HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY’S UPPER CLASS & THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS
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T h e S o c i a l U s es o f D ra f t Ri ot s
The troubles started on July 13, 1863, when U.S. Army provost marshals trying to administer the new federal draft law held a lottery at an office at Third Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street to draw the names of men who were to be conscripted into the army. An angry crowd of five hundred people, led by a core group of Irish American firemen, attacked and destroyed the building, initiating four days of rioting by Irish immigrant and other white working-class New Yorkers (figure 4.1). Appalled by this violence, a young boatman from upstate New York exclaimed: “Last night [ July 14th] was an awful night a great many men was shot you could hear the shots just like a 4th of july [sic] in some village.”63 Irish immigrants lived in appalling poverty and endured ethnic and religious discrimination from the Protestant majority. In the six months since President Lincoln had made the abolition of slavery an official war aim by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, speeches by Fernando Wood and other Peace Democrats had stoked Irish fears that the freed slaves would compete for jobs and drive down wages. And now, with the passage of a conscription law designed to rectify the manpower shortages caused by the wartime slaughter, the federal government proposed to tear working-class men from their families and send them to the butcher’s yard, all, it seemed, to elevate African Americans above white workers. Worse yet was a provision of the conscription law permitting anyone who had been drafted to secure an exemption by paying a $300 waiver fee, a stipulation that put the burden of combat on the poor. The draft riots were carried out by desperate people who had serious grievances against the established order yet who lacked access to political and social channels for seeking redress for their grievances. Resorting to force because they had few alternatives, the rioters conducted reprisals against members of social groups and institutions whom they blamed for their suffering. Mobs assaulted sites associated with the Republican Party, such as the offices of the New York Tribune and the home of its editor, Horace Greeley, and symbols of police and military authority, like police stations and draft offices. Yet their prime targets were African Americans. A large
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crowd attacked the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue, clubbing to death a nine-year-old girl who was discovered hiding under a bed. African American men were beaten and sometimes killed and mutilated. The bodies of African American men were hung from trees and lampposts. Their homes were destroyed.64 By the time that five regiments dispatched from the Gettysburg battlefield could restore calm, at least 105 people died and another 2,000 were injured.65
Figure 4.1 Illustrations of the New York City draft riots of July 1863 stressing the viciousness and inhumanity of the predominantly working-class and immigrant rioters, from Benjamin La Bree’s The Pictorial Battles of the Civil War (1885). (Author’s collection.)
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A crucial determinant of the upper- and middle-class experiences of the draft riots was the spatial structure of midcentury New York. The recent introduction of mass transit had begun to foster a new social geography that featured the separation of home and work; the emergence of specialized locations for manufacturing, retailing, and finance; and the division of residential areas on the basis of wealth, race, and ethnicity. Yet this transformation was in its infancy, and the New York City of 1863 remained fairly compact and spatially undifferentiated. In Chapter 3 we saw that Lafayette Place–Bond Street bordered a working-class neighborhood that lay across the Bowery from it. This kind of propinquity has vanished now that American metropolises cover vast areas and physical distance reinforces social barriers. When a riot erupts in a big city today, its upper- and middle-class inhabitants generally encounter it at a physical and emotional remove and their lives are almost never at risk. By contrast, the mid-nineteenth-century spatial pattern meant that the draft riots occurred in close proximity: terrible things happened down the street or next door. The mobs had specific targets and the violence was not indiscriminate. In fact, rioters did not attack upper-class people or buildings in Lafayette Place–Bond Street (although they did enter it), and the damage done to other upper- and middle-class areas was isolated and patchy. Provided they were wearing civilian clothes rather than military or police uniforms, upper-class New Yorkers were not objects of violence. Accounts of the riots abound with incidents in which upper- or middleclass people momentarily found themselves in great danger yet managed to get away unscathed. The narrators of these stories usually attributed their narrow escapes to some combination of their own manly character, good luck, or the providential arrival of soldiers or police, but a better explanation is that the rioters did not choose to brutalize members of the middle and upper classes. For there is no question that upper-class New Yorkers could have been readily detected in light of their distinctive clothing, deportment, and pronunciation and lack of calloused hands and other bodily signs of physical labor. Crowds that murdered African Americans let upper- and middle-class whites alone, so long as they could not be linked with abolitionism or the Republican Party and were not in uniform.
