Lee in Virginia warned the North of the approaching invasion” that
culminated at Gettysburg. But the readers of the _Evening Post_ were
warned of it by a column editorial on May 21, two weeks before Lee
took his first preliminary steps. That such a prophecy could be made
shows how conversant with the military situation the great New York
journals were kept by their war correspondents, their files of Southern
newspapers, and their high official advisers. Bryant wrote that he
believed Jefferson Davis was preparing his last desperate stroke, in
the knowledge that Grant might soon wrest the whole Mississippi from
him, that there would be more Union cavalry raids like Stoneman’s and
Grierson’s, and that even if the Confederacy beat off another attack
like Hooker’s, it would prove a Pyrrhic victory:
There are unmistakable indications that Davis is quietly
withdrawing troops from the outlying camps along the seacoasts to
reinforce Lee, which movement will be continued, we think, until
that general has a command of 150,000 to 200,000 men. As soon as
it is ready Lee will move, we conjecture, not in the direction of
Washington, but of the Shenandoah Valley, with a view to crossing
the Potomac somewhere between Martinsburg and Cumberland. It will
be easy for him ... to defend his flanks ... and to maintain
also uninterrupted communications with Staunton and the Central
Virginia railway. The valley itself is filled with rapidly ripening
harvests, and once upon the river supplies may be got from
Pennsylvania.
The editorial proposed either the occupation of the Shenandoah
in force, or a new attack on Lee, and advised the Maryland and
Pennsylvania authorities to fortify their towns and raise fresh bodies
of troops.
When the invasion actually began, parts of the North were frightened,
but the _Evening Post_ was almost gleeful. On June 17, when news came
that the first Confederates were across the Potomac, it expressed the
hope that Lee would push on so that he might be cut off and destroyed.
Ten days later, when the rebels had reached Carlisle, Pa., it was
jubilant: “It is time for the nation to rise; the great occasion has
come, and now, if we had prepared ourselves for it, and had collected
and drilled reserve forces, we might end the rebellion in a month.” On
June 29, two days before the battle began, it congratulated Meade on
an unsurpassed military opportunity, and urged three considerations
upon him. He should insist that Washington help and not embarrass him,
he should ask for all the reserves available, “and then, having given
battle in due time, let him avoid the mistake of McClellan at Antietam,
by pursuing the enemy until he is completely overthrown.” That the
chance for pursuit would come the _Post_ never doubted.
The close of the three days’ struggle at Gettysburg left Bryant
confident that the turning point of the war had been passed. “There is
every reason to hope that the rebel army of Virginia will never recross
the Potomac as an army,” he said on July 6; but whether Lee crossed
it or not, “the rebellion has received a staggering blow, from which
it would scarcely seem possible for it to recover.” The next day he
insisted that the rebels be followed at once and destroyed, but in his
exultation he accepted philosophically Meade’s failure to advance.
II
At this moment of rejoicing over Gettysburg and Vicksburg the city was
horrified and humiliated by the Draft Riots, a sharp reminder that the
home front was only less important than the battle front. Of this fact
the _Evening Post_ had never lost sight. Bryant’s editorials always
held in view the necessity of sustaining the spirits of the North. For
every “radical” utterance criticizing the Administration’s faults there
were ten exhorting the people to support its central aims. In the first
months of the war he published two martial lyrics, one addressed to
European enemies who hoped for the ruin of the republic, and one a plea
for enlistment:
Few, few were they whose swords of old
Won the fair land in which we dwell;
But we are many, we who hold
The grim resolve to guard it well.
Strike, for that broad and goodly land,
Blow after blow, till men shall see
That Might and Right move hand in hand,
And glorious must their triumph be!
It was natural for New York city to have a lusty anti-war press
when the struggle for the Union began. It had been Democratic since
Jackson’s time, and remained Democratic during the Civil War. Its
social connections with the South had always been close, while
till 1860 its merchants and bankers had stronger business ties with
the South than with the West. After the war began many Southern
sympathizers, refugees from the border States, settled in the city.
