Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [714]
As well it might have, for the Democrats had completely defanged the draft. Governor Seymour and Samuel J. Tilden had gotten the Lincoln administration to reduce the quota from twenty-six to twelve thousand men. The Democrat-controlled Common Council appropriated three million dollars to pay bounties and relief to anyone drafted, but Mayor Opdyke vetoed it (even as his own son, conscripted, bought his way out). The Board of Supervisors then created its own Exemption Committee and appropriated two million dollars with which it could buy substitutes for poor men with dependent families and for municipal service workers (police, fire, militia), virtually guaranteeing that few conscripts who did not want to serve would be compelled to do so. On this crucial committee, dispensing life and money, sat William Tweed.
In the riot’s aftermath, the mass of the Irish and German working class began to disassociate themselves from Peace Democrats. That fall Seymour was replaced in the governor’s mansion by Republican Reuben Fenton, and the following year Wood lost his seat in Congress, though antiwar sympathy remained powerful enough to vote fur merchant, pacifist, and dissident Democrat C. Godfrey Gunther into City Hall. Not until 1865 would enough of the electorate rally decisively enough behind Tammany’s red, white, and blue banner to elect Tweed’s candidate, John Hoffman, to the mayor’s office.
Blocked from vengeance, Republicans got back at the rioters more indirectly, at first through their principled support for the rioters’ African-American victims. During the riot itself, many Protestant clergymen had courageously given blacks refuge, and merchant families had protected their servants. But blacks needed more organized assistance. Many had fled the city permanently—throughout the summer, one could still see blacks walking north up the Hudson along the railroad tracks—resulting in a 20 percent drop in their numbers in the metropolis, to 9,945 in 1865. But many, an estimated five thousand, were still camped in temporary havens (Blackwell’s Island, police stations) or on the outskirts of the city (the hills, woods, and swamps of New Jersey; the barns and outhouses of farmers in eastern Brooklyn or Morrisania; the African-American communities of Weeksville and Carrsville, whose armed residents had taken in hundreds of refugees).
The week after the riots, William Dodge and others established the Merchants’ Committee for the Relief of the Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots. At a central receiving depot on East 4th Street, they handed out clothing and money to almost six thousand black laborers, longshoremen, and female servants. Setting aside their usual insistence on discriminating between worthy and undeserving recipients, the Merchants’ Committee turned the evaluation procedure over to the Rev. Garnet. The merchants thus demonstrated acceptance of their paternal responsibility to their “loyal” dependents, the churchgoing, respectable black poor, who, unlike the Catholic Irish, shared their language and culture. Indeed some efforts were made to have the upper classes reverse their recent hiring practices and employ black rather than Irish servants.
In a far more satisfying response to rioters, Republicans gave blacks not alms but guns. At one point during the upheaval, when Union League members huddled impotently in their barricaded headquarters, they vowed that if they escaped alive they would send a regiment of black troops to the front, first marching them through the very streets then ruled by the rioters. Now they made good their pledge. By December 19, 1863, they had formed the thousand-man-strong Twentieth Regiment United States Colored Troops, billeted it on Rikers Island, and begun building the Twentysixth.
The Union League Club and the black community’s moment of triumph came on March 5, 1864. The Twentieth, clad in Union blue, disembarked at East 36th Street and marched with muskets