CHAPTER XXIV.
THE DRAFT RIOTS.
ATTITUDE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY—VALLANDIGHAM BANISHED—SPEECH OF EX-PRESIDENT PIERCE—SPEECH OF HORATIO SEYMOUR—LAW OF SUBSTITUTES PERSISTENTLY MISINTERPRETED—THE DRAFT IN NEW YORK—THE RIOTS—THE AUTUMN ELECTIONS.
he second attempt at invasion by Lee had ended at Gettysburg even more disastrously than the first, and he returned to Virginia at the head of hardly more than one-half of the army with which he had set out; on the next day Vicksburg fell, the Mississippi was opened, and Pemberton's entire army stacked their muskets and became prisoners. Then the war should have ended; for the question on which the appeal to arms had been made was practically decided. Four great slave States—Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri—had never really joined the Confederacy, though some of them were represented in its Congress, and the territory that it actually held was steadily diminishing. The great blockade was daily growing more effective, the largest city in the South had been held by National troops for fifteen months, and the Federal authority was maintained somewhere in every State, with the sole exception of Alabama. The delusion that Southern soldiers would make a better army, man for man, than Northern, had long since been dispelled. The nation had suffered from incompetent commanders; but time and experience had weeded them out, and the really able ones were now coming to the front. The taboo had been removed from the black man, and he was rapidly putting on the blue uniform to fight for the enfranchisement of his race. Lincoln with his proclamation, and Meade and Grant with their victories, had destroyed the last chance of foreign intervention. In the military situation there was nothing to justify any further hope for the Confederacy, or any more destruction of life in the vain endeavor to disrupt the Union. If there was any justification for a continuance of the struggle on the part of the insurgents, it was to be found only in a single circumstance—the attitude of the Democratic party in the Northern States; but it must be confessed that this was such as to give considerable color to their expectation of ultimate success.
The habitual feeling of antagonism to the opposite party, from which few men in a land of popular politics are ever wholly free, was reinforced by a sincere belief on the part of many that the Government, in determining to crush the rebellion, had undertaken a larger task than it could ever accomplish. This belief was born of an ignorance that it was impossible to argue with, because it supposed itself to be enlightened and fortified by great historical facts. Both conscious and unconscious demagogues picked out little shreds of history and formulated phrases and catch-words, which village newspapers and village statesmen confidently repeated as unanswerable arguments from the experience of nations. Thus Pitt's exclamation during the war of American independence, "You cannot conquer America!" was triumphantly quoted thousands of times, as an argument for the impossibility of conquering the South. Assertions were freely made that the despotism of the Administration (in trying to save the National armies from useless slaughter, by arresting spies and traitors at the North) exceeded anything ever done by Cæsar or the Russian Czar. The word "Bastile" was given out, without much explanation, and was echoed all along the line. The war Governors of the free States, and especially the provisional military Governors in Tennessee and Louisiana, were called Lincoln's satraps; and "satraps," with divers pronunciations, became a popular word. The fathers of the Republic were all mentioned with sorrowful reverence, and it was declared that the Constitution they had framed was destroyed—not by the Secessionists, but by Mr. Lincoln and his advisers. Somebody invented a story that Secretary Seward had said he had only to reach forth his hand and ring a bell, and any man in the country whom he might designate would at once be seized and thrown into prison; whereupon "the tinkle of Seward's little bell" became a frequent head-line in the Democratic journals. The army before Vicksburg was pointed at in derision, as besieging a place that could never be taken.
It did not occur to any of these orators and journalists to explain the difference between an ocean three thousand miles wide, and the Rappahannock River; or the difference between an absolute monarch born to the purple, and a president elected by a free vote of the people; or even the difference between a state of peace and a state of war. None of them told their hearers that, only eight years before, the city of Sebastopol had withstood the combined armies of England and France for almost a year, while the city of Vicksburg, when Grant besieged it, fell on the forty-seventh day. Nor did any of them ever appear to consider what the probable result would be if the entire Democratic party in Northern States should give the Administration as hearty support as it received from its own.
