by H. W. Brands
Wood didn’t get his way. He wasn’t ready to take up arms for his city’s independence, and Albany wouldn’t let the city go without a fight. But as the war unfolded, New Yorkers were conspicuously unenthusiastic for the Union, and the city became a haven for Southern sympathizers.
It was also a magnet for immigrants, who arrived with no attachment to the Union and no feeling of responsibility for slavery. To the degree that the immigrants—many of them Irish, and most uneducated and unskilled—had opinions on the race question, they viewed blacks as potential competitors in the job market. Emancipation promised the immigrants little but a harder scramble to reach the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Many opposed emancipation, some quite bitterly.
The immigrants’ attitude would have counted little had native Northerners remained eager to enlist in the Union army. But after two years of the war, their devotion was flagging. Congress resorted to conscription, for the first time compelling young men into the national army. The Enrollment Act was unpopular from the start. It required male citizens, and immigrants who had filed for citizenship, between the ages of twenty and forty-five to register for a draft lottery, which would fill quotas set by the federal government. The draft effectively exempted the wealthy, who were allowed to pay others to take their places. It also exempted blacks, who had been barred from citizenship by the Dred Scott decision. The result was that poor whites, often immigrants, were dragooned to fight a war in which they might get killed or maimed and which, if successful, would flood the labor market with people they feared and despised.
The draft provoked riots in several cities of the North; in New York the riots became a kind of urban warfare America had never experienced. John Torrey was a botanist and chemist who lived on Forty-Ninth Street and worked in the federal Assay Office in the Wall Street district of lower Manhattan. “We have had great riots today and they are still in progress,” he wrote to a friend on Monday, July 13. “They were reported to us at the Assay Office about noon, but I thought they were exaggerated.” A new eyewitness report from a colleague showed them to be all too true. “Mr. Mason came in and said that he saw a mob stop two 3rd Ave. cars to take out some negroes and maltreat them.” Manhattan had a large community of African Americans, who since the war’s beginning had been blamed by the city’s dominant Democratic party—the party of Fernando Wood—for the conflict. The draft added to their woes. The assault on the blacks on the streetcars made John Torrey think of his black housekeepers; he headed home to protect them. The cars he normally rode had been stopped by the rioters; he tried another line, on Fourth Avenue. “I found the streets full of people, and when I reached the terminus (now 34th Street) I found the whole road way and sidewalks filled with rough fellows (and some equally rough women) who were tearing up rails, cutting down telegraph poles, and setting fire to buildings.”
Torrey walked the remaining fifteen blocks toward his house. The rioters were too busy to pay him any mind. He thought he had seen the worst of the violence. But as he entered Forty-Ninth Street, the mob grew thick and angry. His house and others on the street were better appointed and maintained than many of those in the neighborhoods he had passed through; adjacent to Columbia College, the street was home to abolitionists and other Republicans. The rioters started in on a house at one end of the street; Torrey feared they would work their way along to his. He stepped up his pace and got there first. “I found Jane and Maggie”—his daughters—“a little alarmed but not frightened. The mob had been in the College Grounds and came to our house wishing to know if a Republican lived there.” Torrey’s daughters denied it; their father was a scientist, not a politician, they said. The mob didn’t debate the point, and moved on. “They were going to burn President King’s house, as he was rich and a decided Republican.”
That particular arson was averted by some Catholic priests who appealed to the Irish rioters to consider their immortal souls. The mob returned to Torrey’s house. “The furious bareheaded and coatless men assembled under our windows and shouted aloud for Jeff Davis!” Torrey wrote. He kept his servants out of sight and prepared his daughters to flee at a moment’s notice.
The rioters became distracted by a more appealing target. “The mob, furious as demons, went yelling over to the Colored-Orphan Asylum in 5th Ave. a little below where we live. And rolling a barrel of kerosene in it, the whole structure was soon in a blaze, and is now a smoking ruin. What has become of the 300 poor innocent orphans I could not learn.” He later discovered that the children had escaped ahead of the flames. But the burning of the orphanage revealed how far out of control the rioting had gone. “Before this fire was extinguished—or rather burned out, for the wicked wretches who caused it would not permit the engines to be used—the northern sky was brilliantly illuminated, probably by the burning of the Aged Colored-Women’s Home in 65th Street, or the Harlem Rail Road Bridge.”
