Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (34 page)

In Smith’s mind, cultural mingling inevitably followed racial mingling. In a separate column, he turned to another popular author of the
day, the British poet Tennyson. Quoting from “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Communipaw playfully unfolded an elaborate argument about poetic imitation and literary theft. Tennyson had committed “flat burglary,” Communipaw asserted, by stealing his lines from a Congo chant. “Canga bafio te, / Canga moune de le, / Canga do ki la, / Canga li” was the original version of Tennyson’s “Cannon to right of them, / Cannon to left of them, / Cannon in front of them / Volleyed and thundered.” Not only had Tennyson stolen from another source, but his source derived from African, not European, culture.
⁵⁵

What was Smith up to? By charging that the great Victorian poet stole lines from a Congolese chant, he was elaborating his own version of cosmopolitanism. High culture, he suggested, was not pure but the result of borrowings from different cultures, African as well as European. Cosmopolitanism was not raceless, as Bell would have it, but rather a form of mingling in which elements from different cultures became so intertwined they could hardly be separated out. Communipaw’s playful and ironic tone emphasized this point. Please don’t take my interpretation of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” too seriously, he seemed to be saying. Maybe it’s correct, maybe not. The one lesson readers needed to take away was that they should never make assumptions about what constituted high culture.

Applied to the United States, the implications of Smith’s theories were considerable. At the very moment when American intellectuals were striving to define national identity, Smith was arguing that all cultures, that of Britain as well as of the United States, had come into being by means of theft resulting in different forms of “mingling.” Americans needed to acknowledge what the early families of Collect Street had long known: that racial, cultural, and hence national purity—of white, black, European, African—was mere myth. In effect, Smith was questioning the very notion of race, of what it meant to be American or Negro, thus challenging niggerologists and elites who determined fitness for citizenship. While complicating his theories of cosmopolitanism of the 1840s, Smith returned to the same central issue: that of double consciousness, of the dilemma of being simultaneously American and Negro. The solution, he suggested, was simple: if the categories
of white, black, European, African, are invalid, then the problem of double consciousness no longer exists and the so-called “Negro” should be granted “American” citizenship.

Left unresolved was how Smith could transform his meditations on race into an effective political tool that black New Yorkers could seize upon and a persuasive message that white New Yorkers—both elite and working class—could readily embrace.

JULY 1863

IT WAS A LOTTERY
—the simple act of reading names drawn from a barrel—that sparked the riot. Early on the morning of Monday, July 13, 1863, hundreds of white workers from the Ninth Ward took to the streets. The weather was infernally hot. In his diary, George Templeton Strong described the day as a “deadly muggy sort with a muddy sky and lifeless air.” It matched the surly mood of the crowd. Rather than proceed to their places of employment, they converged on Central Park where they held a brief meeting. Holding high “No Draft” placards, they then descended on the Provost Marshal’s office in the Ninth Ward at Third Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, where the lottery was about to start. At ten-thirty, the Provost Marshal began calling out names as they were taken from the wheel. As he read off the last one, a stone came crashing through the window, and the destruction began. The crowd smashed the wheel, scattering the pieces of paper on which the names had been written. They destroyed all the furnishings and set the building on fire. The New York City draft riots, the largest incident of civil disorder in the nation to that date, had erupted.
¹

Two years earlier, on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces had launched an attack on the Union army at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. On April 15, President Lincoln declared a state of insurrection in the South and called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to put it down.

As the war progressed, the federal government became desperate
for more soldiers and decided to enact a draft law. In March 1863, Congress passed a National Conscription Act decreeing that all male citizens (by definition white) between the ages of twenty and thirty-five were to be enrolled in the military, and a lottery then conducted to determine who would actually serve. The act granted federal officials considerable authority to intrude in the daily life of the citizenry—namely, the power to conduct house-to-house visits for enrollment purposes and to arrest those who resisted. Stunningly, it also included a provision exempting from service those who could offer an acceptable substitute or pay three hundred dollars. It was the poor, not the rich, who were to fight Lincoln’s war.

Of all the stories in this book, the history of the New York draft riots is by far the best known. It’s been told over and over again in print and on screen. Perhaps because of its violence. Perhaps because of the innocence of the victims. Perhaps because of the fiendishness of the mob. And there’s a written record.

For the next week, white and black New Yorkers alike could follow the progress of the riot in their newspapers. In addition to government, police, and eyewitness accounts, it’s the city papers that have left the most extensive paper trail. Philip and his friends found heartfelt reports of the horrors unfolding in the streets in the
Tribune
, the
Times
, antislavery papers like the
Liberator
and
National Anti-Slavery Standard
, as well as the
Weekly Anglo-African
, the city’s new black newspaper founded in the early 1860s by William Hamilton’s two sons, Thomas and Robert. Putting aside James McCune Smith’s earlier charge that Greeley was nothing but a flagrant prostitute, black New Yorkers were now appreciative of his support for the Union and grateful for his extensive coverage of the riots, especially since the reporting in the
Weekly Anglo-African
relied heavily on articles retrieved from the
Tribune.
Indeed, the degree to which the newspapers tended to reprint one another’s reports is striking. One of the unforeseen consequences has been a more limited historical record.

Over the weekend of July 11, members of New York’s white working class grew increasingly angered that they were being asked to risk their lives in an armed conflict in which neither those who had decided on the war—political elites who could buy their way out—nor those who they believed to be the cause of the war—blacks excluded by law from service—were forced to fight. Although many were native born, a large percentage of this working class were new arrivals from Ireland and Germany. These immigrants, the Irish in particular, could barely make ends meet. From the moment they landed in New York, they toiled at the bottom of the labor market, vying with black workers for unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. Economic competition increased their racial animosity and jealous determination to lock blacks out of gainful employment. Yet to better-off whites they were loathsome creatures, derided in the same abusive language typically reserved for blacks.

