Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [446]
By July racial tensions were at full boil. On the fourth, an integrated group met at Chatham Street Chapel to celebrate New York’s emancipation of its slaves seven years earlier. Angry spectators complained the meeting looked like “the keys of a piano forte,” and rioters proceeded to break up the assembly with hoots, stamps, and shouts of “Treason.”
The celebration was rescheduled for July 7. The chapel’s sexton gave the mostly black group permission to use the building’s large hall. Normally it was used on Monday evenings by the New York Sacred Music Society, but the society’s president had agreed to use a smaller room. The sexton, however, had not explained to the chorister the racial composition of the supplanting group. When the musicians arrived they were enraged to find a black choir seated in their stalls. Hotly ordering the intruders out, they also tried to drag the speaker from the stage. This triggered a full-scale brawl, which the outnumbered whites lost; indeed, they were pitched out of doors and windows.
The police came and arrested six African Americans. A large white crowd forced the remaining blacks to flee. Excited rumors flamed through the city, fanned by the colonizationist press. Webb described the incident as a Negro riot, in which innocent whites had been beaten, and blamed it all on “Arthur Tappan’s mad impertinence.” Stone’s Commercial Advertiser reported that gangs of blacks were threatening to burn the city. “If this state of things is to be suffered to continue,” Stone shrilly declared, “neither white men nor women can much longer leave their doors in safety.”
On Wednesday evening, July 9, one of the hottest nights of the year, three interconnected riots broke out. Early on, two or three thousand whites gathered at Finney’s Chatham Street Chapel to break up a planned antislavery meeting. When the abolitionists, forewarned, failed to show, the crowd broke in and passed resolutions calling for black deportation. One young white man preached in a “mock negro style” (so the newspaper Man reported), and his fellows “struck up a Jim Crow chorus” in the style of Daddy Rice’s popular Bowery act.
At about the same time, another crowd, composed chiefly of butcher boys and day laborers, converged on Lewis Tappan’s Rose Street home (he and his family had fled to Harlem). Spurred on by well-dressed merchants, the rioters smashed windows and doors, demolished the interior, dragged Tappan’s artwork and furniture to the street, piled it high, and set it ablaze. A Gilbert Stuart portrait of Tappan’s father-in-law was being carted to the bonfire when one rioter shouted, “It’s Washington! For God’s sake don’t burn Washington!”—and the republican hero (as they supposed) was borne safely off. Mayor Lawrence arrived with the watch but was shouted down, three cheers were raised for Webb, and the police were driven off with brickbats.
Some of the anti-Tappan group, joined by rioters from Chatham Street, now descended on the Bowery Theater, where a benefit performance was underway for George Farren, the playhouse’s English stage manager. The Britisher had allegedly cussed out Yankees and called them jackasses. In addition, the English were associated with the antislavery cause. Four thousand people stormed the theater. Perhaps a quarter of them broke in and drove Edwin Forrest and the cast from the stage. The riot was quelled only when Thomas Hamblin, the Bowery’s manager, came out waving two American flap, apologized for the Farren benefit, then summoned a performer to sing “Yankee Doodle” and “Zip Coon,” popular anthems of country and color.
Violence escalated over the next two days. Crowds moved methodically through the city assaulting precise targets. Messengers darted to and fro, keeping rioters apprized of the whereabouts of the forces of order. Battle plans were advertised in handbills or spread verbally