Torrey ventured out as night was falling. “I took a walk a short distance down 5th Avenue, and seeing a group of rowdies in the grounds of Dr. Ward’s large and superb mansion, I found they had gone there with the intention of setting fire to the building.” The doctor and his family had come out front to plead for their home. They swore they were Democrats and opposed the draft. The rioters left the house standing. “But they may return before morning,” Torrey remarked.
Torrey’s curiosity caused him to question the rioters on their plans. “I conversed with one of the ringleaders, who told me they would burn the whole city before they were through. He said they were to take Wall Street in hand tomorrow.”
Torrey and his household slept in street clothes that night, with ears cocked for the tramp of the mob’s feet. They were spared, but the city the next day looked like a war zone. Militia troops from Gettysburg, weary after saving Washington from the rebels, were brought in to save New York from itself. Citizens and government workers armed themselves for battle. Torrey arrived at the Assay Office and discovered an arsenal. “The people there were spoiling for a fight,” he said. “They had a battery of about 25 rifle barrels, carrying three balls each and mounted on a gun-carriage. It could be loaded and fired with rapidity. We also had 10-inch shells, to be lighted and thrown out of the windows. Likewise quantities of SO3”—sulfur trioxide, used in the assay process and capable of producing a poison gas—“with arrangements for projecting it on the mob.” Perhaps the mob got wind of what awaited them, for they left the Assay Office alone.
They found plenty of other victims. “The worst mobs are on the 1st and 2nd and 7th Avenues,” Torrey wrote on Wednesday, July 15. “Many have been killed there. They are very hostile to the negroes, and scarcely one of them is to be seen. A person who called at our house this afternoon saw three of them hanging together. The Central Park has been a kind of refuge to them. Hundreds were there today, with no protection in a very severe shower. The station houses of the police are crowded with them.”
The purposeful rioting descended into arrant hooliganism. “Walking out on 5th Ave. near 48th St., a man who lives there told me that a few minutes before, in broad sunlight, three ruffians seized the horses of a gentleman’s carriage and demanded money,” Torrey said. “By whipping up, they barely escaped. Immediately afterwards, they stopped another carriage, turned the persons out of it, and then got in themselves, shouting and brandishing their clubs.” The extortion escalated. “Thieves are going about in gangs, calling at houses, and demanding money—threatening the torch if denied.”
By Thursday the militia and the police had managed to restore order. But the toll of the violence was deeply disturbing. More than one hundred people had been killed and some two thousand injured. Several blacks were hanged; hundreds were burned out of their homes; thousands fled Manhattan never to return. The damage to property would take years to repair.
50
THE SMOKE FROM the fires dissipated beyond the Hudson, but the gloom was felt as far as the Potomac. Lincoln had expected
his Emancipation Proclamation to be controversial, but he hadn’t expected its opponents to incinerate New York. In the aftermath of the riots he concluded he needed to do a better job explaining what the proclamation meant and how it enhanced the war effort.
His opportunity arrived a few weeks later in the form of an invitation from Springfield to address a gathering there. Lincoln likely had solicited the invitation, which gave him, in declining, a chance to speak his mind. “It would be very agreeable to me to thus meet my old friends at my own home,” he said in a letter addressed to James Conkling, one of the organizers, yet intended for publication. “But I cannot, just now, be absent from here so long as a visit there would require.” He proceeded, “There are those who are dissatisfied with me. To such I would say: You desire peace; and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we attain it?” He identified three possible courses. “First, to suppress the rebellion by force of arms. This, I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not for it, a second way is, to give up the Union. I am against this. Are you for it? If you are, you should say so plainly. If you are not for force, nor yet for dissolution, there only remains some imaginable compromise.”
