The Epic of New York City (51 page)

Although Police Superintendent Kennedy knew that trouble was brewing, he was not yet aware of how deadly it would become. He had sent a captain and 60 cops to reinforce the squad of patrolmen on duty at the uptown draft office. He also dispatched a captain, 4 sergeants, and 69 cops to another threatened draft office on Broadway at Twenty-ninth Street. That Monday morning, July 13, Kennedy had a total of only 800 policemen available for duty as the riots began.

Federal officials in the city began to stir uneasily. Major General John Ellis Wool was in charge of the Department of the East, with headquarters in New York City. The seventy-four-year-old general was muddleheaded and indecisive. Now he detached fifty members of the Invalid Corps from guard duty elsewhere and sent them limping toward Third Avenue horsecars to ride to the Forty-sixth Street draft office. By this time rioters were chopping down telegraph poles around the menaced building.

Ruffians along Second and Third Avenues halted the horsecars, and by 8:30
A.M
. no more of these vehicles were moving on the avenues. G. T. Strong had heard the roars of the mob and boarded a Third Avenue car to go see what was happening. At Thirteenth Street he found the track blocked by a line of motionless cars stretching way up the avenue, so he got off and began walking. Above Twentieth Street all shops were closed.

At 9
A.M
. so many alarming reports reached Police Headquarters, at 300 Mulberry Street, that Superintendent Kennedy sent this message over the police telegraph system: “To all stations in New York and Brooklyn: Call in your reserves and hold them at the station house subject to further orders.” A millionaire merchant, named
George Opdyke, was now mayor of New York City. From his City Hall office Mayor Opdyke sent a request to Major General Charles W. Sanford to call out all the militia units left in town. As a result, the first military unit mustered on Monday—apart from the Invalid Corps already under arms—was the Tenth Regiment of the national guard. It assembled in the arsenal at Elm and Worth streets. The mayor also telegraphed an appeal to Governor Seymour to hasten to the city from his Jersey retreat.

Up at the Third Avenue draft office, for the next hour and a half, the police had little trouble coping with the mob surrounding the place. The lottery wheel stood on the ground floor, while the upper three stories were occupied by poor families. The Invalid Corps had not yet arrived. The cops, clubs drawn and faces tense, stood with their backs against the building as the draft lottery resumed. To complete the Ninth District's quota, 264 more names had to be picked. The mob extended half a dozen blocks north and south of Forty-sixth Street, pushing and yelling and hooting. A few reckless carriage drivers tried to whip their horses through the throng. Plug-uglies caught the bridles of horses, unhitched animals from their shafts, and forced drivers and passengers to get out. Bobbing up and down in the melee were placards reading: “No DRAFT!” The mob surged closer to the cops ringing the draft office. Its vanguard consisted of members of a street-brawling outfit, volunteer firemen in Engine Company 33, popularly known as the Black Joke. The Black Jokers jeered the cops and shouted so uproariously that those inside draft headquarters could barely hear themselves.

At 10:30
A.M
. someone in the mob shot a pistol into the air. Then a volley of bricks and stones shattered windows of the draft office. The Black Jokers lunged toward the door. The police fought bravely but were overwhelmed. A police captain ordered his men to retreat inside the building. They backed through the door but were unable to slam it shut, so fast did the howling firemen pour in after them. Draft officials scampered out rear windows. In the halls the cops fought a hopeless rearguard action. Then they dived out windows into the alley and ran toward Second Avenue. Thousands of rioters surged inside. They broke the lottery wheel. They set fire to the building. The flames spread to an adjoining building. Loyal firemen raced up; but the mob kept them from dousing the blaze, and they had to stand by helplessly and watch the destruction of the entire block from Forty-sixth to Forty-seventh Street.

Moments later those on the southern fringe of the mob saw the Invalid Corps unit closing in. These veterans of battlefield horrors, their flesh and bones mending from wounds, had been delayed when the horsecars had stopped running. Now they walked and limped straight toward the mob, which wheeled and charged at them. The clash came at Third Avenue and Forty-second Street. The veterans were vastly outnumbered. Gangsters stoned them, killing one soldier and injuring half a dozen more.

