University of Kentucky UKnowledge United States History History 1974 The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 Adrian Cook Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Cook, Adrian, "The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863" (1974). United States History. 56. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_united_states_history/56 THE ARMIES OF THE STREETS This page intentionally left blank THE ARMIES OF THE STREETS TheNew York City Draft Riots of 1863 ADRIAN COOK THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY ISBN: 978-0-8131-5182-3 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-80463 Copyright© 1974 by The University Press of Kentucky A statewide cooperative scholarly publishing agency serving Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky State College, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40506 To My Mother This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix Proem xi THE CITY IN 1863 I Packed and Pestilential Town 2 2 The Reasons for Riot 18 THE DAYS OF THE RIOT 3 The Fuse and the Powder 48 4 Black Pogrom and the Old Whitecoat 76 5 Clubs Are Trumps 96 6 The Reign of King Mob 114 7 City for Conquest 138 8 Peace in Warsaw 156 THE AFTERMATH 9 The Harvest of Riot 170 IO The Reckoning 192 Appendixes 211 Notes 269 Bibliographical Essay 315 Index 319 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments Since much of this book reads like a blood-and-thunder penny dreadful, academic readers may be reassured to find evidence of scholarly sobriety in the appendixes. I hope, however, that the material in the latter part of the book will find a more practical use. The great objection to using police and court records in build­ ing up a statistical profile of a mob is, of course, that in most disorders one cannot be certain whether or not the authorities were obliging enough to arrest a representative sample of rioters. This objection applies less to the Draft Riots records than to those of any other civil disturbance known to me. Very few people were detained until the very end of the Draft Riots, and there was usually solid and convincing evidence against those arrested after­ wards. Consequently, the list supplied here consists of people who really were hard-core rioters, not just those who were unusually foolhardy or slow in running away. I hope that anyone concerned with the study of riots, political scientists and sociologists as well as historians, will find the appendixes useful. Researching this topic was not an easy matter, and I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all the many people who helped me. Above all, I would like to thank Professor Leo Hershkowitz of Queens College, who generously shared his unrivaled knowl­ edge of the New York City archives with me. Without his aid, it would have been impossible to write this book. I am also especially indebted to Professor Willie Lee Rose, Professor John William x Acknowledgments Ward, Professor H. C. Allen, Professor Ibby Nathans, Professor James P. Shenton, Mr. Arthur Breton and Mr. Tom Dunnings of the New York Historical Society, and to the staff of the Old Mili­ tary Records Division at the National Archives. Two fellowships from the American Council of Learned Soci­ eties made it possible for me to do the research, and Mr. Richard W. Downar, director of the A.C.L.S. American Studies Program, and his assistant Miss Ruth Craven, smoothed my path. Another generous fellowship from the Institute for Research in the Human­ ities, University of Wisconsin, Madison, enabled me to tackle the writing without financial worries. Professor E. David Cronon, the director of the Institute, his two charming and able secretaries, and the other Fellows provided an ideal environment in which to work, and the long-suffering staff at the University of Wisconsin and State Historical Society of Wisconsin libraries always dealt efficiently with my importunate demands. To all, my thanks. Finally, I should also express my sense of gratitude to the pro­ fessor under whom I received the bulk of my graduate training some years ago, David Herbert Donald, then of Johns Hopkins University. Proem When the Civil War began, loss of the lucrative southern trade caused mas­ sive unemployment in the industrial cities of the North. The unemployed began to organize vast demonstrations, which turned into riots. The police and the militia put down the initial troubles with heavy loss of life, but the situation grew worse. With the northern forces suffering military defeat and the northern government floundering in financial difficulties, the number of unemployed rose and the price of food spiraled. The city of New York broke into open rebellion. Thousands of rioters raided the gun stores and plundered the liquor shops. The police were helpless, and the militia could do no more than protect themselves. Four thousand federal troops were sent in to confront JO,ooo rioters. A thousand of the regulars were veterans, and they fought well, but were overwhelmed by superior numbers. Most of them were killed, fighting to the last. The rest of the troops were recent re­ cruits, many from New York itself, and they had no stomach for the fight. First singly, then in twos and threes, and finally in whole units, they deserted and joined the rioters. As night fell on that day of disorder, all opposition ceased. Banks were broken open and their vaults robbed. Churches were looted. The avenues were filled with terrified refugees, struggling to escape the mob. Hundreds of dollars were offered for any kind of conveyance out of danger. Drunk and gorged with plunder, the mob set the city on fire. A high wind whipped the flames into a hurricane of fire, and when morning came New York was a blackened, charred ruin. Riots in other towns forced the northern govern­ ment to give up the idea of conquering the South and ask for a truce. Or so the Virginia fire-eater Edmund Ruffin predicted in his Anticipa­ tions of the Future to Serve as Lessons for the Present Time, written in 186o to urge the South to seize independence. For a few bloody summer days in 1863, when New York City was gripped by the Draft Riots, it seemed as though Ruffin might be a true prophet. This page intentionally left blank THE CITY IN 1863 What apparent cause of any riots may be, the real one is want of happiness. -TOM PAINE 1 Packed and Pestilential Town CoMING THROUGH the Narrows at dawn, the traveler on a vessel bound for New York saw a view of astounding beauty and gran­ deur. On both sides of the channel, white mansions stood among green trees and lawns. In the distance, the city rose against the bay and the sky, the spires of the churches and the masts of anchored ships standing out in the clear light of early morning. 1 Once ashore, the traveler found little beauty in a city racked by the problems of explosive growth. Between 1820 and I86o, the population had increased sevenfold, from 123,706 to 813,662. Stimulated by the Erie Canal, the railroads west, and cheap trans­ portation across the Atlantic by packet and steamship, the orderly Knickerbocker port that Hamilton and Livingston had known be­ came "a huge semi-barbarous metropolis, one-half as luxurious and artistic as Paris, and the other half as savage as Cairo or Con­ stantinople." After 1820, more than 70 percent of all immigrants who came to America landed at New York, and many remained to seek homes and jobs in the city. By 1860 New York had 383,717 citizens of foreign birth, including 203,740 Irish and II9,984 Germans.2 As the population and commerce of the city grew, the tide of construction raced up Manhattan Island. When City Hall was built in I 8 I 2, the front and sides were faced with marble, but the brownstone rear was left unadorned, since everyone assumed that it would be decades before there was any building to the north of 4 The City in 1863 Cham:t>ers Street. But by I86o the city was built up to Forty­ second Street, and here and there a few isolated rows of houses dotted the vacant lots to the north. The upper and middle classes were in the vanguard of the movement out of the older parts of town. In the I85os, the phrase "above Bleecker" was a synonym for wealth and elegance, and in I 8 58 the fashionable Brick Church moved from Beekman Street in the Second Ward to the corner of Fifth A venue and Thirty-seventh Street, "on the top of Murray Hill, in the most aristocratic quarter of the city." The great houses of the wealthy businessmen and bankers lined Fifth A venue down as far as Fourteenth Street. Stuyvesant Square, Gramercy Park, and Madison Square were only slightly less desirable neighbor­ hoods. Some of the well-to-do still lived in Greenwich Village, especially on Washington Square, where Commodore Vanderbilt had a town house, and some blocks of the principal crosstown streets-Fourteenth, Twenty-third, and Thirty-fourth-were the home of the prosperous and successfuP As the wealthy moved uptown, the stores, hotels, and restau­ rants that catered to them followed.