But the capture of Fort Sumter turned all that indifference to the
secession movement which William H. Russell had noted a few weeks
earlier into a passionate enthusiasm of the majority for the Federal
cause. At 3 p. m. on April 18, the day the first troops passed through
New York southward, an excited crowd gathered before the _Express_
office and demanded a display of the American flag. It surged up Park
Row and made the same demand of the _Day Book_ and _Daily News_ (the
latter Fernando Wood’s organ), and thence poured down Nassau Street and
Broadway to the _Journal of Commerce_ building, which also hurried out
a flag. Already the _Herald_ had decorated its windows with bunting.
The Monday after Sumter, Bennett had braved popular feeling with
another demand for peace, but now he hurried to Washington, pledged his
support of the Union to President Lincoln, and saw that beginning with
the _Herald_ for April 17, that policy was adopted.
Unfortunately, the tone of the pro-slavery press continued so
objectionable that on Aug. 22, 1861, the postoffice forbade mail
transportation to the _Journal of Commerce_, _Day Book_, _Daily News_,
_Freeman’s Journal_, and _Brooklyn Eagle_, all five of which had been
presented by a Federal Grand Jury. The _Daily News_ was suppressed in
New Jersey by the Federal Marshal. Gerard Hallock of the _Journal of
Commerce_, complaining of threats of violence and an organized movement
to cut off his subscribers and advertising, sold his interest to David
Stone and Wm. C. Prime, and the paper became less offensive. The _Day
Book_ permanently and the _Daily News_ temporarily ceased publication.
The foreign-language press also failed to show due patriotism, many
French citizens in August signing a petition for the suppression of the
_Courrier des États Unis_ as disloyal, and the Westchester grand jury
presenting the _Staats-Zeitung_ and _National-Zeitung_ as disseminators
of treason. The _World_, changing hands, became under the able Manton
Marble, who had recently been an employee of the _Post_, a leader of
the “copperhead” press.
There is no need to quote from the _World_, _Daily News_, and _Journal
of Commerce_ to show how, boldly when they dared, covertly when they
did not, they continued to attack the Union cause. Their methods were
defined by the _Evening Post_ of May 20, 1863, in a “Recipe for a
Democratic Paper,” which may be briefly summarized:
(1) Magnify all rebel successes and minimize all Federal victories;
if the South loses 18,000 men say 8,000 men, and if the North loses
11,000 say 21,000.
(2) Calumniate all energetic generals like Sherman, Grant, and
Rosecrans; call worthless leaders like Halleck and Pope the master
generals of the age.
(3) Whenever the Union suffers a reverse, declare that the nation
is weary of this slow war; and ask how long this fratricidal
conflict will be allowed to continue.
(4) Expatiate upon the bankruptcies, high prices, stock jobbers,
gouging profiteers and “shoddy men.”
(5) Abuse Lincoln and the Cabinet in two ways: say they are weak,
timid, vacillating, and incompetent; and that they are tyrannous,
harsh, and despotic.
(6) Protest vehemently against “nigger” brigadiers, and the
atrocity of arming the slaves against their masters.
(7) Don’t advise open resistance to the draft. But clamor against
it in detail; suggest doubts of its constitutionality; denounce the
$300 clause; say that it makes an odious distinction between rich
and poor; and refer learnedly to the military autocracies of France
and Prussia.