It is easy to see the fallacy of all those arguments now, and the unwisdom of the policy from which they sprang; but they were a power in the land at that time, and wrought unmeasured mischief. The most conspicuous opponent of the Government in the West was Clement L. Vallandigham, of Ohio, whose position will be understood most readily from a few of his public utterances. He wrote, in May, 1861: "The audacious usurpation of President Lincoln, for which he deserves impeachment, in daring, against the very letter of the Constitution, and without the shadow of law, to raise and support armies, and to provide and maintain a navy, for three years, by mere executive proclamation, I will not vote to sustain or ratify—never." Speaking in his place in the House of Representatives in January, 1863, he said: "I have denounced, from the beginning, the usurpations and infractions, one and all, of law and Constitution, by the President and those under him; their repeated and persistent arbitrary arrests, the suspension of habeas corpus, the violation of freedom of the mails, of the private house, of the press and of speech, and all the other multiplied wrongs and outrages upon public liberty and private right which have made this country one of the worst despotisms on the earth for the past twenty months. To the record and to time I appeal for my justification." In proposing conciliation and compromise as a substitute for the war, he said, borrowing the language of the Indiana Democratic platform, "In considering terms of settlement, we will look only to the welfare, peace, and safety of the white race, without reference to the effect that settlement may have upon the condition of the African." For these and similar utterances, especially in regard to a military order that forbade the carrying of firearms and other means of disturbing the peace, and for the effect they were having upon his followers, Mr. Vallandigham was arrested in May, 1863, by the military authorities in Ohio, tried by court-martial, and sentenced to imprisonment during the war. The President commuted the sentence to banishment beyond the lines, and the prisoner was taken south through Kentucky and Tennessee, and sent into Confederate territory under a flag of truce. This of course placed him in the light of a martyr, and a few months later it made him the Democratic candidate for Governor of Ohio.
In the East, ex-President Pierce, of New Hampshire, loomed up as a leader of the opposition. On January 6, 1860, he had written to Jefferson Davis (who had been Secretary of War in his cabinet) a letter in which he said: "Without discussing the question of right—of abstract power to secede—I have never believed that actual disruption of the Union can occur without blood; and if through the madness of Northern abolitionists that dire calamity must come, the fighting will not be along Mason and Dixon's line merely. It will be within our own borders, and in our own streets, between the two classes of citizens to whom I have referred. Those who defy law and scout constitutional obligations will, if we ever reach the arbitrament of arms, find occupation enough at home." In an elaborate Fourth-of-July oration at Concord in 1863, he said: "No American citizen was then [before the war] subject to be driven into exile for opinion's sake, or arbitrarily arrested and incarcerated in military bastiles—even as he may now be—not for acts or words of imputed treason, but if he do but mourn in silent sorrow over the desolation of his country. Do we not all know that the cause of our calamities is the vicious intermeddling of too many of the citizens of the Northern States with the constitutional rights of the Southern States, coöperating with the discontents of the people of those States? We have seen, in the experience of the last two years, how futile are all our efforts to maintain the Union by force of arms; but, even had war been carried on by us successfully, the ruinous result would exhibit its utter impracticability for the attainment of the desired end. With or without arms, with or without leaders, we will at least, in the effort to defend our rights as a free people, build up a great mausoleum of hearts, to which men who yearn for liberty will in after years, with bowed heads and reverently, resort, as Christian pilgrims to the sacred shrines of the Holy Land." This was long referred to, by those who heard it, as "the mausoleum-of-hearts speech."
In the great State of New York the Democratic leader was Horatio Seymour, who had been elected Governor in the period of depression that followed the military defeats of 1862. While Pierce was speaking in Concord, Seymour was delivering in New York a carefully written address, in which—like Pierce and Vallandigham—he complained, not of the secessionists for making war at the South, but of the Administration for curtailing the liberty of the Government's enemies at the North. He said: "When I accepted the invitation to speak at this meeting, we were promised the downfall of Vicksburg [the telegraph brought news of it while he was speaking], the opening of the Mississippi, the probable capture of the Confederate capital, and the exhaustion of the rebellion. When the clouds of war overhung our country, we implored those in authority to compromise that difficulty; for we had been told by that great orator and statesman, Burke, that there never yet was a revolution that might not have been prevented by a compromise opportunely and graciously made. Until we have a united North, we can have no successful war; until we have a united, harmonious North, we can have no beneficent peace. Remember this, that the bloody and treasonable and revolutionary doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government."