The commanding officer ordered his front rank to fire blanks. The volley pricked the mob into greater fury and left half the troops defenseless. Snarling Irish plug-uglies lunged at the soldiers. The second rank of the Invalids fired real bullets, slaying and wounding six men and one woman. For a second the mob paused. Then, with ferocious roars, the ruffians fell en masse on the veterans, who did not have time to reload. Muskets were jerked from their trembling hands. Many were clubbed with the butts of their own weapons and shot point-blank in the belly. One veteran ran toward the East River and clawed his way to the top of a cliff. He was followed, caught, and hurled to death on the rocky beach below. Then his lifeless body was pounded to pulp by boulders so big that it took two strong men to lift and throw them. All told, a score of veterans were killed. Those able to run took to their heels. They abandoned wounded comrades, who were mutilated as they lay on the ground.

Meantime, Police Superintendent Kennedy had left his headquarters to make a tour of inspection. That hot summer day he wore civilian clothing and carried a bamboo cane. By carriage he drove to Forty-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue, where he heard the hoarse shouts of the mob and saw smoke charcoaling the sky. Kennedy got out and began walking east on Forty-sixth Street. He had gone only half a block when he was recognized. Gangsters rushed him, and one man in an old army uniform knocked him down. Kennedy jumped up and slashed the bully across the face with his cane. Kennedy was beaten to the ground again. He was kicked and stamped on. Once more he leaped up. A hail of blows hammered him to the edge of a hole dug in the street, and he was knocked into it. Up he bobbed. He fled across a vacant lot toward Forty-seventh Street, where another gang met him. He was slugged and slashed as he tried to escape to Lexington Avenue. There a thug pounded him into a deep mudhole. Kennedy pulled himself out and, muddy and bloody, staggered on until he collapsed in the arms of an influential citizen, named John Eagan.
This good Samaritan convinced Kennedy's attackers that the police superintendent was dead. He was indeed unconscious. Kennedy later was placed in a wagon, covered with gunnysacks, and driven to Police Headquarters. There a surgeon found seventy-two bruises and more than a score of cuts on his body.

In the nation's capital President Lincoln was getting telegraphic news of the riot from Sidney H. Gray, managing editor of the New York
Tribune.
At 11:45
A.M
. the federal government ordered the city draft offices closed. This did not end the violence. The criminals, the poor, and the disloyal were out to seize control of the town, and they did. By tearing up tracks, they isolated the city from direct approach by train. They cut wires that cobwebbed the police telegraph system, but repairmen soon spliced lines and restored communications.

With Superintendent Kennedy unconscious, police command devolved upon police commissioners John C. Bergen and Thomas C. Acton. Bergen took charge in Brooklyn and on Staten Island. Acton, a prominent Republican and a founder of the Union League Club, assumed command in Manhattan. Intelligent and energetic, Acton received and answered more than 4,000 telegrams between Monday morning and Friday afternoon. All this time he neither slept nor changed clothes.

Monday noon a mob clattered toward the home of Mayor Opdyke, at 79 Fifth Avenue, near Fifteenth Street. Although the mayor had neglected to provide a guard for his residence, fifty neighbors now armed themselves and took up defensive positions. Supreme Court Justice George G. Barnard climbed onto the stoop of an adjoining house and spoke to the mob. Everybody knew that Barnard had been elevated to the court by William Marcy Tweed, and the fat Boss was everybody's friend. So the judge talked the crowd out of attacking the mayor's home.

Mayor Opdyke was in his City Hall office, where he now called for a special session of the city council. Because only half a dozen aldermen appeared, no quorum could be obtained. The mayor then issued a proclamation ordering the rioters to disperse. The Irish, who regarded the mayor as a Black Republican, reacted violently. A mob began to howl under City Hall windows. Since the mayor was in danger, Tweed and other Democrats persuaded him to seek safer quarters in the St. Nicholas Hotel, at Broadway and Spring Street.

Monday afternoon the city was mob-ruled. As Carl Sandburg has
written: “Never before in an American metropolis had the police, merchants, bankers, and forces of law and order had their power wrenched loose by mobs so skillfully led.” Now brutal Irishmen began attacking Negroes, whom they blamed for the war.

