The Epic of New York City (53 page)

By this time word of the city's agony had reached the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, and a clerk in the Rebel war department wrote in his diary: “We have
awful
good news from New York.
An
insurrection,
the loss of many lives, extensive pillaging and burning, with a suspension of the conscription.”

Early Wednesday morning a mob tried to wreck an ironclad ship, the
Dunderberg,
under construction in a shipyard, but were frustrated by a company of regular soldiers. On Staten Island fifty men attacked Negro houses in Stapleton, burning one to the ground, sacking others, and beating a lame Negro unable to follow his friends into the woods. In Manhattan other rioters captured two howitzers by clubbing artillerymen, but the guns were of no value to the thugs because they lacked the proper ammunition. Aldermen met in City Hall, denounced the draft, and appropriated $2,500,000 to pay the $300 needed by poor men seeking to escape conscription.

Beginning at 6
P.M
. on Wednesday, the largest battle thus far took place at Nineteenth Street and First Avenue. There rowdies clashed in 20 minutes of desperate fighting with 3 companies of regular soldiers, utterly routing them. Sixteen wounded soldiers were beaten to death by the mob. Gunfire sounded elsewhere in Manhattan, and smoke from burning homes coiled into the sky. Wary householders filled bathtubs, pots, kettles, and pails with water.

About 10
P.M
. on Wednesday the Seventy-fourth Regiment of the national guard reached the city. Half an hour later a Buffalo regiment arrived. At 4
A.M
. on Thursday the Seventh Regiment of the national guard landed at Canal Street and soon after daybreak marched in battle array through the Lower East Side. All told, 10,000 veterans of the Battle of Gettysburg poured into the city. Manhattan was divided into four military districts. Soldiers relieved police who had been fighting almost without pause since Monday. Nearly every policeman had been wounded, and the few who escaped injury were so bone-tired that they could hardly lift their arms.

Thursday morning, in a proclamation published in the newspapers, the mayor urged all citizens to open their stores and factories and go back to work. Most streetcar and omnibus lines resumed operations. However, a gunboat still stood guard at the foot of Wall Street.

Thursday afternoon, as the incipient revolution flickered and faded, the city was plastered with signs bearing an announcement from Archbishop Hughes. He said, “To the men of New York, who are now called in many of the papers rioters: Men! I am not able, owing to the rheumatism in my limbs, to visit you; but that is not a reason why you should not pay me a visit in your whole strength. Come, then, tomorrow at two o'clock, to my residence, northwest corner of Madison
Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street. I shall have a speech prepared for you.” The archbishop had moved uptown from Mulberry Street.

Thursday evening the last sharp clash took place near Gramercy Park, where regular solders roughed up rioters who were looting fine homes. Soldiers from West Point reinforced the regulars already thrown into the city. As the thud and cadence of ever more marching men sounded in streets, rowdies sullenly retired to their dirty dens. By midnight on Thursday peace had been restored, but bitterness lingered. G. T. Strong wrote: “Never knew exasperation so intense, unqualified, and general as that which prevails against these rioters and the politic knaves who are supposed to have set them going, Governor Seymour not excepted. Men who voted for him mention the fact with contrition and self-abasement, and the Democratic party is at discount with all the people I meet.”

Friday morning the New York
Times
snapped: “The
Express
is a very curious journal. It ‘begs' and ‘implores' us to ‘hush up' the statement that the President has not ordered the draft suspended. . . . We prefer, for our own part, to tell the truth and shame the
Express.
The draft itself ought
not
and must not be abandoned.” Lincoln had overridden lesser federal officials who had called off the draft. The thirteen regiments of regulars now on duty in the city remained until the draft was resumed on August 19. Then it went off peaceably.

At 11
A.M
. on Friday 4,000 persons gathered in front of the home of Archbishop Hughes. He had spent eight months in Europe as Lincoln's personal representative, successfully setting forth the Union's cause in France, Italy and Ireland. Now sixty-six years old and a sick man only six months from death, the archbishop tottered out onto a balcony and sat down in a chair. He wore a purple robe and other insignia of his high ecclesiastical office. He told the throng:

Came a clamor of voices: “Ireland!” The archbishop went on:

Archbishop Hughes had not spoken until five days after the riots had begun. According to Joel T. Headley, a historian and former secretary of state for New York: “The address was well enough, but it came too late to be of any service. It might have saved lives and much destruction had it been delivered two days before, but now it was like the bombardment of a fortress after it had surrendered—a mere waste of ammunition. The fight was over, and to use his own not very refined illustration, he ‘spak' too late.”

The Draft Riots of July, 1863, stand as the most brutal, tragic, and shameful episode in the entire history of New York City. Politicians encouraged mob violence. Law and order broke down. Mobs seized control of America's largest city. Innocents were tortured and slaughtered. The Union army was weakened.

