Capturing Manhattan’s Bloodiest Street War

The New York City draft riots of July 1863 were American history’s most powerful working-class uprising, yet they have been neglected by historians. Now, Barnet Schecter, whose “The Battle for New York” is the definitive history of the city during the Revolution, has captured Manhattan’s bloodiest street war (Walker & Company, 320 pages, $28).When the Confederacy invaded the North in June 1863, nearly every soldier in New York was sent to Gettysburg. Only 2,500 soldiers, sailors, and marines and 2,300 police remained to keep order in an angry city.The newly instituted draft was wildly unpopular. Exemptions were available only to those who could pay $300 – then the average workingman’s annual income. Many white workers also resented the war itself, for fear of job competition from freed slaves. Mr. Schecter notes that demagogues, such as former Mayor Fernando Wood, roused working class audiences with charges that Lincoln was sending whites to die so blacks could take their jobs.On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the first 1,236 draftees were selected at the draft offices on Third Avenue at 46th Street. More names would be drawn on Monday, July 13. Around 6 a.m. on that day, knots of men and women began moving uptown from Five Points and the Bowery. By 8 a.m. around 15,000 marchers had gathered near Central Park, where speakers whipped them into a mob. Then they marched on the draft offices, jamming Third Avenue from curb to curb for a dozen blocks, and torched them. The mobs attacked a state armory to seize weapons, assaulted police headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street, and invaded the Colored Orphans Asylum at Fifth Avenue and Third Street. By late afternoon, some 70,000 rioters were rampaging throughout Lower Manhattan.Around 8 p.m., mobs attacked the newspapers near City Hall. Since the Times had Gatling guns in its windows, rioters attacked the Tribune instead. Police from the 1st Precinct and City Hall detail clubbed the rioters from the Tribune Building and, with reinforcements from Brooklyn, swept the mob out of City Hall Park by storm. (Nevertheless, the Tribune’s managing editor Sidney Gay pulled together a skeleton staff and published his next edition on time.)But Tuesday, July 14, was no better. Rioters targeted the city’s elite, trashing Fifth Avenue mansions. And they savagely assaulted any blacks found on the street: William Jones, a black cartman, was carrying home a loaf of bread when he was seized by a mob, beaten unconscious, hung, and then set afire. The mob refused to give up his body until 100 policemen were sent to cut him down.Radical abolitionists vehemently denounced the riots as treason. With the relish often found among those who will not have to do the dirty work, the New York Times demanded “an immediate and terrible” display of federal power. Reactionary fanatics like diarist George Templeton Strong called for making “war … on the Irish scum.”To preempt a federal proclamation of martial law, Governor Horatio Seymour declared under state law that the city was in “a state of insurrection.” He also pledged that poor men’s $300 draft exemptions would be paid, and the city’s Board of Aldermen immediately voted the money to do so. Seymour had grasped that many rioters were mere protesters. Once they believed the draft ended, they went home.Wednesday, July 15, saw the riots spread to Brooklyn: A mob burned two grain elevators at the Atlantic Docks as blacks were beaten and killed north and east of Fulton Street. But federal troops began arriving late that night. Six regiments were in action by early Thursday, breaking up mobs with artillery fire and cavalry charges, with skirmishers fighting room to room in the tenements to kill the last holdouts. The riots were quelled that night. (Incidentally, Mr. Schecter notes that massive draft resistance in the Midwest and similar, far less publicized, draft riots in Staten Island, Long Island, Westchester, Jersey City, and Newark.)President Lincoln ignored the Times’s demands for federal occupation of the city, the proclamation of martial law, and the purge of local “semi-loyal” officials. Instead, Lincoln chose former U.S. Senator John Adams Dix, a pro-Union Democrat, to command federal forces in New York. Dix maintained order through diplomacy rather than the brute force so longed for by the abolitionists.Of 70,000 rioters, 443 were arrested. Of those, 221 were released without charge; 10 were discharged for insufficient evidence; 74 were indicted but never tried; and 67 were convicted, most pleading to a lesser charge and only a few receiving serious jail time. Today, such a record might have led to District Attorney Oakey Hall’s removal from office. Instead, Hall became mayor. Mr. Schecter argues that this outcome foreshadowed the compromises, made at the expense of the freed slaves’ civil rights, that ended Reconstruction in 1877 and have since driven the American response to the tensions of race and class.The riots seem to have been nearly spontaneous, rising from hundreds of conversations among angry workingmen, and their momentary success the result of “circumstance (rather) than explicit and coordinated design.” Mr. Schecter notes that the strongest argument against the conspiracy theories rampant at the time of the riots is the Confederate secret service’s repeated failures to foment another riot during the remaining two years of the war: “the explosive mix of ingredients was too complex to replicate at will.”Mr. Schecter places the riots in context as “a defining event of the Reconstruction Era.” He successfully parallels the violence of the rioters – who resisted integrating blacks into the working class for fear of competition and lower wages – with that of Southern nightriders – who resisted the Radical Republican efforts at social revolution in the post-Civil War South. Yet Mr. Schecter also captures the concerns of the impoverished white working class, who feared further degradation through lower wages stemming from cheap black labor.Mr. Schecter’s crisp, flashing prose captures the thrill and horror of the riots, the politicians’ obsessive intrigues for power and wealth, and the numerous fascinating men and women of all classes, races, and occupations swept up in this “most peculiar battle of the Civil War.”Mr. Bryk last wrote in these pages on Chicago’s First Ward.

Capturing Manhattan’s Bloodiest Street War

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