The Colored Orphan Asylum, on the west side of Fifth Avenue, occupied the entire block between Forty-third and Forty-fourth streets. It looked a little like the White House in Washington. Here were sheltered more than 200 Negro children under the age of twelve, together with 50 matrons and attendants. Soon after the abortive attack on the mayor's home, a mob of 3,000 persons gathered in front of the asylum and began shouting threats. The asylum superintendent, William E. Davis, barricaded the doors. Rowdies roared that they damned well would break in. The children's eyes widened in terror. Davis and other staff members herded them out the back and into a nearby police station. Later, under military escort, the children were taken to Blackwells Island. Moments after the asylum was evacuated, rioters stormed its front doors, broke them down, tumbled inside, smashed furniture, carried out toys and bedding, and then set fire to the place. While the vandalism was at its height, one little Negro girl, overlooked in the hasty departure, was found trembling under a bed. She was pulled out and beaten to death.

The middle of Monday afternoon the rioting spread to the downtown section of the city. Most stores had closed, but saloons stayed open to stoke people's fury with raw liquor. Jewelry shops were looted. Hardware stores were raided for guns and pistols and ammunition. Fires were set here, there, everywhere. Negroes were chased and cornered and strung up and tortured. Irish biddies knifed the flesh of hanged Negroes, poured oil into the wounds, set fire to the oil, danced under the human torches, and sang obscene songs.

(Despite the unspeakable cruelty of some of New York's low-class Irish, many of the city's Irishmen served with distinction in the Union army. At least 8 all-Irish regiments were formed here. Thousands of Patricks and Clanceys and Emmets donned the honorable blue uniform, a total of 150,000 Irishmen from all parts of the North swelling the ranks. Generals Meade, Rosecrans, Sheridan, Meagher, Sickles, Ord, and Gillmore were Catholic. At Fredericksburg, Virginia, an Irish brigade marched into battle flying Ireland's green flag with its golden harp. Later a color sergeant was found with the flag wrapped about his body, a bullet having pierced the flag and his heart. An Irish washerwoman followed some of her countrymen into combat
during the Second Battle of Bull Run and stood tall and unafraid as she cheered them on.)

But here in New York, as drunken Irishmen lurched through the streets, decent people locked themselves in their homes. Peter Goelet owned a big house at Broadway and Nineteenth Street. With him lived his twenty-five-year-old nephew, Elbridge Gerry. The old man raised peacocks and pheasants and let them strut about the lawn. In normal times pedestrians stopped to peer at them between iron railings. On this day of peril young Gerry felt that the gorgeous plumage of the birds might attract the attention of rioters. He ordered the coachman to pull out all their colorful tail feathers. Divested of this weight, the peacocks and pheasants, looking like drunken acrobats, lost their balance and toppled over onto their beaks. Elbridge Gerry later became vice-president of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

One mob looted and burned a block of fine houses on Lexington Avenue near Forty-sixth Street. Another set fire to the draft office on Broadway near Twenty-ninth Street. Then this downtown mob, led by a giant carrying an American flag, a bobbing, throbbing, chanting mass of men and women, 10,000 strong and armed with guns, pistols, clubs, swords, and crowbars, clattered down Broadway, setting the torch to houses as they went and heading for Police Headquarters. Under the hot sun the rioters cast snake-weaving shadows. At the central office, as Police Headquarters was then called, 200 policemen had gathered, but 50 were too weak from wounds to be efficient. Commissioner Acton wired precinct houses to rush reinforcements at once. The besieged Eighteenth Precinct Station, on Twenty-second Street near Third Avenue, replied, “One of our officers, just in, says that not one of us can get to the central office, in uniform, alive. They will try in citizens' dress.” Detectives who had mingled with the advancing mob now raced into headquarters, panting that if the rioters overran the central office, their next target would be the Wall Street area. There they planned to loot banks and plunder the Subtreasury Building. The alert was relayed to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and two armed ships glided into position, one in the East River and the other in the Hudson, ready to rake the toe of Manhattan with their guns.

Sweeping sweat from his forehead, Acton decided to head off the mob before it neared the central office. Combat command was given to Inspector Daniel C. Carpenter, the senior uniformed officer in the department. Lining up 125 cops in front of headquarters, he said
grimly, “We are going to put down a mob, and we will take no prisoners.” Then he marched his men out of Mulberry Street west toward Broadway and turned north onto this wide thoroughfare. From the north as far as the eye could see, a lavalike hubble-bubble of people seethed and seeped down Broadway. The police trudged north. The mob inched south.