Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [709]
One week later, on Saturday, July 11, the lottery commenced. Seymour had failed even to get it postponed. Anticipating trouble, and still without military resources to back up the police, the authorities chose to begin the process on the city’s periphery, at the Ninth District Headquarters on Third Avenue and 47th Street, an area of vacant lots and isolated buildings. It went reasonably well. While a large but good-tempered crowd watched, the provost marshal read off names drawn from a large barrel. By late afternoon, 1,236 draftees had been selected, at which point the office closed, leaving the remainder of the two-thousand-man quota to be filled two days later.
The next morning, working-class families pored over the names published in the Sunday papers. In bars and taverns around the city, men discussed their response over glasses of whisky, and large numbers of working-class wives and mothers (the Herald reported) “mingled their wildest denunciations against the conscription law.” A variety of protest activities were decided upon for the next day, Monday, July 13.
DAY ONE
Between six and seven in the morning, four hours before the lottery was scheduled to begin again, hundreds of workers from the city’s railroads, machine shops, shipyards, and iron foundries, together with building and street laborers working for uptown contractors, began to stream up the West Side along Eighth and Ninth avenues. Beating copper pans as if they were gongs—a tactic familiar from labor protests—they closed shops, factories, and construction sites, moved on to a brief meeting in Central Park, and then marched, with NO DRAFT placards aloft, toward the provost marshal’s office on Third Avenue. There they linked up with downtown committees, which, in similar fashion, had closed Allaire’s, the great novelty works on 14th Street, and a dozen or more foundries and machine shops along the East Side waterfront. At 10:30, with a huge crowd gathered outside, the selection process started up, guarded by sixty hurriedly gathered police.
At this point another group arrived: the Black Joke Engine Company No. 33, in full regalia. The volunteer firemen, enraged at having lost their traditional exemption from military service, had decided over the weekend not only to halt the proceedings but to destroy all evidence that members of their unit had been drafted. They stoned the building, drove off the police, smashed the draft wheel, poured turpentine everywhere, fired the structure, and then drove away the arriving fire companies.
Word of all this reached the provost marshal’s general bureau headquarters. A thirty-two man squad of the Invalid Corps (composed of wounded or disabled veterans reassigned to light guard duties) was dispatched uptown on a Third Avenue horsecar through jeering and ever thicker crowds. Finally they were ordered to detrain, form a line across the avenue, and march north toward the burning draft office. When they reached 43rd Street they were met with a fusillade of paving stones. They broke and ran. A similar experience awaited Police Superintendent John Kennedy. On hearing of the attack he hurried most of the way uptown by buggy, then tried to walk the remainder of the way up Lexington through the now huge throngs around the Ninth District Office. After he was identified by a former policeman, the crowd beat Kennedy about the head until he was unrecognizable.
By now the day had grown hot and humid; it made one feel “as if you had washed yourself in molasses and water,” one participant recalled. The streets fumed with the usual rotting debris and excrement, the stench worsened by the stifling heat and humidity. Tremendous numbers of people poured out of the tenements. Crowd members began to isolate the area, cutting down telegraph poles that connected local police precincts to the Central Office. They stopped Second and Third Avenue Railroad cars. New Haven commuter