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.
The 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.
[Illustration]
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 {284} 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 {285} 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.
[Illustration: LIEUTENANT-COLONEL EDWARD JARDINE. Commanding a
detachment of troops for service against the rioters.]
[Illustration: HORATIO SEYMOUR.]
[Illustration: CLEMENT L. VALLANDIGHAM.]
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. {286} 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.
[Illustration: 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 {287} 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.
[Illustration: OFFICERS OF THE FORTY-FOURTH NEW YORK INFANTRY.]
{288}