The Epic of New York City (50 page)

Free Negroes tried to enlist, but they were rejected at first. New York was still a segregated city. In 1860 voters had defeated a bill giving Negroes the right to vote without meeting property qualifications. Black men persisted in their clamor to bear arms against the South. Visiting here was a South Carolina white woman, who cried, “Just think how infamous it is that our
gentlemen
should have to go out and fight niggers, and that every nigger they shoot is a thousand dollars out of their own pockets!” The first local company of colored soldiers was mustered on February 9, 1864. All told, 200,000 American Negroes served in the Union army.

The New York Sabbath Committee declared it would be unholy of soldiers to fight on Sunday. The Reverend Stephen H. Tyng, of St. George's Episcopal Church on Broadway, said that it was a historic fact that “the party who attacks in war on Sunday has invariably been defeated.” General Robert E. Lee, who had spent five years in New York strengthening local forts, took command of all Southern forces. Tiffany's began making swords, medals, corps badges, and other military insignia. Brooks Brothers turned out uniforms for generals
Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Hooker and for thousands of their men.

The largest mass meeting in the city's history was held in Union Square to pledge loyalty to the Union cause. Crowd estimates vary from 100,000 to 250,000 persons. Whatever the exact number, the multitude was so vast that speeches were made from 5 different stands erected in the square. Fernando Wood presided because he was mayor, but scowling men muttered that they might run him out of office unless he took a strong pro-Union stand. This warning was echoed by a boy perched in a tree: “Now, Fernandy, mind what you say! You've got to stick to it this time!” People laughed, and Wood spoke as ordered. The rabid patriotism of New Yorkers galled Southerners, who felt betrayed by the one group of Northerners they had considered their friends. The Richmond
Dispatch
editorialized: “New York will be remembered with special hatred by the South for all time.”

The Rebels, with superior leadership, won the first two engagements of the war. After the First Battle of Bull Run, demoralization spread throughout the North, and Greeley wanted an armistice. In the
Tribune
he wrote: “The gloom in this city is funereal—for our dead at Bull Run were many, and they lie unburied yet. On every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair.” Spirits drooped even lower after the Battle of Ball's Bluff. Then came incredible news of how some New York units had conducted themselves on the field.

At Bull Run the First New York Fire Zouaves distinguished themselves. However, another group of Zouaves panicked their first time under fire. Basically brave men, they were such individualists that they defied discipline. Then too, the Seventy-ninth New York Highlanders, who had volunteered for three
years
of service, mutinied when three-
month
volunteers left the front.

Early victory faded from sight, and defeatism corroded the North. A Confederate major from Mississippi rashly made his way to New York, swaggered from one Broadway saloon to another, and boasted how he had chewed up Union soldiers at Bull Run. He was clapped into prison, but people shuddered at his words. August Belmont, a Rothschild agent in New York, wrote that thousands of people were sorry they had voted for Abraham Lincoln. Bennett of the
Herald
roared, “The business community demands that the war shall be
short;
and the more vigorously it is prosecuted, the more speedily it will be closed. Business men can stand a temporary reverse. They can
easily make arrangements for six months or a year. But they cannot endure a long, uncertain and tedious contest.”

Greeley, who blew hot and cold about the Lincoln administration, first used the word “Copperhead” in the
Tribune
on July 20, 1861. Copperheads were Northern Democrats who opposed the war policies of the Republican President and favored a negotiated peace. New York became the nest of these snake-named conspirators. According to
A Short History of New York State:
“The peace faction was particularly strong in New York City, which from the elections of 1860 to Appomattox provided more moral support to the Confederacy and more opposition to the war than any other important section of the North.”

The first two war years the Union's fighting men consisted of four grades of troops—regular army, state militia, three-
month
volunteers, and three-
year
volunteers. Most were volunteers, since this was a people's war fought by amateurs, rather than by professional soldiers. In April, 1862, the Confederacy began drafting men, and the following July New York State passed a weak draft law. Lincoln's first call for 75,000 three-month volunteers proved inadequate, so he asked again and again for various quotas to serve various periods of time. Not enough men stepped forward to replace battle losses and the thinning of ranks because of illness. On March 3, 1863, the first federal American draft went into effect. All able-bodied Northern white males between the ages of twenty and forty-five became liable for military service.

The draft was “profoundly repugnant to the American mind,” according to the New York
World,
controlled by Fernando Wood and August Belmont. Wood's brother, Benjamin, headed the
Daily News,
which said, “The people are notified that one out of about two and a half of our citizens are to be brought into Messrs. Lincoln & Company's charnelhouse. God forbid!” The proslavery
Journal of Commerce
snarled that the war itself had become the work of “evil-minded men to accomplish their aims.”

Even though his own state had already passed a draft act, Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour challenged the federal government's right to conscript citizens. By protesting the quota assigned to New York State, he postponed the first local draft lottery. On July 4, in New York City, the governor made one of the most inflammatory speeches ever uttered by a public official. Seymour shouted, “Remember this! Remember this! The bloody, treasonable and revolutionary
doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government!”

His words fell like sparks on a city rotten with crime and ripe for revolt. In 1862 nearly one-tenth of the population had been arrested on one charge or another, and between 70,000 and 80,000 criminals infested the town. Wages were low, and prices high; coal, for example, cost more than $10 a ton. A draftee could buy exemption from service by paying the federal government $300, but few unskilled workers had this much money. They muttered that it was a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight. It was known that John Jacob Astor, grandson and namesake of the late multimillionaire, was a colonel on General McClellan's staff and lived by himself at headquarters in a rented house with a valet, chef, and steward.