The practical effect of all these protests, in the name of liberty, against arrests of spies and traitors, and suspension of the habeas corpus, was to assist the slave-holders in their attempt to make liberty forever impossible for the black race, in pursuance of which they were willing to destroy the liberties of the white race and sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives, most of which were valuable to their country and to mankind, being lives of men who earned a living by the sweat of their own faces. All the abridgment of the liberties of Northern citizens, in time of war, by President Lincoln's suspension of the writ, and by arbitrary arrests, was not a tithe of what those same citizens had suffered in time of peace from the existence of slavery under the Constitution. Yet neither President Pierce, nor Chief Justice Taney, nor Horatio Seymour, nor Mr. Vallandigham, had ever uttered one word of protest against the denial of free speech in criticism of that institution, or against the systematic rifling of mails at the South, or against the refusal to permit American citizens to sojourn in the slave States unless they believed in the divine right of slavery.
It was no wonder that such utterances as those quoted above, by the leaders of a party, at such a time, should be translated by its baser followers into reasons for riot, arson, and butchery. Another exciting cause was found in the persistent misinterpretation of what was meant to be a beneficent provision of the conscription law. Drafts had been ordered in several of the States to fill up quotas that were not forthcoming under the volunteer system. The law provided that a man whose name was drawn, if he did not wish to go into the service himself, might either procure a substitute or pay three hundred dollars to the Government and be released. In the North, where there were no slaves to do the necessary work at home, it was absolutely essential to have some system of substitution; and the three-hundred-dollar clause was introduced, not because the Government wanted money more than it wanted men, but to favor the poor by keeping down the price of substitutes, for it was evident that that price could never rise above the sum necessary for a release. Yet this very clause was attacked by the journals that assumed to champion the cause of the poor, as being a discrimination in favor of the rich! Mr. Vallandigham said in a speech at Dayton: "The three-hundred-dollar provision is a most unjust discrimination against the poor. The Administration says to every man between twenty and forty-five, 'Three hundred dollars or your life.'" When the clause had been repealed, in consequence of the ignorant clamor raised by this persistent misrepresentation, the price of substitutes rapidly went beyond a thousand dollars.
A new levy of three hundred thousand men was called for in April, 1863, with the alternative of a draft if the quotas were not filled by volunteering. The quota of the city of New York was not filled, and a draft was begun there on Saturday, the 11th of July. There had been premonitions of trouble when it was attempted to take the names and addresses of those subject to call, and in the tenement-house districts some of the marshals had narrowly escaped with their lives. On the morning when the draft was to begin, several of the most widely read Democratic journals contained editorials that appeared to be written for the very purpose of inciting a riot. They asserted that any draft at all was unconstitutional and despotic, and that in this case the quota demanded from the city was excessive, and denounced the war as a "mere abolition crusade." It is doubtful if there was any well-formed conspiracy, including any large number of persons, to get up a riot; but the excited state of the public mind, especially among the laboring population, inflammatory handbills displayed in the grogshops, the presence of the dangerous classes, whose best opportunity for plunder was in time of riot, and the absence of the militia that had been called away to meet the invasion of Pennsylvania, all favored an outbreak. It was unfortunate that the draft was begun on Saturday, and the Sunday papers published long lists of names that were drawn—an instance of the occasional mischievous results of journalistic enterprise. Those interested had all Sunday to talk it over in their accustomed meeting-places, and discuss wild schemes of relief or retaliation; and the insurrection that followed was more truly a popular uprising than the rebellion that it assisted and encouraged.
