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By Root 8399 0

Pennsylvania took up arms against the rioters, aided by volunteer companies set up by merchants and bankers who mobilized their employees. Fighting continued all Wednesday night and throughout the next day. Troops assaulted “infected” districts, using howitzers loaded with grapeshot and canister (primitive fragmentation bombs) to mow down rioters and engaged in fierce building-by-building firefights. Rioters defended their barricaded domains with mad desperation. Faced with tenement snipers and brick hurlers, soldiers broke down doors, bayoneted all who interfered, and drove occupants to the roofs, from which many jumped to certain death below.

By Thursday evening it was all over. The city filled with six thousand troops. Seventh Regiment pickets manned Third Avenue. The Eighth Regiment Artillery Troop trained mountain howitzers on streets around Gramercy Park. The 152nd New York Volunteers set up camp in Stuyvesant Square. By Friday telegraph lines were being repaired, West Side rails relaid. Omnibuses and horsecars ran. Laborers returned to work. It was over.

AFTERMATHS

Contemporaries believed that a thousand people had died, though in the end only a body count of 119 could be verified. To participants, no doubt, it had seemed like another Gettysburg; perhaps the tremendous death tolls on the battlefields made overstatements credible. But even adopting the smaller number, the New York City draft riots had been the largest single incident of civil disorder in the history of the United States.

The response to the riots was relatively mild, certainly not on a par with the bloody reaction to the earlier 1848 uprisings in Paris. There were no mass sentencings, no mass executions of rioters, though some of the Union League crowd thirsted for all-out reprisals. George Templeton Strong declared: “I would like to see war made on Irish scum as in 1688.” Herman Melville, who would move back to New York City from his tranquil Berkshire retreat that fall, conjured up similar images in his poem “The House Top, a Night Piece, July 1863,” which concluded that “the town is taken by its rats.”

The images haunting Republican minds—of barbaric, subhuman savages tearing down a civilized city—certainly invited retribution, but Republicans were not in charge, War Democrats were. Republicans had asked Lincoln to declare martial law and install General Benjamin F. Butler as military governor (they applauded his rigorous suppression of treason during an 1862 stint running New Orleans). But Lincoln feared alienating conservative Democrats and perhaps provoking the New York City regiments who had loyally done riot duty but might well balk at imposing Republican military rule. Rejecting the advice of Republican hard-liners, the president turned military control of New York over to General John Adams Dix, a Democrat (and financier) of impeccable credentials, appointing him commander of the Department of the East.

This strategy also required, and received, the cooperation of Tammany Hall and its chairman and grand sachem, William Tweed. Tammany, whose patriotic prowar credentials were well established, denounced transgressions against property and lawlessness, while at the same time signaling its willingness, and demonstrating its ability, to protect local rioters from excessive federal vengeance. Tammanyite District Attorney A. Oakey Hall and Recorder John T. Hoffman indicted and prosecuted the rioters vigorously, becoming in the process among the most popular politicians of the era, though the postriot trials they directed through August and September eventually let most offenders off, and of the sixty-seven who were convicted, only a handful got lengthy jail terms.

Meanwhile, Dix ordered a formidable show of force and started up the draft machinery again. Ten thousand federal troops from Meade’s army were brought in, including three batteries of artillery from the Virginia front. Battalions bivouacked in Madison and Washington squares. Squads marched up and down city streets. Republicans were pleased at the display. When the selection process