No one will ever know exactly how many people were killed. The New York
Post
said that the bodies of rioters were boated across the East River and buried secretly at night. Governor Seymour, who tried to minimize the tragedy, told state legislators that “more than a thousand” civilians, policemen, and soldiers had been slain. Police Superintendent Kennedy, after recovering from his injuries, told G. T. Strong that 1,155 persons had been killed—not counting those smuggled to their graves. Social historian Herbert Asbury wrote that “conservative estimates placed the total at two thousand killed and about eight thousand wounded, a vast majority of whom were rioters.” Four days of rioting in New York City produced casualties numbering almost half the total of Americans killed in the American Revolution, just about as many as perished in the War of 1812, and more than all the battle deaths in the Mexican War.

More than 100 buildings were burned down, and about 200 others were damaged and looted. The property loss has been estimated variously at from $1,500,000 to $5,000,000. Business suffered in another way, too, for of the thousands who fled the city, many did not return for several months.

The federal government investigated but took no other action. The identity of the men who planned and led the riots was never disclosed. Of the 50,000 to 70,000 men and women who had taken an active part in the insurrection, only 19 were tried and convicted. None was a ringleader. The 19 men got an average of 5 years each in jail. Governor Seymour, on the other hand, tried but failed to remove police commissioners Acton and Bergen, who had done all in their power to quell the uprising.

Carl Sandburg wrote: “So delicate and combustible was the subject that neither party cared to go into details about those New York riots, the Democrats because their record was so lawless and shameful, the Republicans because they were still conducting the draft over the country.” Perhaps the most trenchant judgment was made by George Templeton Strong: “This is a nice town to call itself a centre of civilization!”

Chapter 25

T
HE IMPACT
of the Civil War on the city was varied and colorful. When hostilities began, New York was suffering from a recession. Scores of firms went bankrupt, and thousands of men were thrown out of work. Employers took advantage of the labor surplus to cut wages from an average of $1.25 to 85 cents a day. Women were paid only $1 to $3 a week. At the same time Arnold Constable & Company sold lace at $1,000 a yard, lace parasols at $500 each, and shawls at $1,500.

By the fall of 1861 the recession had ended, and the city was prospering as never before. But it was a selective prosperity. Wages
lagged behind price rises. Workers, plunged into even greater poverty, organized unions and walked off jobs. Newspaper publishers broke a strike by the printers' union. Streetcar drivers lost their bid for an 11-hour working day. For a second time war increased Cornelius Vanderbilt's fortune; he chartered his fleet of ships to the federal government. Cotton, once the chief export from New York, fell off to a trickle. On the other hand, torrents of wheat left Manhattan docks for England. Officers of a Russian fleet anchored here donated $4,760 to buy fuel for the poor. But William B. Astor raised his rents 30 percent.

Corruption fell like a leper's shadow on the city, as well as on the rest of the country. Lincoln sighed that “few things are so troublesome to the government as the fierceness with which profits in trading are sought.” The New York
Tribune
advocated the gallows for New York profiteers who sold the army rotten blankets and “rusty and putrid pork.” Mayor Opdyke made a fortune as a secret partner in a munitions firm. Edwin D. Morgan, governor of New York State when war broke out, was a brother-in-law of Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, of Connecticut. Welles gave Morgan permission to buy ships for the navy at a 2.5 percent commission, and within a few months Morgan had profited by $90,000. The House Select Committee on Government Contracts said, “Worse than traitors in arms are the men pretending loyalty to the flag, who feast and fatten on the misfortune of the nation, while patriot blood is crimsoning the plains of the South, and bodies of their countrymen are mouldering in the dust.”

The city's social fabric was torn by the excitement of the times, the grief of separation and death, easy money, and increased tension between rich and poor. Morals degenerated. Broadway teemed with women of easy virtue. Saloons were crowded. Luxury shops and restaurants catered to the new rich. Men wore diamond buttons on their waistcoats, and women powdered their hair with gold and silver dust. The
Herald
estimated that an average of $30,000 was spent in the city each night just for entertainment—or a third more than in Paris. After attending
The Follies of a Night
to raise money for army relief, G. T. Strong mourned in his diary that “the spectacle of lavish luxury tonight was a little suggestive of fiddling while Rome is in full blaze at its corners.”

Far from this revelry and graft, Billy Yank fought on and on until, by the autumn of 1864, the South was losing the war and knew it. Union forces controlled the Mississippi, General Lee had failed in
his second attempt to invade the North, General William T. Sherman's army had captured Atlanta, and the South's resources were about exhausted. In a spirit of desperation and vengeance the Confederates tried to burn down New York City.