Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (38 page)

St. Philip’s Church, Mulberry Street, photo- graph by G. Stacy, probably 1863 (New-York Historical Society)

St. Philip’s stood across the street from Police Headquarters at 300 Mulberry. Presumably its location made it safe from destruction by the mob, and in fact the church was not ransacked as the earlier building on Centre Street had been during the 1834 riots. But poring through the vestry minutes I discovered a heartrending account of assault from
unexpected quarters that parishioners experienced as only slightly less distressing. In 1863, Philip was no longer on the vestry, but those who were—Peter Ray, John Peterson, James McCune Smith, and others—were adamant about preserving memory of the violation in writing.

It may be recollected that it was our pleasure and duty to be permitted to assemble ourselves in our sanctuary on the Sunday of July 12th for our usual devotions and humble praise and thanksgiving. But on the succeeding day July 13th 1863 anarchy and confusion took the place of law and order and for several days pillage, arson, murder reigned supreme in our midst. Men, women, and children having seemingly, suddenly become transformed into the vilest and savagest of fiends. During the reign of this state of affairs, at a late hour Tuesday night July 14th 1863 the police authorities took possession of our parish to quarter military who had been summoned hither to bring order over chaos, restore law and maintain the peace of the city. Thus our parish has been in their possession since the above mentioned date until Friday noon July 31st 1863. In consequence of such occupation our church has been greatly defaced and damaged and left in an untenable condition requiring thorough renovation. … [We must] have our parish put in a restored condition in every respect as soon as possible so that we and our fellow parishioners may once again through God’s providence be permitted to draw near and assemble in our old, accustomed, beloved, and familiar spots in united prayer, to mingle our voices in praise and thanksgiving to “God our refuge.”
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The soldiers who had turned St. Philip’s into a barracks had been careless, and having defaced the church sanctuary, they never thought to repair the damage before leaving.

Parishioners were devastated. They launched a campaign of private solicitation. Members of Trinity Church donated liberally. The next generation of Lorillard sons gave, as did a son-in-law, the prominent
merchant John D. Wolfe. So did John Jay and Philip Hone. St. Philip’s vestry also appealed to city and federal authorities. In November General Edward Canby, who had been assigned by the army to deal with the riot, finally agreed to pay for damages. But he attached conditions: He would pay one month’s rent only if the amount was ascertained by affidavit of property owners in the vicinity. He would reimburse the church for stolen money, books, and other property provided knowledgeable persons specified their exact value by affidavit. He would cover the cost of repairs in the amount fixed upon by estimates submitted beforehand by disinterested parties. There were to be no complaints after the work was finished. Yet it would be almost three years before the vestry sent my great-grandfather to collect a check for $1,100 from the city comptroller. Even then, St. Philip’s continued to wrangle with the War Department over the number of months it was owed restitution for the “military occupation.” On July 18, 1871, exactly eight years after the riots, the matter was finally put to rest. In all, St. Philip’s was reimbursed approximately $1,500 of the $2,500 it had requested.
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General Canby’s statement, sent through lawyers to St. Philip’s vestry, reeked of condescension and suspicion. I wonder what he said in private. Maybe it was something on the order of the comments made by former volunteer special William Stoddard about the African Methodist Church, which had also been used as an army barracks during the riots. Authorities grudgingly agreed to pay this church for new carpets as well as new books for the Sunday-school library, he wrote sarcastically, “on the ground that the unrighteous police, soldiery, and ‘specials’ had read up forever all there was left of the old,” but drew the line “with a good deal of quiet fun” at reimbursement for the Sunday collections missed when the church was undergoing repairs. “That church and the Orphan Asylum,” Stoddard concluded cynically, “both made money by the mob, but in somewhat different ways.”
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How could any of this have assuaged the sense of desolation felt by St. Philip’s parishioners? For families like the Lyonses and the Powells, who had been driven out of their homes only to discover that they could not even turn to their church for solace, the feelings must have been especially intense. They found themselves subjected to still other
forms of violence. There was the physical violation of defacement of their sanctuary. There was the spiritual violation of defilement of their sacred space. There was the psychological violation of denial of legitimacy by the authorities. In the wake of the riots, St. Philip’s parishioners required reparations, not only economic but spiritual and emotional as well.

