New York at War (27 page)

Well before Semmes’s or Wood’s attacks, New Yorkers had worried about the vulnerability of the port’s defenses. In 1821, a federal board had recommended that six new forts be built to seal off New York’s outer approaches from possible attack. These works would protect the inner line of forts and guns that Jonathan Williams had placed on Ellis, Bedloe’s, and Governors Islands. By 1861, granite-walled Fort Schuyler on the Bronx shore of Long Island Sound was complete; so was Fort Lafayette, built on an offshore reef in the Narrows channel, and Fort Hamilton, overlooking it from the Brooklyn shore (where an up-and-coming army engineer, Robert E. Lee, had served capably during the 1840s). But much was left undone. Construction continued on forts Richmond and Tompkins on the Staten Island side of the Narrows, and little had been done at Sandy Hook or on the Queens side of the Sound. Nervous New Yorkers shared George Templeton Strong’s antebellum perception that “our fortifications at the Narrows, though quite picturesque of a summer afternoon, are still, considered strictly as defenses, about as much as a line of squirtgun batteries.”
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One army officer who understood New Yorkers’ fears threw himself into the work of making the port impregnable. Sixty-three-year-old Colonel Richard Delafield of the US Army Corps of Engineers was a native New Yorker, reared in his merchant father’s Wall Street townhouse. A former superintendent of West Point like Williams before him, Delafield was an acknowledged expert on port defense who had toured Europe’s great forts. Appointed engineer to the New York State Commission of Harbor and Frontier Defence, Delafield dedicated himself to keeping the Confederate foe at bay. With some 1,100 cannon already lining the ramparts and casemates of the port’s defenses, Delafield promised New Yorkers that he would add another 242 heavy guns, “a greater number . . . than exists in most of the fortified harbors of Europe.” Armed with a congressional appropriation, Delafield extended rudimentary defenses at Fort Lincoln (later renamed Fort Hancock) on Sandy Hook and began building what became known as Fort Totten on the Queens shore opposite Fort Schuyler.
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Delafield also solicited ideas from the city’s inventors and scientists, professional and amateur, who were happy to oblige. One suggested a railway running along the Upper Bay with mobile guns to fire on invading ships. The magazine
Scientific American
argued that a pool of petroleum dumped into the harbor and ignited on the enemy’s approach would prove an effective deterrent. Delafield himself advocated a system of chains and pontoons across the Narrows to let in friendly vessels and keep out hostile ones, and a string of electrically triggered “torpedoes” (“the fruits of American science and genius”) across the riverbed between the Bronx and Queens, but expense and practical obstacles prevented these from being implemented.
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Although he fretted privately about insufficient funds and the slow pace of the work, Delafield tried to calm New Yorkers. Many of them believed that the Confederacy was acquiring fearsome new technologies from England or France, fast ironclad steamers and powerful rifle-barreled artillery that might turn brick and granite forts into rubble. “No hostile force can ever reduce it,” he wrote confidently of Fort Schuyler, provided it were properly supplied and garrisoned. New fifteen-inch guns he installed at Fort Hamilton in 1864, mounted on rotating carriages, promised to rain death and destruction on any enemy warship trying to enter the Narrows or Upper Bay.
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In the summer of 1863, however, it was Delafield’s turn to vent his alarm. As Robert E. Lee’s army surged north into Pennsylvania, Delafield realized that the city faced a threat that rendered its seaward-facing forts irrelevant. In an urgent letter to New York governor Horatio Seymour on July 3, Delafield sketched the probable result if Lee proved to be “a successful conqueror” in his northward march: Confederate occupation of Philadelphia, followed by the taking of Jersey City, from which the rebels could easily bombard Manhattan with their artillery and throw an army of fifty thousand across the Hudson. Delafield beseeched the governor to mobilize the state militia and reserves to expand New York City’s home guard, as well as an army to strike Lee’s rear from the Susquehanna Valley. “Now shall we stand with our arms folded,” he asked, “and allow the resources within the limits of the State of New York in this eventful and momentous crisis to be ‘
not ready
’?”
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Delafield’s fears were unwarranted. As he wrote his letter, Meade’s Army of the Potomac was turning Lee back at Gettysburg. Yet the war
was
soon to come to the city. Edmund Ruffin’s nightmare vision—of civil war erupting in Manhattan’s streets—was about to become a reality.