The copperhead politicians were as active as the copperhead press. At
their head was Mayor Wood, who ran for reëlection in the fall of 1861
and was opposed by Bryant’s friend George Opdyke. Called a blackguard
by the _Tribune_ and a miscreant by the _Evening Post_, Wood based his
campaign upon denunciation of the abolitionists and appeals to racial
prejudice. In a speech reported by the _Post_ of Nov. 29 he declared
that Lincoln had brought the nation to the verge of ruin, that the
negro-philes would prosecute the war as long as they could share the
money spent upon it, and that “they will get Irishmen and Germans to
fill up the regiments under the idea that they will themselves remain
at home to divide the plunder.” Just before election day the _Post_
gave part of its editorial page to the following bit of drama:
FERNANDO IN A PORTER HOUSE
AN OCCURRENCE UP-TOWN; NOT A FANCY SKETCH
(_Scene: A porter house in the 22d ward. Proprietor behind the
counter. Behind him a row of bottles, etc. Enter Fernando and a
voter._)
_Fernando_: Good morning, my dear friend. Please let me and my
friend have something to drink. (_Glasses are set before them and a
decanter. They help themselves. Fernando throws a double eagle upon
the counter, waving away the offer to give back change._) You will
support me, I suppose?
_Proprietor_ (_quietly depositing the money in the till_): Yes,
I shall support you for the State prison. You have been up for a
place there, I believe.
_Fernando_ (_going out and coming back_): By the way, you did not
mean what you said just now?
_Proprietor_: Yes, I did mean just that. You deserve State prison
and would have gone there three years ago if you had not cheated
the law.
_Fernando_: Will you give me my change?
_Proprietor_: No, I will not. I want it to show my neighbors how
you tried to influence my vote.
(_Exit Fernando, crestfallen_)
Opdyke, with the first war enthusiasm behind him, won the Mayoralty
election from the egregious Wood. But the strength of the Democrats,
which in large degree meant the strength of the anti-war party, was
thereafter triumphant in every election till Grant took Richmond. The
State and Congressional campaign of 1862, coming during the dark period
after the Peninsular campaign and the drawn battle of Antietam, aroused
the _Evening Post_, _Times_ and _Tribune_ to great exertions. Horatio
Seymour, the “submissionist” candidate, contested the Governorship
with Gen. James Wadsworth. His speeches, wrote Bryant, have a direct
tendency to discourage our loyal troops and sustain the hopes of the
South. The _Post_ denied his echo of the _World’s_ and _Herald’s_
statements that the Administration was a failure. “It has been a grand
and brilliant success. History will so account it.” Lincoln, predicted
the _Post_, need only give rein to the Northern determination, and his
name “will stand on the future annals of his country illustrated by a
renown as pure and undying as that of George Washington.” But Seymour
easily won, obtaining 54,283 votes in New York city against 22,523
given Wadsworth; and the Democrats swept the Congressional districts,
including one in which they had nominated Fernando Wood.
One factor in this result, said the _Evening Post_, was the alarm
many had taken at the threat of the draft. The _World_ played upon
this alarm, and both it and the _Herald_ attacked the emancipation
proclamation as a change in the objects of the war; to which Bryant
replied that the Revolution had begun to assert the rights of the
Colonies within the British Empire, and had shortly become a war
to take them out of it. Bryant in the spring of 1863 characterized
the _Express_ as an organ “which has called repeatedly upon the mob
to oust the regular government at Washington, and upon the army to
proclaim McClellan its chief at all hazards”; while the _Journal of
Commerce_, he said, “has always denounced the war, and even now argues
... that the allegiance of the citizens is due to the State, and not
to the Federal Government.” Some of the most prominent men of the
city--Tilden, James Brooks, S. F. B. Morse, August Belmont, David E.
Wheeler, and others--met at Delmonico’s on Feb. 6, 1863, and formed
a plan for circulating copperhead doctrines, or, as they put it,
for “the diffusion of knowledge”; whence the _Post_ nicknamed them
“diffusionists.”