In fact, all black New Yorkers were in need of reparations. In his annual report as a city missionary, Charles Ray described the aftermath of the riots in harrowing terms:

This was a week which scarcely has a parallel in this or any other country, unless it were in the Sepoy massacre in India. It was a brief time of the reign of an infatuated mob—the Reign of Terror. Seldom has a people been so hunted and driven in all sections of the city, and so filled with consternation and dread as were our people during those scenes.
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The most vulnerable among the survivors went mad. The
Tribune
printed an account of a company of soldiers who discovered a “negro with his clothes nearly torn from his back” rushing up Seventh Avenue “with the most distressing cries.” Deciding that he had become a “raving maniac, growing out of the intense excitement … against which he was unable to maintain his mental balance,” the soldiers brought him into the arsenal where he wandered around “utterly crazed.” Even more distressing was the fate of one William Henry Yates, who committed suicide after overhearing the mob talk of killing him and burning his house. According to the
Tribune
, Yates first attempted to kill himself by slitting his throat with a razor, but when he found that “death would not ensue from hemorrhage,” he resorted to “hanging himself to the cellar door by means of a small cord,” thereby ending “his earthly career by strangulation.”
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Others—some five thousand black men, women, and children
who had managed to keep their wits about them—took flight. Many sought shelter in the wild briars, bushes, and low woods on the ridges that bordered the city, on Blackwell’s Island, in the swamps and woods back of Bergen, New Jersey, and in the barns and outhouses of farms on Long Island and Morrisania. Luckier ones fled to the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, the scene of picnics and baseball games in happier days, where they improvised a refugee camp. Luckiest of all were those who had close friends in other cities. On her own, Mary Joseph Lyons took her children across Long Island Sound to New London, Connecticut, and from there to Salem, Massachusetts, where they were taken in by the Remond family.
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The
Weekly Anglo-African
provided an invaluable service by publishing notices to inform readers of the fate of community members. It printed a long list of the colored sufferers of the late mob; denied the reported deaths of John Zuille and Peter Porter; noted Albro Lyons’s temporary change of residence to Peter Guignon’s home in Williamsburgh and subsequent return to Vandewater Street; publicized the reopening of both Charles Ray’s and Henry Highland Garnet’s churches.
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Some semblance of normalcy seemed to be returning to the lives of black New Yorkers. Yet their numbers dwindled from a high of 16,350 in 1840 to slightly under 10,000, approximately as many as in 1820.
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Who among New York’s white population would come forward to restore property and possessions to those blacks who remained in the city, to repair their bruised spirits and wounded dignity?

William Powell trusted Superintendent Kennedy enough to call for his help when his house was being attacked. Officer Kelly came to the Lyons’s home and sobbed like a child because he had not been able to protect it. In the aftermath of the riots, John Rode promised to send three policemen to guard Lyons’s house from being burned to the ground and agreed to meet Albro at “said drugstore” with a horse and wagon. Both the Powells and the Lyonses, and many other black families as well, were given shelter in police stations until it was safe for them
to leave the city. New York’s policemen worked valiantly to restore law and order, often at the risk of becoming victims of the mob.

