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.

July 12, 1863---The New York Draft Riots: Day Two

JULY 12, 1863:           

The New York Draft Riots (Day Two): 

The names of draftees drawn the previous day are published in the New York newspapers. Angry workingmen gather in saloons, on streetcorners, and in their kitchens to discuss their response to the Draft, which is scheduled to resume on Monday, July 13. As the New York Herald later observed, 'Those who heard the scattered groups of laborers and mechanics who congregated in different quarters on Saturday evening…might have reasonably argued that a tumult was at hand.” Overnight, groups of men begin to assemble into ever larger crowds as information, true and false, is passed around.

On this same day, the U.S. Balloon Corps is deactivated.    

July 11, 1863---The New York Draft Riots: Day One

JULY 11, 1863:            

The New York Draft Riots (Day One). 

From the outset of the war, New York City (then comprising lower and middle Manhattan Island) had mixed loyalties. As the nation’s largest city, New York was home to everyone from everywhere---and this included Confederates. (Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, the mother of future President Theodore Roosevelt, was a “thoroughly unreconstructed” Georgian, sister of James Dunwoody Bulloch, the Father of the Confederate Navy, and an unabashed Southerner---it’s said she hung the Stars and Bars out the window of her stylish midtown townhouse after a Confederate victory; while, at the same time, her husband, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. dined with the President and bought bonnets for Mary Lincoln while on government business in Washington.)

Much of Confederate government finance was handled quietly on Wall Street. The New York Bank Note Company printed Confederate money that was then smuggled South in return for cotton. The sweatshops on the Lower East Side’s Ludlow Street sewed Union uniforms from bolts of blue cloth and Confederate uniforms from bolts of gray cloth in the same rooms. Illicit Confederate shipments went to Europe through New York’s unblockaded port, and illicit shipments came from Europe bound for Richmond.

Southern business was so important to New York that the city’s Copperhead Mayor, Fernando Wood, had tried to set New York up as a Free City in the North. Unlike the civic leaders who tried to do the same with New Orleans in the South, Wood was not arrested by the Powers That Be. Instead, he was elected to Congress.

The Copperheads lost none of their influence among New York’s traditionally Democratic, Tammany Hall-dominated voting populace. Tammany had worked intensely to co-opt the Irish Catholic vote, above all, in the face of considerable nativist resistance. Nor was this resistance merely political. Each political faction clandestinely supported the street gangs that roved the working class areas of the city, such as Five Points, as muscle; the Protestant nativists employed the “Bowery Boys”, led by Bill The Butcher Poole; the Irish Catholic “Dead Rabbits” were their mortal enemies. The Nativists were War Democrats who opposed Fernando Wood; Wood was the current head of Tammany, and a Peace Democrat.

New York in 1863 was one of the most segregated places in the country. Blacks were unwelcome and not allowed to ride the public conveyances or appear in public parks. A thriving illegal slave trade, bringing blacks from Africa to the city and then South, had only recently been stopped by the exigencies of war. Though legally given the franchise, black would-be voters faced literacy tests, poll taxes, and the nation’s first Grandfather Clause as hurdles. The first public performance of the song “Dixie” had taken place in 1857 as part of a minstrel show in town.  

Among New York’s Irish immigrants there was much fear (privately reinforced by Tammany Hall) that the Emancipation Proclamation would lead to fierce competition between the newly-emancipated blacks and the recently-arrived Irish for the limited number of existing low paying jobs. Tammany publicly vowed to fight Emancipation as well as stop the Draft. 

Thus, when the Draft was announced in March 1863, it was as if a match had been thrown into the powder keg that was New York.  The Draft Law had several aspects that added to the potential for violence: firstly, a man could pay a $300.00 fee and buy an exclusion from the Draft (as many wealthier New Yorkers did), and a wealthier man could hire a substitute to fight in his place for an agreed-upon price (as many wealthier New Yorkers also did); secondly, due to racist prejudices about the “fitness” of blacks, blacks were excluded from the Draft (though they could volunteer); thirdly, the Draft applied not only to citizens but to resident aliens who had not attained citizenship as of yet. For the socially depressed, economically struggling Irish (and others), this meant that the Civil War had become two things: one, “A rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight,” and two, a “ni**er war.” The Irish bitterly compared themselves to the South’s slaves---"[We] are sold for $300 while they pay $1000 for negroes."

In despite of Tammany Hall’s efforts, the first Draft was called on a swelteringly hot Saturday; somewhat like a later bingo or lottery game, numbers were pulled at random from a large rotating cage. The first day’s Draft proceeded peacefully despite the gathering of a loud crowd in the street. Rumors of riots in other cities tinged the air.  

July 10, 1863---The Union prepares to assault Battery Wagner

JULY 10, 1863:            

Union troops capture Morris Island near Charleston, South Carolina, and prepare for a siege on Battery Wagner, a massive sand fortress guarding Charleston harbor. The attempt to capture Charleston was largely symbolic since the city had not yet recovered from the Great Fire of 1861, and since the Union blockade had bottled up Charleston harbor anyway.