When the draft was resumed on Monday, the serious work began. One provost-marshal's office was at the corner of Third Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. It was guarded by sixty policemen, and the wheel was set in motion at ten o'clock. The building was surrounded by a dense, angry crowd, who were freely cursing the draft, the police, the National Government, and "the nigger." The drawing had been in progress but a few minutes when there was a shout of "Stop the cars!" and at once the cars were stopped, the horses released, the conductors and passengers driven out, and a tumult created. Then a great human wave was set in motion, which bore down everything before it and rolled into the marshal's office, driving out at the back windows the officials and the policemen, whose clubs, though plied rapidly and knocking down a rioter at every blow, could not dispose of them as fast as they came on. The mob destroyed everything in the office, and then set the building on fire. The firemen came promptly, but were not permitted to throw any water upon the flames. At this moment Superintendent John A. Kennedy, of the police, approaching incautiously and unarmed, was recognized and set upon by the crowd, who gave him half a hundred blows with clubs and stones, and finally threw him face downward into a mud-puddle, with the intention of drowning him. When rescued, he was bruised beyond recognition, and was lifted into a wagon and carried to the police headquarters. The command of the force now devolved upon Commissioner Thomas C. Acton and Inspector Daniel Carpenter, whose management during three fearful days was worthy of the highest praise.
Another marshal's office, where the draft was in progress, was at Broadway and Twenty-ninth Street, and here the mob burned the whole block of stores on Broadway between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Streets. At Third Avenue and Forty-fourth Street there was a battle between a small force of police and a mob, in which the police were defeated, many of them being badly wounded by stones and pistol-shots. Some of them who were knocked down were almost instantly robbed of their clothing. Officer Bennett fell into the hands of the crowd, and was beaten so savagely that no appearance of life was left in him, when he was carried away to the dead-house at St. Luke's Hospital. Here came his wife, who discovered that his heart was still beating; means of restoration were used promptly, and after three days of unconsciousness and a long illness he recovered. Another officer was stabbed twice by a woman in the crowd; and another, disabled by a blow from an iron bar, was saved by a German woman, who hid him between two mattresses when the pursuing mob was searching her house for him. In the afternoon a small police force held possession of a gun factory in Second Avenue for four hours, and was then compelled to retire before the persistent attacks of the rioters, who hurled stones through the windows and beat in the doors.
Toward evening a riotous procession passed down Broadway, with drums, banners, muskets, pistols, pitchforks, clubs, and boards inscribed "No Draft!" Inspector Carpenter, at the head of two hundred policemen, marched up to meet it. His orders were, "Take no prisoners, but strike quick and hard." The mob was met at the corner of Amity (or West Third) Street. The police charged at once in a compact body, Carpenter knocking down the foremost rioter with a blow that cracked his skull, and in a few minutes the mob scattered and fled, leaving Broadway strewn with their wounded and dying. From this time, the police were victorious in every encounter.
During the next two days there was almost constant rioting, mobs appearing at various points, both up-town and down-town. The rioters set upon every negro that appeared—whether man, woman, or child—and succeeded in murdering eleven of them. One they deliberately hanged to a tree in Thirty-second Street, his only offence being the color of his skin. At another place, seeing three negroes on a roof, they set fire to the house. The victims hung at the edge of the roof a long time, but were obliged to drop before the police could procure ladders. This phase of the outbreak found its worst expression in the sacking and burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum, at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street. The two hundred helpless children were with great difficulty taken away by the rear doors while the mob were battering at the front. The excitement of the rioters was not so great as to prevent them from coolly robbing the building of everything valuable that could be removed before they set it on fire. Bed-clothing, furniture, and other articles were passed out and borne off (in many cases by the wives and sisters of the rioters) to add to the comfort of their own homes. Several tenement houses that were occupied by negroes were attacked by the mob with a determination to destroy, and were with difficulty protected by the police.
|
RECRUITING OFFICE IN NEW YORK CITY HALL PARK. (From an engraving published in "Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly," during the war.) |
The office of the Tribune was especially obnoxious to the rioters, because that paper was foremost in support of the Administration and the war. Crowds approached it, singing
"We'll hang old Greeley on a sour-apple-tree,"
and at one time its counting-room was entered by the mob and a fire was kindled, but the police drove them out and extinguished the flames. The printers were then supplied with a quantity of muskets and bomb-shells, and long board troughs were run out at the windows, so that in case of an attack a shell could be lighted and rolled out, dropping from the end of the trough into the crowd, where its explosion would produce incalculable havoc. Happily the ominous troughs proved a sufficient warning.
