A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [280]
On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the authorities chose a half-developed block of Manhattan—Forty-seventh Street and Third Avenue—to hold the first of two lotteries for the draft. Colonel Robert Nugent of the Irish 69th New York Volunteers had been asked to oversee the lottery in the hope that this would calm Irish objections. But no other preparations had been made in case the event turned violent; there were only eight hundred policemen on duty for the entire city, and almost every New York regiment was at Gettysburg with General Meade.26 The drawing of names passed without incident, however. There were a few more fires than usual over the weekend, and the crowds watching them seemed to be on the large side, but the authorities had no hint of what was about to happen on Monday.
When the famous Great Eastern—the largest passenger ship in the world—docked at New York on Sunday night, the disembarking passengers felt an air of menace from the onlookers. The financial agents John Murray Forbes and William H. Aspinwall were among them; in Forbes’s trunk were $6 million worth of bonds. He was standing on the quayside, fearful that he was about to be mugged, when an Irish cab driver recognized him from a goodwill visit Forbes had once paid to his regiment and offered to take him anywhere he wanted. “We rattled safely over the rough, dark streets, and I was soon glad to deposit my charge among the heaps in the old Brevoort House [Hotel],” wrote Forbes.27 A few hours later, Lieutenant Colonel Fremantle’s train pulled into New York from Pennsylvania. He had said farewell to his friends on July 9, when the Confederate army was still resting at Hagerstown in Maryland, and turned back toward the North. Fremantle’s steamship, the China, was scheduled to depart for England on Wednesday, July 15, and until then he had arranged to stay at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Madison Square. Even though the city was searing hot, Fremantle walked the length of Broadway on Monday. “On returning to the Fifth Avenue,” he wrote, “I found all the shopkeepers beginning to close their stores, and I perceived by degrees that there was great alarm about the resistance to the draft which was going on this morning.” Inside the hotel he found a scene of pandemonium, with terrified guests begging the equally frightened concierges for protection. A mob had torched several blocks nearby and was holding back the fire brigade. Fremantle decided it would be better to wander around anonymously rather than be trapped in the hotel: “I walked about in the neighbourhood, and saw a company of soldiers [from the invalid corps] on the march, who were being jeered at and hooted by small boys, and I saw a negro pursued by the crowd take refuge with the military; he was followed by loud cries of ‘Down with the bloody nigger! Kill all niggers!’ ”28
The British consul was able to rescue Ann Anderson, a Barbadian ship’s cook, who was being chased down West Street by a mob. Fortunately, she had time to hammer on the doors of the consulate at No. 10 and be pulled to safety. Twenty blocks north of Fremantle’s hotel, at Forty-third and Fifth, stood the Colored Orphan Asylum, home to 237 Negro children aged twelve and under. Three thousand rioters gathered at the front, forcing the asylum superintendent hurriedly to evacuate the small occupants through the back. One little girl was left behind. She was found cowering under her bed by the rioters and beaten to death.29
Farther downtown, another mob, heavily armed and ten thousand strong, appeared in front of the police headquarters on Mulberry Street and were confronted by two hundred club-wielding policemen. After twenty minutes of hand-to-hand fighting, the mob turned tail.30 The violence was sporadic but clearly the result of direction.