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But even though upper-class New Yorkers were not targets, the urban social geography made it impossible for them to segregate themselves from the rioters, and many of them had terrifying experiences. On the first day of the riots, James Parton, the biographer of Andrew Jackson, and his wife, Sara, were walking on Fourteenth Street when they saw “streaming down Fifth Avenue a crowd of ill-dressed and ill-favored men and boys, each carrying a long stick or piece of board and one or two of them a rusty musket.”66 The rioters were pursuing an African American man who was on horseback and ignored the Partons and the other bystanders. A column of policemen dispersed this crowd before it did any damage. Nevertheless, several dozen rioters had breached the premier upper-class neighborhood. John Torrey, a botanist and chemist working for the U.S. Assay Office on Wall Street, had a close call returning to his home on the campus of Columbia College, which was then located at Madison Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street in what is now Midtown. “I found the whole road way & sidewalks filled with rough fellows (& some equally rough women) who were tearing up rails, cutting down telegraph poles, & setting fire to buildings,” Torrey said. “I walked quietly along through the midst of them, without being molested.”67 Upper- and middle-class New Yorkers who left accounts of their experiences stressed the outrages against African Americans as well as the assaults on soldiers and policemen. Similarly, merchants and manufacturers accentuated their dread that mobs would plunder their places of business. William Steinway, a partner in the Steinway & Sons piano-making company, agonized about the safety of his factory, on what is now Park Avenue between Fifty-Second and Fifty-Third Streets. After staying in the shop almost around the clock to protect it, Steinway wrote in his diary that, “I have been unable to eat for the last 3 days except bread & drinking water for excitement.”68 But the incidents that feature most prominently in these portrayals involved acts of violence against private homes.69 Torrey watched “an attack upon one of a row of new houses in our street” near the Columbia campus and found that “the mob had been in the College Grounds, & came to our house—wishing to know if a republican lived there, &
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what the College building was used for.”70 He heard a rumor that rioters “were going to burn Pres[ident Charles] King’s house, as he was rich and a decided republican.”71 No harm came to either Torrey’s or King’s house, but others were less fortunate. John Ward Jr. told the story of a doctor who resided at Broadway and Twenty-Ninth Street: The rioters burnt & gutted the next house & a whole row of buildings
beyond, hung two negroes, etc. When it broke out his mother was alone in the house. He came home & saved his house by threatening
the rioters if they dared come in. He was unarmed. The next day he had friends to assist him. The firemen stole a few shirts etc. & that was all he lost. 72
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the women’s rights and abolitionist leader, was living with her family off Fifth Avenue on West Forty-Fifth Street, close to where several thousand men, women, and children sacked the Colored Orphan Asylum. As the asylum burned, a group of rioters charged down the Stantons’ street, and, yelling “Here’s one of those three-hundred-dollar fellows,” seized her son Neil, who had been standing in front of their house.73 Stanton expected her son to be killed, but Neil showed presence of mind by offering to stand his captors to a round of drinks in a saloon, and, after he treated them and joined them in giving three cheers for Jefferson Davis, they released him. Meanwhile, Stanton believed that, after murdering Neil, the rioters would return, break down her front door, and annihilate everyone inside. She sent her children and the servants to the top floor with instructions to run onto the roof and escape to a neighboring house in the event of an attack, but just then a squad of policemen and two militia companies turned onto their street, averting this imagined disaster. Lucy Gibbons Morse, an accomplished novelist, had often discussed the riots in talks to women’s groups and in letters to friends, but she did not organize her memories into a formal reminiscence until 1927. In it Morse wrote that she and her family were living on West Twenty-Ninth Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, in a row of
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houses where their neighbors included the Sinclair family, who were related to Horace Greeley. As Quakers, the Gibbonses had heralded the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation by illuminating their house and hanging red, white, and blue bunting from it. Evidently this celebration had been noticed. On July 14, a servant who had been dispatched to buy a loaf of bread from a bakery around the corner returned in tears, and reported that while she was in the shop a man had come in and announced, “We are going to burn Gibbonses and Sinclair’s tonight.”74 It rained that night and nothing happened. As their cook swept their walk the next morning, however, a passerby warned her, “We are coming tonight.”75 Morse recalls that her older sister Julia immediately sent the cook away with her trunk because she and the rioters were Irish and the Gibbonses did not feel responsible for her. That seems like a cruel stroke, being cast out in the midst of an insurrection, but Morse supplied a significantly different account in a private letter that she wrote the day after the riots ended. Unlike her 1927 remembrance, this contemporaneous version of events makes no reference to the servants’ volunteering information or sympathizing with their predicament. Instead, it has the Gibbonses overhearing “a faint rumor among the servant girls” that their and the Sinclairs’ houses were to be fired.76 And the next day, when the family sought to move its valuables to the nearby home of their uncle and aunt, Morse’s July 1863 letter has an Irish servant named Bridget insisting on continuing with her washing and refusing to help them pack. Morse resorted to anti-Irish stereotypes in attributing Bridget’s conduct to her stolidity and lack of common sense (“it was impossible to alarm her”), unable to bring herself to openly question Bridget’s trustworthiness. Needless to say, one wonders about the loyalties of the servants and whether Bridget knew exactly what she was doing.77 In any case, by the time that she composed her reminiscence sixty-four years later, Morse had squelched her doubts and could remember her household as having been a place of mutual affection and their servants as having been faithful. Lucy and Julia did the packing themselves and transferred many of their belongings to the home of their relatives. Then, under their father’s