The newspapers went to great lengths to praise the police for bringing terrified blacks into their stations, protecting, clothing, and feeding them. In its July 25 issue, the
National Anti-Slavery Standard
reported that more than two hundred blacks “of both sexes and all ages, from the infant at the breast to the white haired grandfather,” were being sheltered at Police Headquarters. Housed in the upper floor of the station, the refugees were provided with trunks and boxes to use as seats; beds were placed on the floor; and they received substantial rations of food. Another account described how “through the kindness of the chief officers of the police,” the station’s courtroom was set aside for Sabbath school; church services soon became crowded with over a hundred black women and children.
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Even from a distance of some sixty-five years, however, a tone of humiliation hovers over Maritcha’s description of her “dismayed” parents taking shelter in the police station after the riot. Part of it had to do with their sudden homelessness. But it was also because police protection came with certain assumptions and expectations. Once again, black New Yorkers were reminded of the degree to which benevolence was so often accompanied by ignorance, thoughtlessness, and stereotypes that made dependence difficult to bear. Rank-and-file policemen believed that most black New Yorkers were servants and expected them to behave as such while in their station. “The rooms,” one report observed, “are scrubbed and dusted and kept in excellent order by the Negroes, many of whom are employed as servants—making themselves very useful. They work well and cheerfully, and have earned the good opinion of the officers in charge.”
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I don’t think that either Albro or Mary Joseph Lyons would have objected to helping keep the station house clean, but I’m sure they didn’t like assumptions of their servitude.

Hoping to find more information on the draft riots and their aftermath, I made my way to the municipal archives. To my surprise, I found myself faced with what turned out to be the most egregious example of institutional forgetting that I encountered in the course of my research. None of the staff seemed to know what I was talking about. After much
debate, they produced three dusty gray boxes stuffed with uncatalogued claims and counterclaims. I wondered whether these documents had remained buried because of their content.

It appears that the police department’s goodwill quickly evaporated when the time came to make good on financial reparations for the victims. I found a litany of rejections by city officials couched in a language of thinly veiled contempt that reminded me of the earlier comments made by General Canby and William Stoddard. Maybe because the violence was over, maybe because money was involved, attitudes had clearly changed. Not only were black petitioners denied compensation, they were repeatedly accused of fraud. Time and again, the police argued that claimants did not live where they said they did, or had not really been attacked, that there was no proof of rioting in the area specified, or no corroborating witnesses. Sticking to legal niceties, city authorities denied claims that they felt were indirect rather than direct consequences of the riots—those of a woman who dropped her bundle of clothes while running from the mob or of a fruit vendor whose raspberries rotted because he was afraid to leave his house. They seemed convinced that blacks were constitutionally incapable of telling the truth. All too often their reports concluded with comments like “it is all a base fabrication,” “she is a counterfeit,” “it is all a gross imposition,” “there is not a word of truth in this statement,” “it is a cool and deliberate
lie
, and he knows it.”
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If there were to be reparations, they would have to come from private parties. The city’s leading merchants eagerly took up the challenge. By July 23 they had set up a Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots in the City of New York. Maybe their enthusiasm came from a sense of responsibility that they had not done enough to rein in the pro-southern pronouncements of their fellow merchants; or perhaps it stemmed from the guilt they
felt for having adopted similar attitudes. Within weeks, the merchants published a report in which they stated their purpose with the utmost clarity: to provide aid to black New Yorkers left destitute by the riots. But they had additional goals, and their motives were mixed. They were determined to reassert the municipal authority they had been forced to relinquish over five terrifying days to an underclass they despised. They also recognized the need to rehabilitate their reputation and that of the city on which they had staked their fortunes, to assure the world that law and order had been restored, and that New York was once again a safe, welcoming place for businessmen and tourists alike.

The merchants clung to the belief that they were part of a tradition of private philanthropy that had long existed among their class. “I have been forty-one years a merchant in my present location,” Jonathan Sturges maintained. “During this period I have seen a noble race of merchants pass away. I cannot help calling to mind the many acts of charity which they performed during their lives. … I trust we shall be quick to continue these acts of humanity, thus showing that the race of New York Merchants is not deteriorating.” Their report consisted primarily of reprinted newspaper items detailing the destruction of black property and naming those attacked or killed by the mob. The authors went to great lengths to describe how they had gone about raising funds to compensate victims, putting their lives at risk for the sake of charity. They concluded by providing a long list of donors: abolitionists like John Jay, Gerrit Smith, and the
Tribune
but also some whose forefathers had made their fortunes in slave products, the Minturn shipping family, the Bayards, operators of sugar manufactories, the de Forest rum distillers, as well as the China trade firm of A. A. Low and Brothers.