But what would the compromise be? “I do not believe any compromise embracing the maintenance of the Union is now possible,” Lincoln said. “All I learn leads to a directly opposite belief. The strength of the rebellion, is its military—its army. That army dominates all the country, and all the people, within its range. Any offer of terms made by any man or men within that range, in opposition to that army, is simply nothing for the present; because such man or men have no power whatever to enforce their side of a compromise, if one were made with them.”
Lincoln admitted that the unhappiness with his administration wasn’t merely about the Union’s slow progress at arms. “To be plain, you are dissatisfied with me about the negro. Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose you do not. Yet I have neither adopted nor proposed any measure which is not consistent with even your view, provided you are for the Union. I suggested compensated emancipation, to which you replied you wished not to be taxed to buy negroes. But I had not asked you to be taxed to buy negroes except in such way as to save you from greater taxation to save the Union exclusively by other means.”
So he had taken action on his own, and incurred additional anger. “You dislike the emancipation proclamation; and, perhaps, would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional. I think differently. I think the Constitution invests its commander-in-chief with the law of war in time of war. The most that can be said, if so much, is, that slaves are property. Is there—has there ever been—any question that by the law of war property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed? And is it not needed whenever taking it helps us or hurts the enemy? Armies, the world over, destroy enemies’ property when they cannot use it; and even destroy their own to keep it from the enemy.”
In any event, the proclamation had been issued. What to do now? “The proclamation, as law, either is valid or is not valid. If it is not valid, it needs no retraction. If it is valid, it cannot be retracted, any more than the dead can be brought to life. Some of you profess to think its retraction would operate favorably for the Union. Why better after the retraction, than before the issue? There was more than a year and a half of trial to suppress the rebellion before the proclamation issued, the last one hundred days of which passed under an explicit notice that it was coming, unless averted by those in revolt returning to their allegiance.” The war had gone well in the months since the proclamation was issued, Lincoln said. And he thought the proclamation had much to do with it. “Some of the commanders of our armies in the field who have given us our most important successes believe the emancipation policy and the use of colored troops constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.”
Critics said the proclamation had damaged Union morale. Lincoln addressed those in his reading audience who felt that way. “You say you will not fight to free negroes.” This was ungenerous. “Some of them seem willing to fight for you—but no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time then for you to declare you will not fight to free negroes.”
Lincoln repeated his rationale for the proclamation. “I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you.” Was there something wrong with this logic? The error had not been shown to him. “I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do as soldiers leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union.” From this followed emancipation. “Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.”
Lincoln asked his readers to take courage from recent events. “The signs look better,” he said. Referring to the capture of Vicksburg, he declared, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” Victories in the East were having a cumulative effect. “It is hard to say that anything has been more bravely and well done than at Antietam, Murfreesboro, Gettysburg, and on many fields of lesser note.” The end wasn’t yet near, but it was getting closer. “Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case and pay the cost. And then 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.”
He didn’t want to get ahead of himself. “Let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober. Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result.”
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LINCOLN’S LETTER TO James Conkling fell short of its target. He had wanted it to be published but not in the mutilated form it first took in the papers. “I am mortified this morning to find the letter to you, botched up, in the Eastern papers, telegraphed from Chicago,” he wrote to Conkling. “How did this happen?”
Conkling explained that he was mortified too, but the cause was an honest mistake. He noted that the full letter had been published the next day, and he was confident no lasting harm was done.
Lincoln had reason to be sensitive, for during this period he was stretching the Constitution to the breaking point. In mid-September he suspended the writ of habeas corpus for individuals arrested as “spies or aiders or abettors of the enemy.” The suspension was broad, applying throughout the country, and it was open-ended, lasting for the duration of the war or until it was explicitly revoked.
Lincoln’s critics grew apoplectic. The Emancipation Proclamation was bad enough, they said, depriving citizens of their property. But suspending habeas corpus deprived Americans of their liberty. The proscription might seem narrow on paper, but there was little to prevent corrupt officials from arresting their enemies as spies, locking them up and never having to bring them before a judge.