In New York City a recent strike had been broken by importing freed slaves willing to scab. This further incensed poor whites against Negroes. More than half the city's dwellers were foreign-born, most were Democrats, and 203,740 were Irish. Tammany Hall, dependent on the Irish vote, was eager to undermine the national war effort. The
Daily News
charged that the federal draft was a deliberate attempt to reduce the number of Democratic voters in the city.

The draft was scheduled to begin here on Saturday, July 11, 1863. The city was divided into districts, each having an enrollment office. There the names of eligible men would be drawn from revolving lottery wheels. City officials were not asked to take part in the draft; the War Department had appointed Robert Nugent chief provost marshal to oversee everything. Nugent, a colonel of the Sixty-ninth Regiment, an Irishman, and a Democrat, was named in the hope of assuring the city's Irish that the draft would be conducted fairly.

As the deadline approached, New York City was almost stripped of troops. Confederate General Lee had invaded Maryland and filled Pennsylvania with wild alarm. President Lincoln had asked the governor of New York to send 20,000 men for 30 days to resist the invaders, and 19 regiments of the state national guard had been rushed to the front. Only about 1,900 military men remained here. Of these, 1,000 belonged to various militia and volunteer companies still being organized; 700 were soldiers, sailors, and marines garrisoning the city's forts and manning the warships anchored here; and 200 were members of the Invalid Corps, or crippled and wounded soldiers protecting arsenals, armories, and munitions plants. A few of these invalids were detached from duty to protect draft offices. There was 1
constable for each of the city's 22 wards. The police force totaled only 2,297 men.

The infamous Draft Riots of July, 1863, were so well led that they constituted an organized insurrection, rather than a spontaneous mob uprising. Definite strategy may be seen in the efforts to cut off approaches to the city, to sever communications, to capture forts, to seize armories and munitions works with all their weapons and ammunition, and to plunder banks and federal treasury vaults. In fact, the mobs have been called “the left wing of Lee's army.” G. T. Strong spoke of the “scoundrels who are privily engineering the outburst” as “agents of Jefferson Davis,” the president of the Confederacy—but he stretched a point.

Some contemporary New Yorkers regarded the riots as a Catholic plot, since Protestant property was burned and looted, while no Catholic property was even threatened. This seems unlikely, for on several occasions lone Catholic priests turned back murderous mobs. It is true, however, that most rioters were Irish Catholics. Between 50,000 and 70,000 of them took part in the orgy, and some individual mobs numbered as many as 10,000 frenzied men and women.

On Saturday morning, July 11, Governor Seymour was vacationing at Long Branch, New Jersey, a two-hour carriage drive from New York City. He sent the state adjutant general from Long Branch to Washington to ask federal officials to postpone the draft. Lincoln's twenty-year-old son, Robert Todd Lincoln, on holiday from Harvard, was stopping in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street. Sir Winston Churchill's paternal grandfather, Leonard Walter Jerome, sometime adviser to Cornelius Vanderbilt and a big stockholder in the New York
Times,
puttered about his mansion, at Madison Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street.

Early that morning the police heard that the arsenal at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-fifth Street was to be raided by Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society of Northerners siding with the South. The police superintendent, John A. Kennedy, sent a sergeant and fifteen patrolmen to the building, where they broke up a gathering crowd and then marched inside.

News of the Union victory at Gettysburg now reached the city, and optimists assured one another that the rebellion had been put down. Who wanted to be drafted when the whole shooting bang was about over? A sullen crowd collected in front of the Ninth District's enrollment office on the northeastern corner of Third Avenue and Forty
sixth Street, where the city's first draft lottery was to be held. Names and addresses of eligible men were written on white slips of paper. The papers were folded and dumped inside a wooden revolving drum. It was hand-cranked until the papers were thoroughly scrambled. This process was repeated again and again until 1,236 names had been picked. Then it was announced that the draft would be resumed the following Monday.

Saturday's evening papers published the results of this first local draft. As
Leslie's Illustrated
said:

That night Southern sympathizers visited saloons in the Five Points and along the waterfront, fanning the first flames of resentment.

On Sunday morning, in hundreds of homes, the meaning of the draft sank deeper into the minds of conscripted men, their wives, and their sweethearts. The city's seventeen detectives spread through streets to look and listen. Stormy-faced citizens gathered at corners to growl that some rich men had already paid their $300 and been excused from military duty. Messages flew back and forth among gang chieftains. Hoodlums collected bricks, clubs, stones, and other weapons and hid them. Superintendent Kennedy kept a guard at the arsenal and made full use of his detectives, but otherwise his Sunday assignments were routine. That evening several fires broke out in lower Manhattan, and firemen noted that the watching crowds were larger and more boisterous than usual.

Monday morning dawned hot and clear. About 6
A.M
. men and women slunk out of Lower East Side slums, filtered to the West Side, and paused to regroup. They were joined by others until the crowd became enormous. Now it split into two detachments, which tumbled north up Eighth and Ninth avenues. Groups of men spun off from these main bodies and darted into side streets, yelling for workers to lay down their tools and join the fun. By the time respectable people sat down to breakfast, the mob had turned east and reached its rendezvous. This was a vacant lot just east of Fifth Avenue near
Fifty-ninth Street. Agitators climbed onto boulders and bellowed about the injustice of the draft.

At eight o'clock, augmented by newcomers, the human tide began moving again, this time southward, clattering in two thick columns down Fifth and Sixth avenues, cursing, singing, brandishing weapons, and screaming defiance of the federal government. At Forty-seventh Street the columns merged and wheeled east in one vast multitude, filling the street from curb to curb, requiring twenty-five minutes to pass a given spot. At Third Avenue the rabble turned south and tramped down the broad thoroughfare to the draft office at Forty-sixth Street, where another crowd was already assembled.