At first, New York’s white workingmen caught the war fever. Military service, they figured, would provide steady employment, allow them to wave the flag of patriotism, and offer a life of adventure. Their fever waned quickly. Thousands died on the battlefield. Others came home sick, maimed, disfigured. In the city, inflation was rampant; prices rose while wages fell.
²

The rioters came from different parts of the city. Some were journeymen in the older artisan trades, while others—mostly Irish Catholic—were common laborers or workers in newer industrial occupations. Over the four days of rioting, the composition of the mob gradually shifted as both native-born Americans and German immigrants retreated. More likely to be skilled workers and property owners, their animosity toward political elites and blacks was not nearly as great as that of the Irish.

The mob’s targets were varied, but put together they covered just about every aspect of city life. Their work of destruction had a perverse logic of its own. They descended on the Provost Marshal’s office to disrupt the lottery that was going to send them to a war they didn’t want to fight. When they came across Superintendent of Police John Kennedy rushing to defend the building, they beat him to a bloody pulp. They
invaded the Armory at Second Avenue and Twenty-first Street, seizing all the weapons they could find. They set about destroying all means of communication—telegraph lines, railroads and streetcar tracks, ferries and bridges—to prevent city officials from calling for reinforcements from both inside and outside the city.

They vented their wrath against anybody or anything that smacked of wealth and privilege—swank mansions on Fifth and Lexington Avenues, banks where the elite made their money, department stores like Brooks Brothers where they spent it. Strong was disgusted. Like a bad habit he could not get rid of, he still referred to blacks as “niggers.” But he had equal contempt for lower-class whites. Above all, he wanted the Union preserved. On the third day of the riots, he became seriously frightened, so “by way of precaution,” he wrote in his diary, “I had had the bathtubs filled, and also all the pots, kettles and pails in the house.” He took to praying for rain, opining that “mobs have no taste for the effusion of cold water.”
³

The mob attacked the building of the
Tribune
, looking for its troublemaking editor while singing a ditty to the tune of “John Brown’s Body”:

We’ll hang old Greeley to a sour apple tree,

We’ll hang old Greeley to a sour apple tree,

We’ll hang old Greeley to a sour apple tree,

And send him to straight to hell. …
⁴

Most especially, they poured their venom upon New York’s black population.

Reading through the newspapers, it seemed that the organizing principle of the reporting was to list the mob’s horrific acts as random assaults against random individuals of the wrong color caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, proceeding geographically from one ward to another and, within each ward, from one street to another. Geography mattered.

Decades earlier, black New Yorkers and their institutions had concentrated in the Five Points area, housing families like the Marshalls, DeGrasses, Crummells, Garnets, and Williamses; churches like
St. Philip’s and Mother Zion; organizations like the Philomathean Society, the offices of
Freedom’s Journal
and the African Society for Mutual Relief. By 1860, however, the black community was no longer so geographically delimited; only the African Society remained in its original Baxter Street location.

In addition to their community, however, black New Yorkers lived in city neighborhoods made up of diverse peoples. By now the white elite—the Upper Tendom—had walled itself off in exclusive residential enclaves. But artisans, skilled and unskilled laborers, still tended to live in close proximity to their workplaces. In these neighborhoods, native-born Americans mixed with Irish and German immigrants as well as with blacks. Racial and ethnic differentiation occurred within city blocks, or even buildings, rather than from neighborhood to neighborhood.
⁵

So at the time of the draft riots black New Yorkers lived in two places—black community and local neighborhood—that were quite distinct. Given their dispersal and that of their institutions, they could not rely on community collaboration. Could they count on their neighbors? “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Christian ethics demand of us. But is that truly possible? Despite close proximity, my neighbor might remain a stranger. How can I love a stranger? And might physical intimacy breed not love but hostility, even hatred?
⁶
The rioters must have perceived their black victims as strangers: strangers on a strange street, but also, as accounts intimated, strangers in their own home neighborhoods. And their neighbors did likewise.

Here’s a sampling:

Abraham Franklin, a cripple. The mob hanged him in front of his mother near their home on the corner of Twenty-seventh Street and Seventh Avenue. They left when the police interrupted their work, but later returned to hang him once again and mutilate his body.

James Costello. Pursued by a rioter when he left his home at 97 West Thirty-third Street on an errand, he turned and shot the man in self-defense. The mob set upon him, mangled his body, then hanged it; after cutting it down, they dragged it through the gutter, smashing it with stones, and finally burned it.

Jeremiah Robinson. Hoping to escape the mob, he dressed in his
wife’s clothes, but, betrayed by his beard, was captured and killed on Madison near Catherine Street. His body was then flung in the river.

A seven-year-old child living with his grandmother and widowed mother. They were forced to flee their house on East Twenty-eighth after a mob set fire to it. Separated from his family, the boy was struck with cobblestones and pistols. He died from his injuries.

Samuel Johnson, a resident of Roosevelt Street. His father William was brutally attacked by rioters on Second Avenue near Thirty-sixth Street and left for dead. He dragged himself home only to find his son dying from injuries inflicted by the mob.

Mary Alexander, who lived on West Twenty-eighth Street, chased out of her house by the mob, although her life was spared.
⁷

When it was all over at least 150 people, black and white, were dead and millions of dollars in property lost.

How could this have happened in New York City?