A small military force was brought to the aid of the police, and whenever an outbreak was reported, a strong body was sent at once to the spot. The locust clubs, when wielded in earnest, proved a terrible weapon, descending upon the heads of rioters with blows that generally cracked the skull. A surgeon who attended twenty-one men reported that they were all wounded in the head, and all past recovery. One of the most fearful scenes was in Second Avenue, where the police and the soldiers were assailed with stones and pistol-shots from the windows and the roofs. Dividing into squads, they entered the houses, which, amid the cries and curses of the women, they searched from bottom to top. They seized their cowering assailants in the halls, in the dark bedrooms, wherever they were hiding, felled them, bayoneted them, hurled them over the balusters and through the windows, pursued them to the roof, shot them as they dodged behind chimneys, refusing all mercy, and threw the quivering corpses into the street as a warning to the mob. It was like a realization of the imaginary taking of Torquilstone.
One of the saddest incidents of the riot was the murder of Col. Henry J. O'Brien, of the Eleventh New York Volunteers, whose men had dispersed one mob with a deadly volley. An hour or two later the Colonel returned to the spot alone, when he was set upon and beaten and mangled and tortured horribly for several hours, being at last killed by some frenzied women. Page after page might be filled with such incidents. At one time Broadway was strewn with dead men from Bond Street to Union Square. A very young man, dressed in the working-clothes of a mechanic, was observed to be active and daring in leading a crowd of rioters. A blow from a club at length brought him down, and as he fell he was impaled on the picket of an iron fence, which caught him under the chin and killed him. On examination, it was found that under the greasy overalls he wore a costly and fashionable suit, and there were other indications of wealth and refinement, but the body was never identified.
Three days of this vigorous work by the police and the soldiers brought the disturbance to an end. About fifty policemen had been injured, three of whom died; and the whole number of lives destroyed by the rioters was eighteen. The exact number of rioters killed is unknown, but it was more than twelve hundred. The mobs burned about fifty buildings, destroying altogether between two million and three million dollars' worth of property. Governor Seymour incurred odium by a speech to the rioters, in which he addressed them as his friends, and promised to have the draft stopped, and by his communications to the President, in which he complained of the draft, and asked to have it suspended till the question of its constitutionality could be tested in the courts. His opponents interpreted this as a subterfuge to favor the rebellion by preventing the reinforcement of the National armies. The President answered, in substance, that he had no objection to a testing of the question, but he would not imperil the country by suspending operations till a case could be dragged through the courts.
Fourteen of the Northern States had enacted laws enabling the soldiers to vote without going home. In some of the States it was provided that commissioners should go to the camps and take the votes; in others the soldier was authorized to seal up his ballot and send it home to his next friend, who was to present it at the polls and make oath that it was the identical one sent to him. The enactment of such laws had been strenuously opposed by the Democrats, on several grounds, the most plausible of which was, that men under military discipline were not practically free to vote as they pleased. The most curious argument was to this effect: a soldier that sends home his ballot may be killed in battle before that ballot reaches its destination and is counted. Do you want dead men to decide your elections?
These were the darkest days of the war; but the riots reacted upon the party that was supposed to favor them, the people gradually learned the full significance of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and at the autumn election the State of New York, which a year before had elected Governor Seymour, gave a handsome majority in favor of the Administration. In Ohio, where the Democrats had nominated Vallandigham for Governor, and made a noisy and apparently vigorous canvass, the Republicans nominated John Brough. When the votes were counted, it was found that Mr. Brough had a majority of one hundred thousand, the largest that had ever been given for any candidate in any State where there was a contest. Politically speaking, this buried Mr. Vallandigham out of sight forever, and delivered a heavy blow at the obstructive policy of his party.
| OFFICERS OF THE FORTY-FOURTH NEW YORK INFANTRY. |
| THE ATTACK ON CHARLESTON. |