubbed them down. Several were killed by mighty blows. Meanwhile other elements of the mob, fearing that the police had come in sufficient force to recapture the Armory, fired the building in half a dozen places. The structure was of wood and very old, and within ten minutes the lower half was a mass of flames. Rioters who ran out after the fire had started were not molested by the police unless they carried carbines or ammunition. These were clubbed without mercy. The mob in the drill room had slight chance of escape, for the door had been barricaded to such good purpose that it could not be opened for some time, and when it was finally ripped from the hinges the whole building below the third floor was a roaring torch. A moment later the frenzied rioters began leaping from the windows, but many who did so cracked their skulls against the pavement and were killed, while

  Burning of the Second Avenue Armory

  others received broken legs and arms. But not more than a score had jumped before the floor of the drill room collapsed and the screaming men were hurled into the flames. The number who thus perished was never known, but after the riots had subsided and workmen began to clear away the debris, more than fifty baskets and barrels of human bones were carted from the ruins and buried in Potter’s Field.

  WHILE the battle was raging for possession of the Armory, the great throng which had massed in Third avenue divided into smaller mobs and surged across Manhattan Island from the Hudson to the East Rivers, looting, burning, and beating every Negro who dared show himself. Three black men were hanged before nightfall on the first day of the rioting, and thereafter an average of three a day were found by the police hanging to trees and lamp-posts, their bodies slashed by knives or beaten almost to a pulp. Some were little more than charred skeletons, for the women who followed in the wake of the rioters and on occasion took part in the fierce fighting, poured oil into the knife cuts and set fire to it, and then danced beneath the blazing human torch with obscene songs and imprecations. Within three hours after the first attack on the Third avenue draft office several fine private residences in Lexington avenue near Forty-sixth street had been pillaged and set on fire, the rioters staggering out of the houses laden with clothing, furniture and other property. The Bull’s Head Tavern in Forty-sixth street was burned, as was the block of buildings in Broadway between Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth streets. The mob which had massed before the Provost Marshal’s office in Broadway at Twenty-ninth street during the morning returned early in the afternoon, and fired the structure, carrying the furniture into the streets and hacking it to pieces with hatchets and axes. Half a dozen jewelry stores and other shops in the vicinity were looted, and several hundred guns and pistols stolen from hardware stores.

  One of the mobs which had detached itself from the main body of the rioters moved eastward to attack the residence of Mayor Opdyke, in First avenue, while another marched southward through Broadway to burn Police Headquarters. Small detach-merits of police continued to engage the rioters, but a force sufficient to strike an effective blow could not be formed, and so many mobs were roaring through the streets that a concentration against one would only have left the others free to burn and pillage without hindrance. About two hundred patrolmen had made their way to Headquarters, but many had been seriously wounded, and fewer than one hundred and fifty were fit for active duty. Instead of sending them out in small detachments to harry the rioters until military aid could be organized and sent into the field. Commissioner Acton decided to stake everything in an attempt to disperse the great throng which was marching against Headquarters, for detectives who had mingled with the rioters reported that their leaders planned, if successful in Mulberry street, to invade the financial district and loot the banks and the United States sub-treasury.

  Every available policeman was mustered and placed under command of Inspector Daniel C. Carpenter, senior uniformed officer of the department, who made a brief speech after Drill Officer Copeland had formed them in front of the building. “We are going to put down a mob,” said Carpenter, “and we will take no prisoners.” The savage roar of the rioters could be heard as Inspector Carpenter and about one hundred and twenty-five men marched through Mulberry and Bleecker streets, and as they turned into Broadway they saw that the slowly moving mass filled the broad thoroughfare from curb to curb, and extended northward as far as the eye could reach. There were at least ten thousand howling men and women, with the former in the majority, and they were all armed with clubs, guns, pistols, crowbars and swords. At their head marched a giant carrying an American flag, and another who staggered beneath the burden of a huge plank on which had been crudely lettered, “NO DRAFT!” During its progress down Broadway the mob set fire to half a dozen houses, and a pall of black smoke enveloped that section of the city. Storekeepers put up their shutters and abandoned their shops, stages turned into the side streets and were quickly emptied of drivers and passengers, and ahead of the advancing mob raced frightened Negroes, and rumbling carts piled high with the household belongings of citizens who had been forced from their burned and pillaged homes.

  Inspector Carpenter deployed his men in four lines of skirmishers across Broadway, and the police marched steadily northward, establishing contact with the mob at Amity street just south of La Farge House, into which a hundred of the rioters had swarmed and were beating the Negro servants. For a moment the front rank of the mob halted, and then a huge thug, armed with a bludgeon, sprang forward and rushed upon Inspector Carpenter, who was marching several feet in advance of his men.

  But Carpenter was a fierce fighter. Instead of falling back, he ran to meet his assailant, and dodging the blow which would have cracked his skull, killed the man with his nightstick. Behind him rushed Patrolmen Doyle and Thompson, the latter capturing the flag and the former killing the rioter who bore the lettered plank.

  The next moment a hail of brickbats and paving stones whirled from the mob and hurtled into the ranks of the police, and a score of shots followed in rapid succession. Several of
the policemen fell seriously wounded, but the remainder closed ranks and continued their steady march, their clubs rising and falling in almost perfect unison and seldom faiUng to find marks as they came to close quarters with the surging throng. Gradually the mob gave ground before the onslaught of the disciplined fighters, and after fifteen minutes of furious slugging the rioters broke and scattered in all directions, while the police pursued them up the side streets and clubbed them unmercifully. The pavements and sidewalks were littered with the dead and wounded, who were carried away by their comrades several hours later under cover of darkness.

  Mayor Opdyke had neglected to provide a police guard for his home, but his neighbors had recognized the likelihood of an assault, and when the rioters swept into First avenue they found the house and grounds garrisoned by more than fifty citizens, armed with swords, carbines and pistols, under command of Colonel B. F. Manierre. This display of force turned back the mob without a shot being fired, and it surged across the city and joined a great crowd which had gathered in front of the Colored Orphan