Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [720]
As blazes broke out all along Broadway, terrified crowds poured into the street. Wooden houses were evacuated in a frenzy. Police wagons and fire engines fought their way through dense crowds of people screaming, “Find the rebels! Hang them from a lamppost! Burn them at the stake!”
Despite the panic, the fires were promptly extinguished, though not before causing four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage. The incident captured world headlines but did not affect the course of the war. New York City detectives tracked the conspirators down in Canada and arrested one, Robert Kennedy, when he reentered the United States trying to return south. Tried as a spy, he was found guilty and hanged in Fort Lafayette in March 1865. His fate was symbolic. That same March the death knell of the Confederacy itself could be heard tolling in New York.
PEACE
On March 6 a procession seven miles long snaked its way through the streets of lower Manhattan—a “National Jubilee” hailing Lincoln’s second inaugural, recent Union victories, and impending Confederate defeats. Marchers included huge numbers of troops, the city’s volunteer fire companies, scores of German, Italian, and Irish community organizations, businesses and banks, insurance and express companies, typographers, pianomakers, steam fitters, tailors—even elephants and camels. Patriotism and commerce mingled: Harper’s sniffed that for all too many businesses the “chief object in participating in the festival was the opportunity to advertise their wares.” Some commercials were done with knowing wit, like the sign for McAuliffe’s Irish whiskey: DON T AVOID THE DRAUGHT. In echoes of earlier days, sailors carried model boats, one of a fullrigged ship, another of the Monitor. Others proclaimed the future: OIL IS KING NOW, NOT COTTON read one display.
On April 3, businessmen standing on the corner of Pine and William read on the Commercial Advertiser’s bulletin board that Richmond and Petersburg had been captured the day before. Broadway became an instant river of cheering, singing men. Flags waved, guns saluted. On April 11 word came that Grant had run Lee to ground at Appomattox, and again the city exploded.
But the night of April 14 wrenched New York into an abrupt change of mood. Lincoln had been shot and died the next morning, Good Friday. Whitman, reading the news in black-bordered papers, crossed to Manhattan and walked up Broadway past shuttered stores hung in black. Toward noon, he recalled, it began to rain: “Black clouds driving overhead. Lincoln’s death—black, black black—as you look toward the sky—long broad black like great serpents.”
The city prepared for Lincoln’s final visit. The Committee of Arrangements included A. T. Stewart, Moses Grinnell, William Dodge, and William Tweed. The funeral train left Washington on April 21. It stopped at Baltimore, Har risburg, Philadelphia. From New Jersey the party was ferried to Manhattan. The ships in the harbor were draped in black muslin. At the Desbrosses Street dock the body was placed in a glass hearse drawn by six gray horses. Accompanied by a German society singing a funeral ode, the procession, headed by General Dix and the Seventh Regiment, moved across Canal and down Broadway to a black-draped City Hall, where it was put on a catafalque. Lines formed to pay last respects.
The city shut down for the day. Businesses closed, courts adjourned. At the Nineteenth Street Synagogue, the Rev J. J. Lyons led the Nahan Neshomen, the prayer for the dead, the first time such a ceremony was ever held in the United States for a non Jew. Mourning was not unanimous, however. Strong reported hearing of a dozen cases where “celtic handmaidens” had been summarily discharged for rejoicing at the news. Gramercy Park House similarly dismissed a number of waiters for approving of the assassination.
The next day, April 25, a sixteen-horse funeral car