July 16, 1863---The New York Draft Riots: Day Six

JULY 16, 1863:            

The New York Draft Riots (Day Six): 

Federal troops continued to arrive from outside the city. It now became dangerous for citizens going about their ordinary business to be out, as the troops made little distinction between rioters and ordinary pedestrians. Several persons were shot as the day went on. A non-violent “Peace Rally” was held outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral at Noon, and the newspapers printed reports of the Draft having been suspended. A final confrontation occurred in the evening near Gramercy Park. Military firepower finally killed off and dispersed the remaining rioters.

Although called “riots” the Draft Riots were more than just riots. Contemporary accounts referred to what might more properly be called “The Battle of New York” as a “Confederate victory.” The city was ineradicably changed. Immediately following the Draft Riots most of New York City’s blacks fled to the City of Brooklyn and to New Jersey, allowing the poor white, mostly Irish, immigrants to fill their abandoned jobs; this gave the Irish a financial boost that allowed many of them to move out of poverty. For a week the nation’s largest city, its hub of finance and international trade, had been utterly shut down. Conscription had been suspended. Unionists and Abolitionists and newspapers had been successfully attacked. Free black citizens had been brutalized and butchered.

There is little doubt that, though most of the participants were mere ordinary working men and women with no grasp of the larger issues, these “riots” were organized quasi-military affairs. Throughout the city, rioters had set up a strategic system of barricades to keep first firemen and police and later troops from easily communicating and aiding each other. The gangs of New York, though their Five Points neighborhood had been mostly untouched by violence, had recruited many rioters from among the city’s poor white population. Blacks and Republicans were especial targets. The State and Federal Arsenals had been attacked in an attempt at seizure. The leaders of the various rioting mobs met and coordinated their activities, striking at specific targets at specific times planned to keep the civic authorities dispersed and under constant pressure. The Governor of New York State came from Albany to address the rioters en masse, reinforcing their cause. Whether this was a New York political in-fight or an urban insurrection against the United States, or both, one thing is clear: the Draft Riots were not a spontaneous eruption of mass hysteria, but a coldly calculated channeling of populist rage. 

Fortunately, after the violence ended New Yorkers responded well to the riots. Money was raised to aid those left homeless and injured, businesses received aid for repairs and rebuilding, and much of the anger underlying the Draft Riots seemed to have dissipated; when the Draft was resumed, it proceeded peacefully, and Copperhead sentiments in the city began to wane rapidly after the riots.

 

The number of killed and injured is unknown. Conservative estimates are that 150 people were killed (mostly blacks) and up to 8,000 injured.

July 15, 1863---The New York Draft Riots: Day Five

JULY 15, 1863:            

The New York Draft Riots (Day Five): 

Overnight, U.S. troops and New York State Militia, some recalled from Gettysburg where they numbered among the lightly wounded, began pouring into the city to restore order. While this caused many rioters to disperse, the more hard-core rioters attacked the troops, and gun battles raged in scattered areas of the city all day long. The troops sometimes used artillery to stop the mobs.

While this urban warfare went on, word was received from Washington that the New York City Draft was suspended until further notice. With the suspension, and it was believed, probable end of Conscription, the riot ran out of steam, and all but the most recalcitrant rioters dispersed.          

July 14, 1863---The New York Draft Riots: Day Four

JULY 14, 1863:            

The New York Draft Riots (Day Four):      

As the rains abated in the early morning hours, the rioters returned to the streets. It’s unknown precisely how many rioters there were at this point, but estimates are that 50,000 or more persons were directly involved.

On this second day of full violence, the mobs continued to target black people, many of whom had fled their usual neighborhoods overnight. The mob turned its rage on prominent Republicans and Abolitionists, whose houses were smashed open, looted and burned.

The unrestrained attacks on prominent white citizens finally motivated New York’s Four Hundred to do something to calm the violence. At Noon, New York State’s Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour addressed a large crowd of rioters at City Hall. Beginning the speech with, “My friends,” he then criticized the Government, claiming that Conscription was unconstitutional. This speech, meant to calm the mob, re-energized it, and the rioting continued unabated. Seymour was later branded a traitor for encouraging the mob.

Previously, Seymour had asserted of the Draft:  

"It is a high crime to abduct a citizen of this State. It is made my duty by the Constitution to see that the laws are enforced. I shall investigate every alleged violation of our statutes, and see that offenders are brought to justice. Sheriffs and district attorneys are admonished that it is their duty to take care that no person within their respective counties is imprisoned, or carried by force beyond their limits, without due process or legal authority."

In the late afternoon, cadet troops from West Point began arriving in the city. 

July 13, 1863---The New York Draft Riots: Day Three

JULY 13, 1863:            

The New York Draft Riots (Day Three):    

It immediately became apparent that serious trouble was in the air as thousands of city workers and other workingmen did not show up for work on the morning of July 13th. As dawn broke, two very large crowds assembled in Midtown---including men armed with guns, clubs, knives, whips, brickbats, and lengths of pipe and chain, women with children, and sign-carrying protesters. At about 7:00 AM the two groups converged, their leaders held a brief meeting, and the two wings of what had now become a small army proceeded to the Draft office at 46^th Street and 3^rd Avenue. The swollen crowd stood outside the Draft office chanting and jeering; when the Draft resumed around 10:30, the jeers became a roar. It wasn’t until Engine Company 33 (“The Black Jokers”) of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) arrived before 11:00 AM and set fire to the Draft office that the mob flashed into violence. The burning building was looted; the Draft officers were brutalized; when other FDNY units responded to the alarms to put out the fire they were attacked by the mob; Police called to the scene were likewise attacked, and New York’s Police Superintendent was savagely beaten.

The famous Bull’s Head Hotel refused to give alcohol to the rioters, and it was burned down. The Mayor’s residence was set ablaze. The headquarters of vociferously pro-Union New York Times was likewise set alight. The Times staff managed to put out the fire and defended themselves from the rioters with a Gatling Gun (where did they get it?). Dismayed by the machine gun, the mob turned southward, attacking random people in the streets. More police and firefighters were called to quell the disturbance and to put out the myriad fires lit by the rioters, but many joined the mob instead, which now numbered in the tens of thousands. The rioters moved south, looting shops and battling anyone in their path.

Some nameless and unfortunate African-American became an unwilling victim of the mob, which now made blacks the focus of the riot and turned its rage against them almost exclusively. One man was attacked by a mass of 400 rioters who brutally stomped him to death, hung his battered body from a lamppost, and set it afire.

The Colored Orphans Asylum was burned to the ground by the rioters after being looted. Fortunately, the police were able to parley with the mob’s leaders and managed to remove the staff and the children before the building was torched.

At least 100 blacks were killed that afternoon, most of them in brutal lynchings. The first black-owned pharmacy in the United States was destroyed, and other black-owned businesses were likewise razed to the ground. Businesses that catered to blacks or served black and white customers without regard to race became focal points of the mob’s rage. They were wrecked, and the white owners were stripped and beaten in the streets. In the docks area, rioting longshoremen attacked taverns and cathouses serving blacks.

The riots continued into the evening, when a heavy rainstorm put out most of the fires and sent the mob scurrying for cover inside their rattrap homes.