Opposite the Reservoir stood a knot of gentlemen, strangers to each other. Said one of them, a timid, clerical-looking man:
“What are we coming to? Is this to go on? Whose family and dwelling is safe?”
“How long is this to last?” asked another—who might have been a merchant.
“I will tell you how long,” replied a third, who looked like a Tammany alderman, but as respectably dressed as either of the others, and buttoning up his coat to his chin defiantly: “Just as long as you enact unjust laws.”
The rioting, Nordhoff believed, might have been ended the first day by determined military forces. While ruffians at the Orphan Asylum were crying, “Kill the little devils!” a steady attack by a small armed force would have routed them. “The rioters evidently expected such an attack, and at one time, frightened by a squabble on their outskirts between a few firemen and a gang abusing a bystander, actually took to their heels, but returned to their work with cries of derision.” The first charge was made by the police just after 4 p. m. at the La Farge Hotel, and the rioters ran like sheep, leaving about thirty dead or wounded. Nordhoff’s observation that the pillaging was done mainly by women and boys, who took two hours to carry 300 iron bedsteads from the Orphan Asylum, was borne out by a news item printed by the Post during the riots:
HOW A HOUSE IS SACKED
Having witnessed the proceedings of the rioters on several occasions ... we describe them for the benefit of our readers. On yesterday afternoon about six o’clock they visited the residence of a gentleman in Twenty-ninth Street. A few stragglers appeared on the scene, consisting mainly of women and children. Two or three men then demanded and gained admittance, while their number was largely increased on the outside. One elderly gentleman was found who had liberty to leave. Then commenced indiscriminate plunder. This was carried on mostly by old men, women and children, while the “men of muscle” stood guard. Every article was appropriated, the carriers often bending under their burden. Women and children, hatless and shoeless, marched off having in their possession the most costly of fabrics, some of them broken and unfit for use.
To this wanton destruction of private property the neighbors and the many visitors drawn to the spot were silent spectators. A word of remonstrance cost a life. Two gentlemen, we are informed, paid the penalty yesterday for expressing their righteous indignation....
An hour later, in another visit, we saw the crowd engaged in breaking the sashes and carrying off the fragments of woodwork.
Nordhoff gave high praise to the city police and the United States troops, but thought the State militia miserably ineffective, and the firemen often allies of the mob. He ascertained that the rioters’ casualties were much higher than the public believed, and estimated that 400 to 500 lives were lost. “A continuous stream of funerals flows across the East River, and graves are dug privately within the knowledge of the police here and there.”
Just how much basis there was for the Evening Post’s view that the mob was not spontaneous, but instigated by disloyalist leaders of brains, it is impossible to say. On the second day “a distinguished and sagacious Democrat,” Bryant wrote editorially, visited the office to warn him that the riots “had a firmer basis and a more fixed object than we imagined.” But it is certain that the copperhead press seemed to cheer on the mob even while it denounced it. Thus the World on Tuesday spoke of the rioters as possessed “with a burning sense of wrong toward the government,” and though it appealed to them to stop, asked: “Does any man wonder that poor men refuse to be forced into a war mismanaged almost into hopelessness, perverted almost into partisanship?” The Evening Post was particularly incensed by the Herald’s references to the riots as a “popular” outbreak, and that of the Daily News to “the people fired on by United States soldiers.” Not the people, it said; “a small band of cutthroats, pickpockets, and robbers.” It wanted the miscreants given an abundance of grape and canister without delay, and declared that an officer who had used blank cartridges ought to be shot. To this the Herald made its usual impudent kind of rejoinder. Aren’t the members of the mob people, it asked? They have arms, legs, and five senses; “their intelligence is low, but it is at least equal to that of the editors of the niggerhead organs.”
III
News of the complete victory at Vicksburg, arriving in New York at the same time that it became evident Meade was not vigorously following up his repulse of Lee at Gettysburg, brought home to the East the superiority of Grant as a commander. That superiority the Evening Post had begun to recognize as early as Feb. 14, 1862, when it had contrasted his capture of Fort Donelson, in a sea of mud, using men half trained and half supplied, with McClellan’s inaction in Virginia. “A capable, clear-headed general,” it said, who knew that where there is a will there is a way. After Corinth the paper hailed Grant (Oct. 8, 1862) as the one general “able not only to shake the tree, but to pick up the fruit.” When by a brilliantly bold campaign he invested Vicksburg, it used precisely the comparison that John Fiske used years later in his history of the Mississippi Valley in the Civil War: “The dispatches from the Southwest read like the bulletins of the young conqueror of Italy when he first awakened the world to the fact that a new and unprecedented military genius had sprung upon the stage.”
Sober history doubts whether Lincoln actually said that if he knew what whisky Grant used he would send other generals a barrel; but the Evening Post almost said it. Just after the surrender of Vicksburg it published (July 8) a defense of Grant from the charge that he drank heavily. It recalled the many evidences of his single-mindedness, alertness, and decision, and the fact that he had gained more victories and prisoners than any other commander. “If any one after this,” it concluded, “still believes that Grant is a drunkard, we advise him to persuade the Government to place none but drunkards in important commands.”
Years later the Evening Post related that while Grant lay before Vicksburg, a letter from a prominent Westerner assured the editors that the general and his staff had once gone from Springfield to Cairo in the car of the president of the Illinois Central, and that almost the whole party had got drunk, Grant worst of all. By a coincidence, while this letter was under discussion President Osborne of the Illinois Central entered the office. He characterized it as a malignant falsehood. “Grant and his staff did go down to Cairo in the President’s car,” he said; “I took them down myself, and selected that car because it had conveniences for working, eating, and sleeping on the way. We had dinner in the car, at which wine was served to such as desired it. I asked Grant what he would drink; he answered, a cup of tea, and this I made for him myself. Nobody was drunk on the car, and to my certain knowledge Grant tasted no liquid but tea and water.”
After Grant was made commander-in-chief in March, 1864, and took charge in the East, the Evening Post was confident that victory was at hand. This faith increased during the summer. Bryant wrote Bigelow on June 15 that the North ought certainly to bring the war to an end within the year, at least so far as concerned all great military operations. On Sept. 3, just after Grant had asked for 100,000 additional men, he said editorially that if he were given them, peace might be won by Thanksgiving. The next day, when news had come that Sherman had captured Atlanta, the paper renewed the prophecy of an early triumph, changing the date, however, to Christmas. It no longer grumbled over military nervousness and dilatoriness. It was disturbed by the state of the currency, which was making the public debt twice what it should have been; but its chief fear was that the men at the North in favor of a premature peace would rob the Union of the fruits of its bloody struggle.