On the hot summer morning of Monday, July 13, 1863, crowds of men and boys swarmed through the streets of Manhattan, inviting and bullying others to join them from foundries near the East River docks and workshops scattered among the new blocks that had sprouted uptown in the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties. Some carried homemade placards and banners reading “No Draft.”

The previous Saturday, federal provost marshals had begun to implement the first compulsory military conscription in the Union’s history. Bounty money offered by government recruiters was failing to turn out the full complement of volunteers Lincoln had counted on to win the war. With veterans like Thomas Southwick retiring from the army and other young men thinking twice about risking their lives and limbs in a seemingly endless bloodbath, the administration and a Republican-controlled Congress had resolved on a drastic measure. The War Department set quotas for a national draft to begin in mid-July 1863, applying to all able-bodied single men ages twenty to forty-five and all married men ages twenty to thirty-five. New York City alone was to supply twenty-four thousand men to the Union army.
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The Conscription Act of 1863, however, was deeply unpopular with many New Yorkers, for two reasons. First, by signing the Emancipation Proclamation the previous January, President Lincoln had pledged the Union to the liberation of the Confederacy’s slaves—a measure anathema to local Democrats who had long warned that such was the ultimate goal of “black Republicans.” Since before Lincoln’s election, newspapers like the
Herald
had been warning working-class readers that, should the abolitionists get what they wanted, “you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated Negroes.” The specter of a mass influx of freedmen into New York’s job market angered and frightened immigrant workers. The fear compounded a widespread belief in the Irish community that, as Maria Lydig Daly put it, “the abolitionists hate both Irish and Catholic and want to kill them off.”
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Second, the Conscription Act contained a clause that gave a new and bitter meaning to the motto “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight”: an exemption for any man who paid a $300 fee that would be used to hire a volunteer substitute. In a city where many laborers earned about $1 a day, this was class legislation with a vengeance, and, indeed, propertied men like J. Pierpont Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., and George Templeton Strong paid the fee and stayed clear of the battlefield. Over the spring and summer of 1863,
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
warned that the draft law “converts the Republic into one grand military dictatorship,” while John McMaster’s vehement
Freeman’s Journal
blasted that “deluded and almost delirious fanatic,” Lincoln. Another Democratic paper ran a parody of a popular Union Army recruiting song:

Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to the decree;
We are the poor who have no wealth to purchase liberty.
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For thousands of working-class New Yorkers alienated from the war, the government’s determination to enforce the draft was an intolerable challenge, one that momentarily focused their anger on the federal draft offices established in neighborhoods throughout the city.

