Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [711]
That same evening crowds moved toward the intellectual heartland of Republicanism, Newspaper Row, across from City Hall Park, where Greeley’s Tribune and Raymond’s Times had their headquarters. Raymond had used his influence to get Gatling guns from the army, which he set up in the north windows. Raymond manned one himself; millionaire speculator Leonard Jerome, a leading Times shareholder, took another. The crowd, led by a waiter from Astor House, attacked the less well defended Tribune, which had barricaded itself with bales of printing paper. They stoned the building, broke in, and started a fire but were driven off by police brought in from the quiet Brooklyn precincts.
Lynching on Clarkson Street, from Harper’s Weekly, July 21, 1863. (© Museum of the City of New York)
Meanwhile, a debate had broken out among the authorities about how to respond to the upheaval. During the day, Mayor Opdyke’s approach of dispatching small bands of police to the uptown working-class wards had proven drastically counterproductive; it had enraged the crowds and provoked massive and murderous retaliation. Now Strong and some Union League Club colleagues proposed another strategy. They hurried over to the St. Nicholas Hotel, where General Wool had established his headquarters, and begged him to declare martial law and summon federal troops to enforce it. Wool refused, though he did order troops moved in from Fort Hamilton to assist the police. Disgusted, Strong and the others telegraphed Lincoln directly, asking for troops, and then went to the home of David Dudley Field in Gramercy Park, where friends gathered with muskets.
At eleven P.M., drenching, cooling rain brought the day to a close.
THE BATTLE FOR NEW YORK CITY
As Tuesday dawned hot and dry, crowds crystallized all over the city, broke into gun shops to arm themselves, and launched firefights against a variety of targets. Far from being random anarchic outbursts, the attacks focused on those in command of the new industrial and political order.
Rioters swept the streets clear of wealthy individuals—readily identifiable by their clothes and bearing. (“There goes a $300 man!” “Down with the rich men!”) They attacked genteel homes and trashed (more often than stole) the fancy furniture.
They lit into Republican enterprises. Crowds attacked and sacked Brooks Brothers, hated for being hard employers and shoddy contractors, went after German clothing stores along Grand Street, and would have marched on Wall Street had it not been the best-defended area in the entire city. Customs House workers prepared bombs with forty-second fuses. Employees of the Bank Note Company readied tanks of sulfuric acid to spill on attackers. At the Sub-Treasury Building on the corner of Nassau Street, guns and bottles of vitriol were passed out to employees stationed at windows, troops with howitzers were stationed nearby, and a gunboat was anchored at the foot of Wall Street.
The crowds, particularly the women, beat policemen and soldiers, the agents of upper-class and federal power. After Colonel Henry O’Brien of the Eleventh New York Volunteers used a howitzer to clear Second Avenue and killed a woman bystander and a child, the crowds (when they found him the next day) beat his face to a pulp, then stripped, tortured, and shot him in the head and hung his broken body from a lamppost.
Rioters began erecting barricades, cordoning off their waterfront neighborhoods from center-island bourgeois districts. On the East Side, industrial metal trades workers used cut-down telegraph poles, carts, wagons, lumber, boxes, bricks, and rubbish to run a line along First Avenue (particularly solid from 11th to 14th streets)