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tutelage, they practiced firing pistols in their backyard. That night, as the two sisters watched from a neighbor’s dwelling, two men on horseback galloped down the sidewalk and shouted: “Greeley, Greeley,” attracting a crowd of several hundred people who began roaring, “Greeley! Gibbons, Greeley, Gibbons, Gibbons.”78 After wrecking the Sinclair place, the rioters invaded and ransacked the Gibbons’s house. Foolishly or courageously, her father returned to look for his pistol, pushing through the rioters who had piled into the house. Nobody recognized him and he safely rejoined his daughters.79 In putting so much weight on the destruction of private houses, these narrators established the disregard of the rioters for human decency as well as the peril that existed to respectable New Yorkers, even to innocents like women and children who were in their own homes. In these depictions, the lower classes amounted to a missile hurled at the tender heart of upper- and middle-class New York. That women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Gibbons Morse should have identified this threat to home and family gave this version of events all the more credence given nineteenth-century assumptions that females were inherently refined, nurturing, and compassionate. The guardians of domesticity had sounded the alarm.80 Some observers concluded that the draft riots must be the work of Confederate agents attempting to sow chaos on the home front by turning the city against the federal government.81 “It was not simply a riot,” the Tribune fulminated, “but the commencement of a revolution, organized by the sympathizers in the North with the Southern Rebellion.”82 For fear that the Confederates might strike again, the Union League Club stockpiled weapons and hung heavy wooden shutters on its ground-floor windows to deflect bullets.83 Yet even commentators who suspected a Southern link pointed to the wickedness of workingmen who, with no discernible provocation, had metamorphosed into a mob hell-bent on destruction. That understanding raised disturbing questions about political legitimacy and social stratification in the American republic, a subject that the editors of Harper’s Weekly broached by asking whether the escalating
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revulsion that respectable citizens felt against the lower classes could be reconciled with the democratic principles of majority rule and egalitarianism. Harper’s insisted that wretches who beat helpless African Americans to death and ravaged defenseless homes should not be considered “the people” and that the riots must not be regarded as a “popular uprising” or a “movement of the people.”84 Phraseology that presupposed a gulf between government and citizenry might explain mob violence in Europe but had no place in the one nation that exemplified democracy. In the United States, according to the magazine, it was the great mass of the population that constituted the people, including the soldiers and the policemen who enforced the laws and the citizens who obeyed them.85 For Harper’s, the draft riots amounted not to a clash between the government and the people or between democracy and aristocracy but rather one between “barbarism and civilization” that pitted the unruly, vicious, and slothful against the law abiding, orderly, and industrious.86 The tyranny of the low and ignorant over the rich and the respectable obliged the educated classes to lead. That was the same tattoo that the Union League Club had been beating out, but the draft riots gave it special force. Gone was the old notion that the lower classes possessed the self-discipline and moral fiber to accept elite direction and enter the body politic. Now, upper-class leaders must impose order.87 Some eminent New Yorkers who conceded that abysmal housing and health conditions in neighborhoods like Five Points had contributed to the uprising sought to improve the lives of the poor by passing reforms like the municipal tenement laws of 1867 and 1879. But most leaders reacted by damning the rioters and the working-class and immigrant communities from which they had sprung, as Harper’s Weekly did in characterizing the rioters as “fierce and cruel” beasts who had a “fiendish spirit” and “mad passions.”88 These responses soon crystallized into a stable and coherent representation that many upper- and middleclass and “decent” working-class Americans would come to accept as the truth. Moving beyond the initial belief that the disturbances had been an isolated phenomenon, this new construct portrayed them as a
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spectacular manifestation of a general peril that the lower classes posed in every big American city. In 1863, a Protestant minister named B. Peters wrote a pamphlet that told respectable New Yorkers to be grateful that the riots “have given us a glimpse of the moral condition of a formidable proportion of the population of our larger cities.”89 “Perhaps,” Peters said, “most of us have had some idea of the moral corruption that lay festering beneath the wealth and poverty of our great cities, but who among us dreamt of such a gross condition of depravity, barbarism, and sin?”90 Once demagoguery from “the worst political influences” inflamed the “aboriginal savages,” Peters wrote, the “vilest, wickedest depravity” accumulated like floodwater behind a dam and then “burst upon us through an outbreak against law and order, in the short space of twenty-four hours.”91 Other commentators reached similar conclusions.92 This point of view was best articulated by William Osborn Stoddard, a prolific journalist who in 1887 published The Volcano Under the City, which would become the standard nineteenth-century account of the draft riots. Influenced by the resurgence of nativism and the rise of industrial violence in the 1880s, Stoddard played down the rumors that Confederate sympathizers had triggered the unrest, stressing instead the fiendishness of the “whooping, yelling, blaspheming, howling, demoniac” crowds that had poured from immigrant neighborhoods.93 As the title of his book indicates, Stoddard supposed that immigrant laborers constituted a menace that lay seething below the surface of every major American city, liable to explode at any moment and threaten the educated classes. Stoddard counseled that mob outbursts could not be prevented. Periodic eruptions were inevitable, and if respectable citizens were to survive them, their political leaders must control the lower orders. As he put it, “men now or hereafter intrusted with the guardianship of the public peace” must remain vigilant.94 The lessons of the draft riots had now fused seamlessly with the plea of the Union League Club for elites to shoulder their civic responsibilities and govern rather than leave it in the hands of Tammany politicians.