In the morning hours on Monday, as crowds of machinists, iron-workers, longshoremen, and others listened to impromptu speakers in an empty lot above Fifty-Ninth Street just east of the new Central Park, they remained peaceful. But at 10 AM, when the drawing of names from a rotating drum—the “wheel of misfortune,” the
Daily News
called it—commenced in the Ninth District draft office at Third Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street, the situation deteriorated. The throng of hundreds pressing around the office’s door grew angrier and more boisterous until, finally, members of the Black Joke Engine Company, volunteer firemen with strong ties to local Democratic politicians, hurled paving stones through the windows. Shouting “Down with the rich men!” the crowd poured into the office, demolishing it and clubbing several draft officers. Armed with stones and sticks, the crowd beat back a company of fifty soldiers of the army’s Invalid Corps who appeared on the scene. The draft office was soon consumed in flames.
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A block away, at Lexington Avenue and Forty-Fifth Street, George Templeton Strong watched as several hundred “of the lowest Irish day laborers” attacked two row houses because of a rumor that a draft officer lived there. After the mob (including “stalwart young vixens and withered old hags”) shattered the windows with stones and forced several women and children to flee, “men and small boys appeared at rear windows and began smashing the sashes . . . and dropped chairs and mirrors into the back yard. . . . Loafers were seen marching off with portable articles of furniture.” As smoke billowed out of the buildings, Strong turned away. “I could endure the disgraceful, sickening sight no longer, and what could I
do
?” The New York Draft Riot, the bloodiest mob action in American history, was beginning.
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By Monday afternoon, the pent up fury of Manhattan’s white immigrant working class was exploding throughout the city. On Third Avenue alone, a crowd estimated at fifty thousand surged back and forth. Although many were spectators like Strong, a hard core of rioters numbering in the thousands ranged through the city. Breaking into stores, the mob armed itself with “revolvers, old muskets, stones, clubs, [and] barrel-staves,” as well as with alcohol from saloons and liquor shops. Rioters and policemen battled for possession of a gun factory at Twenty-First Street and Second Avenue, partly owned by Republican Mayor George Opdyke. By night, the building was a charred ruin littered with thirteen corpses. Another draft office at Broadway and Twenty-Ninth Street went up in flames. The many New Yorkers who frantically boarded ferryboats to escape, and especially the African Americans who sought refuge on the city’s outskirts or tried to hide in Central Park, were well advised to take flight. Monday proved to be only the beginning of a rampage that continued for four days and nights.
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Although luck largely determined who escaped the mob and who fell victim to it, the rioters chose a predictable range of targets. The households of wealthier families who could be identified as Republicans or emancipationists were attacked, looted, and sometimes burned to the ground. On Tuesday, for example, some two hundred rioters converged on the West Twenty-Ninth Street townhouse of white abolitionist James Gibbons. Through the shutters of her aunt’s house two doors down, Gibbons’s daughter Lucy watched as men with pickaxes shattered the parlor windows of her home. She saw “sheets of music . . . flying in every direction” and observed “women, laden with spoils . . . leaning against the courtyard railing; one had a pot and was fanning herself with the lid.” The Gibbons home barely escaped conflagration; neighbors, fearing for their own townhouses, climbed to the roof and lowered buckets of water into the house to douse the flames ignited by the looters.
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Isolated members of the Metropolitan Police Force—controlled by the Republican state legislature in Albany, rather than by local Democrats—also came in for rough treatment. Near the Ninth District draft office on Monday, a crowd recognized police superintendent John Kennedy, known for his success in arresting Union army deserters. They beat and kicked him savagely and left him for dead (miraculously, the sixty-year-old Kennedy survived). Patrick Dolan, an eighteen-year-old blacksmith, led a group to destroy Mayor Opdyke’s Fifth Avenue mansion, but they were driven off by police. When, on West Twenty-Eighth Street, a drunken John Fitzherbert shredded the stars and stripes while shouting “Damn the flag!” and others offered “Three cheers for Jeff Davis!” they made clear their revulsion at a war they now saw as serving the rich man and the abolitionist.
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The most hated prey were black New Yorkers—men, women, and children. For four days, “Down with the bloody nigger!” and “Kill all niggers!” echoed through the streets. On Monday afternoon, a mob surrounded the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue at Forty-Third Street, a philanthropy funded by wealthy Quakers and hence a symbol of the link between the city’s white abolitionists and its black population. As members of the crowd shouted “Burn the niggers’ nest!” and split the front door with axes, superintendent William Davis led the asylum’s residents—237 black children—out the rear. With looting under way and the edifice going up in flames, an Irishman in the crowd beseeched those around him: “If there’s a man among you, with a heart within him, come and help these poor children.” Their answer was to beat him. But elsewhere in the crowd, Paddy M’Caffrey with several fellow stage drivers and volunteer firemen protected twenty children who had become separated from the main group. Davis managed to get his charges, unharmed, to the sanctuary of the Twentieth Police Precinct House at Thirty-Fourth Street off Ninth Avenue.
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