A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [282]
“Wednesday begins with heavy showers, and now, (ten A.M.) cloudy, hot, and steaming,” wrote the treasurer of the Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, in his diary; “there will be much trouble today.”32 When Fremantle went down for breakfast he found soldiers guarding the hotel (Robert Lincoln, the president’s eldest son, was coming home from Harvard and happened to be one of the guests). But outside, the immediate streets were deserted; the entire city appeared to be in the middle of a mass exodus. There were no carriages, and he had to walk down to the waterfront. “I was not at all sorry to find myself on board the China,” wrote Fremantle, his final memory of the city “a stone barricade in the distance, and [the sound of] firing going on.”33 The mob and the military had evidently found each other.34
At midmorning a small funeral cortège started out from West Fifty-third Street. Dr. Charles Culverwell’s wife, Emma, could no longer wait for the rioting to subside. Their three-year-old daughter had died the previous Sunday of infant cholera. Emma did not know where Charles was, although he had promised to come to them. Terrified for herself and her surviving daughter, she attempted to slink unnoticed past the rioters. They barred her way, forcing Emma to plead for permission to bury her child.35 All this time Culverwell had been begging his hospital superiors in St. Louis to grant him compassionate leave. In desperation he annulled his contract on July 16, donned civilian clothes, and headed for New York.
By Wednesday night, HMS Challenger had still not appeared; however, a U.S. warship had joined the Guerriere, training its guns on Wall Street to deter an attack on the financial district. On Thursday, rioters discovered they were fighting not just a few brave souls but ten thousand veterans of Gettysburg. During the night there was a final, bloody convulsion at Gramercy Square on Twentieth Street that left one soldier and fifteen rioters dead. But at noon on Friday, the roars and explosions ceased as suddenly as they had begun; Elizabeth Blackwell unlocked the doors of the infirmary for the first time in forty-eight hours. Edwin Sanford telegraphed Washington at 3:45 P.M. that the “city continues very quiet.” George Templeton Strong blessed the change in weather: “Rain will keep the rabble quiet tonight.”36 Early estimates put the death toll at anywhere from a hundred to a thousand people, but the physical devastation was obvious. Whole blocks had been burned and more than three hundred buildings destroyed.37 Among the homes that had been ransacked was Colonel Nugent’s—a punishment for his role in enforcing the draft.
“It is a fact that the rioters have been almost entirely Irish,” Archibald wrote to Lord Russell, and their fury toward “the poor Negro people” had not abated simply because of the presence of troops.38 HMS Challenger arrived on Saturday and accepted transfer of the refugees from the Guerriere. The seventy-one colored seamen remained sequestered below for several days. “There are, however, many lawless characters still about the wharves,” Archibald wrote on July 20, “and the masters assure me that it is not safe for the Negro sailors to return to their own vessels.”39 Although the consul was due to take his annual leave, he remained in the smoldering city until he was confident that the danger had passed.
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Lyons had not heard from Seward during the crisis; violence had flared in other parts of New York, and the secretary’s own house in Auburn was attacked. The incident was relatively minor—a rock hurled through a downstairs