Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [447]
The crowds went after the homes, businesses, and churches of white “amalgamators.” Throngs stoned Arthur Tappan’s Pearl Street store until his employees, armed with muskets, drove them away with the help of a troop of one hundred watchmen. At the Laight Street Church, on the corner of Varick, rioters began smashing windows as one shouted, “Dr. Cox says our Savior is a nigger, and [damn] me if I don’t think his church should be torn down!” Another contingent broke into Cox’s home on Charlton Street. When the police and two squadrons of cavalry showed up, rioters ripped down fences for clubs and hurled paving stones but were driven off. Later in the evening, several thousand headed to Spring Street, where they attacked Henry Ludlow’s church, demolishing its organ and pews and tearing down its galleries. To ward off a cavalry charge, they carried out the wreckage and built a barricade, which they bolstered by chaining carts together. The Twenty-seventh National Guard Regiment hacked its way through with axes and dispersed the crowd—which then reassembled on Thompson Street to trash Ludlow’s home.
A second set of targets consisted of churches and institutions associated with black abolitionists. The African Baptist Church on Anthony Street was among those pelted with rocks, the African schoolhouse on Orange Street was heavily damaged, and a huge crowd totally demolished Peter Williams’s St. Philip’s African Episcopal Church (and his home as well).
The greatest ferocity was reserved for the black community in the Five Points area—though isolating it from the white community with which it was so intermixed proved challenging. Taking a cue from Exodus, rioters spread the word that white families should keep lit candles in their windows and stand before them, so their homes might be passed over. Households with dark windows or dark faces were sacked, torn down, or burned. All night long, individual blacks were caught and beaten. Roughly five hundred fled their homes, many to the watch house in the Park. No one was killed, however, and guns were kept under wraps (though a black barber on Orange Street did fire off his pistol as whites stormed in).
On Friday, Mayor Lawrence, himself an active colonizationist, weakly urged citizens to refrain from further violence, while agreeing that the abolitionists’ program was “repugnant.” By that evening, however, Lewis Tappan sensed that “the ‘respectable’ portion of the community, that had, thus far, looked on with indifference, or a willingness to see the hated band of abolitionists punished to a certain extent by popular violence, began to be alarmed for the safety of their own property.”
And indeed the Twenty-seventh, which had handled the nativist outbreaks easily enough, was having serious trouble dealing with these upheavals. It didn’t even try to intervene in the Five Points, where the rioting was heaviest. Saturday promised worse. Mayor Lawrence, deluged with desperate communications from citizens, estimated that sixty-two sites had been slated for destruction, including businesses, churches, schools, newspapers, the prison, and the state arsenal. With violence threatening to spread, the press demanded bringing it to an immediate end—by firing on the crowd if necessary.
Lawrence now issued a second, stronger proclamation and swore in one thousand volunteers as special constables. Irish laborers, who had been noticeably absent from the affray, now volunteered in the hundreds to aid in suppressing rioters perceived to be nativists. The New York First Division was ordered out and its officers authorized to hand out ammunition. Troops paraded through the streets and took up stations at such key sites as St. John’s Park and the arsenal. Cavalry squadrons patrolled all through the night. The upheaval tapered down. By Tuesday evening