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By Root 8078 0

and fixed bayonets to a gigantic rally in Union Square. There Charles King, the Columbia College president whose house had come close to being incinerated during the riots, addressed the officers and men. He presented them with a flag and a parchment scroll inscribed by the club members’ “Mothers, Wives and Sisters” (names including Astor, Beekman, Fish, Jay, and Van Rensselaer). From there the regiment, led by the now recovered Superintendent Kennedy and a force of a hundred Metropolitans, marched down Broadway, past applauding throngs, to the Canal Street dock, where it boarded a steamer bound for New Orleans. The Times rejoiced, noting that where “eight months ago the African race in this City were literally hunted down like wild beasts,” now they marched in solid platoons “with waving handkerchiefs, with descending flowers, and with the acclamations and plaudits of countless beholders.”

Countless other beholders watched too, infuriated but helpless. The Herald was livid at the “miscegenation” represented by the “daughters of Fifth Avenue” presenting the black troops their regimental colors. Nor was the point of the black and upperclass alliance lost on the Workingmen’s United Political Association, which asserted: “The very object of arming the negroes is based on the instinctive idea of using them to put down the white laboring classes.” Many upper-class conservatives, like Maria L. Daly, wife of a Democratic judge, were distressed at the move to punish the Irish and support the blacks. She was “very sorry and much outraged at the cruelties inflicted,” Daly wrote, but added: “I hope it will give the Negroes a lesson, for since the war commenced, they have been so insolent as to be unbearable. I cannot endure free blacks. They are immoral with all their piety.”

The Twentieth U. S. Colored Infantry presented with its colors, March 5, 1864, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 26, 1864. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

More pragmatic whites came to accept the idea of black enlistment. When General Thomas F. Meagher gave a banquet for veterans of the Irish Brigade at Irving Hall in January 1864, they hailed a new song written by Charles Graham Halpine. An Irishborn journalist, Halpine, while serving as an officer in the Sixty-ninth, had begun publishing morale-raising minstrel-type pieces for the Irish American featuring the fictional hero “Private Miles O’Reilly of the Forty-seventh New York Volunteers.” In his latest ditty, titled “Sambo’s Right to Be Kilt,” the final stanza went:

Though Sambo’s black as the ace of spades,

His finger a thrigger can pull,

And his eye runs sthraight on the barrel-sights

From undher its thatch of wool.

So hear me all, boys darlin’,

Don’t think I’m tippin’ you chaff,

The right to be kilt we’ll divide wid him,

And give him the largest half!

These proved to be prescient verses, in that black soldiers would experience ferocious discrimination in the ranks. Until the war’s end they got paid less, collected no federal bounties, obtained little help for their families from the government, seldom became officers, were organized in segregated regiments, and were assigned largely to menial labor—though an incredible 37 percent of their total number would die. Nor did the administration hasten to protect black soldiers who surrendered to Confederate forces from being butchered on the spot or sold into slavery. Despite all this, New York’s African Americans signed up at a rate twice that the army had forecast, inspired by their antislavery convictions, and for some military service would provide unprecedented opportunities for exercising leadership.

The episode of the black troops was satisfyingly cathartic, but it was clear to upperclass reformers that a longer-term response to the upheavals was necessary. The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, now presided over by James Brown of the Brown Brothers banking and trading firm, asserted that the riots proved beyond all doubt the existence of a “dangerous class” in New York City. The “terrible