Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [712]
Rioters also pursued the race war. Brandishing poles and clubs, they hunted blacks on the streets, mauled them along the docks, went after black workers in restaurants and hotels. They attacked black homes and stores around Bleecker and Carmine streets, except where blacks tore down chimneys for bricks to hurl at attackers or, as in Minetta Lane, guarded their homes with guns.
Sacking Brooks Brothers Clothing Store at Catherine and Cherry Streets, from Harper’s Weekly, August 1, 1863. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Divisions now appeared in the rioters’ ranks. Many original protesters had envisioned at most a one-day antidraft demonstration, and certainly not a general onslaught on private property. Large numbers of them—particularly the Germans, though many Irish Catholics and native Protestants as well—abandoned violence and even joined with the authorities. Squads of Turnverein and Schutzenverein patrolled the streets of Kleindeutschland. Volunteer fire companies (including the Black Joke men who had started the riot) turned out to defend their neighborhoods against riot and arson. Crowds, at times led by Irish priests like Father Treanor of Transfiguration, intervened to halt lynch mobs.
While the battle raged on the streets, two sharply opposed factions within the city’s upper classes argued over how to respond to the uprising. On one side were those businessmen and Democratic officials who, in effect, treated the riots as an appeal to elites to respect and protect customary working-class rights and privileges. Governor Seymour dispatched gentlemen and clergymen to negotiate face-to-face with the crowds, displaying the confidant paternalism of the old upper class. On Tuesday morning he himself, flanked by Tammany leaders A. Oakey Hall and William Tweed, pledged a large crowd at City Hall (whom he addressed as “My Friends”) that he would work for postponement of or relief from the draft, while repudiating violence.
Republican journals, merchants, financiers, and industrialists saw the riot as a fullscale challenge to the political and social order at precisely the moment when—given the Union’s doubtful military prospects—such an uprising might actually precipitate European intervention. Their prescription was simple: “Crush the mob!” howled Tuesday’s Times. Merchants and bankers gathered at Wall Street to demand federal imposition of martial law, “an immediate and terrible” display of federal power.
Rioters and militia fighting at the barricades on First Avenue, from The Illustrated London News, August 15, 1863. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
At noon Mayor Opdyke asked Secretary of War Stanton for troops. Stanton complied that evening, but had the request come even a day earlier it would have put him in a difficult spot. After Gettysburg, Lee’s army, wounded and dangerous, had remained in the area, and Union forces had been tied down in blocking a possible move northward. As it happened, Lee escaped south across the Potomac the night of Monday the thirteenth, leaving Stanton free to divert five regiments.
Troops began arriving Wednesday evening, a day of atrocities during which crowds had hanged, drowned, and mutilated black men, looted and burned black homes up and down Sixth Avenue, and attacked Republican mansions and Protestant missions. In Brooklyn hundreds of men, including some disgruntled ex-employees, invaded the Atlantic Docks and burned two of the hated grain elevators, and along the East River north and east of Fulton Street, blacks were beaten and killed, their houses ransacked and destroyed.
Promptly on arrival, the soldiers from