When the Draft Act was enforced throughout the North just after
Gettysburg, disorders occurred in widely scattered centers; and it was
inevitable that they should be gravest in New York. Not merely did the
city contain many half disloyal Americans of native birth. It was full
of a class of Irishmen who had proved especially responsive to the
demagogues opposing the war. Clashes between the Irish and negroes had
been common for a decade. In August, 1862, a mob in Brooklyn attacked
a factory in which blacks were working, and tried to set it afire with
the negroes inside. Similar riots, the _Post_ remarked, had disgraced
several Western cities. “In every case Irish laborers have been incited
to take part in these lawless attempts; and the cunning ringleaders and
originators of these mutinies, who are not Irishmen, have thus sought
to kill two birds with one stone--to excite a strong popular prejudice
against the Irish, while they used them to wreak their spite against
the blacks.”
The copperhead press in the early July days preceding the first drawing
of draft numbers was filled with abuse of conscription. The _Herald_,
to be sure, which professed neutrality between the “niggerhead” press
(the _Evening Post_, _Times_, and _Tribune_) and the copperhead papers,
advocated the draft as a means of hastening Union victory, though it
abused Lincoln as a nincompoop. But the _World_ spoke of Lincoln’s
“wanton exercise of arbitrary powers,” and predicted that if the war
was carried on to enforce the emancipation proclamation a million men,
not three hundred thousand, would have to be conscripted. “A measure,”
it said of the Draft act, “which could not have been ventured upon in
England even in those dark days when the press-gang filled the English
ships of war with slaves ... was thrust into the statute books, as one
might say, almost by force.” The _Daily News_ applauded the speeches
at a city peace meeting on July 9, where one orator had declared: “The
Administration now feels itself in want of more men to replace those it
has slaughtered, and to aid it in upholding its despotism, and for this
purpose has ordered the conscription.”
On July 11, 1863, the draft began, and on the 13th, Monday, when
an effort was made to renew it, the rioting commenced. The first
disturbances occurred at the draft headquarters on the corner of Third
Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, which were sacked about noon; the
disorders grew much worse on Tuesday, and were not entirely suppressed
until Thursday. The story of the four days of bloodshed need not be
rehearsed in detail, but the _Evening Post_ files afford certain new
lights upon it. The historian Rhodes, in his account, draws upon the
files of the _Tribune_, _Times_, _World_, _Herald_, and _Post_ as
sources, but only upon the issues of the week of the riot. Ten days
later (July 23) an 8,000 word history of the riot appeared in the
_Evening Post_, a close-knit, graphic narrative, apparently written by
Charles Nordhoff, who had been an eye-witness of much of it.
Nordhoff makes it clear that the mob was against not merely the draft,
but the war. “Seymour’s our man”; “Seymour’s for us”; “Yis, and Wood
too”; “It’s Davis and Seymour and Wood,” were expressions heard at
every turn. “Cheers for Jeff Davis were as common as brickbats.” Above
all, Nordhoff was convinced that the mob had intelligent leaders
outside of its own ranks. The nucleus of the mob was a gang of about
fifty rough fellows who at nine o’clock in the morning began prowling
along the East River wharves in the Grand Street neighborhood,
picking up recruits. As the crowd grew in size it entered foundries
and factories for more men. “It is absolutely certain that there was
no planning or directing head among the acting ringleaders. No one
could follow or watch them without seeing that they were instigated;
though by whom it was impossible to tell. They were men themselves
incapable of self-direction; men of the lowest order and of the most
brutal passions--and at that doubly infuriated by rum.” Immediately
the destruction of the Third Avenue draft headquarters was complete,
the mob split into three parts, which at once sought three important
objectives, a fact which Nordhoff regarded as proving outside
leadership.
One of the three mobs destroyed the Armory on Second Avenue at
Twenty-First Street--this was on Monday at four p. m.; a second
simultaneously demolished the draft office at Broadway and Twenty-ninth
Street; and a third, the largest, sacked and burnt the Colored Orphan
Asylum on Fifth Avenue. Meanwhile, small groups had begun hunting down
negroes and clubbing them to death. Nordhoff describes a scene during
the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum:
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.”