Riot: 1863

THE SECOND REBELLION by James McCague. 210 pages. Dial. $5.95.

The July sun was scarcely above the Manhattan rooftops when the mob began pouring out of the decaying tenements on the Lower East Side--ragged, shouting, weaponed with sticks, iron bars and brickbats. By midmorning, the crowd had moved across Broadway, filled Eighth and Ninth Avenues, descended on the 47th Street Army draft-board headquarters and set it afire.

It was about this time that New York City's police superintendent, John A. Kennedy, a vigorous man of 60, arrived to see what was going on. Screaming "Get him! Kill him! Damn the Yankee Perlice son of a bitch!", the crowd knocked him down, stomped him and finally threw him in a mudhole.

Dead Rabbits. This well-researched book provides the fullest account ever given of the bloody five days of rioting that broke out in New York City in July 1863. The troubles are usually described as "draft riots." But Author McCague, a novelist and historian (Fiddle Hill, Moguls and Iron Men), makes it clear that the causes ran far deeper than rebellion against the Conscription Act. As with the riots more than a century later in Washington, Detroit and Watts, there was no single cause that provoked the poor and dispossessed. One essential difference was that the angry and resentful people of the ghettos then were not Negroes but mostly immigrant Irish.

Crowded into such blighted slum areas as Manhattan's "Bloody Ould Sixth Ward," the unskilled and uneducated Irishman was the social outcast of the time. Terrorized by slum gangs (the Dead Rabbits and the Patsey Conroys), shunned by native Americans who despised his rough, alien ways, his papist religion and his uncouth brogue, the average Irish immigrant had to work at the most menial and degrading jobs, and he lived in desperate resentment. He certainly had no stake in the Civil War; indeed, it was the news that he would be subjected to a draft lottery, while well-heeled citizens could buy exemption for $300, that finally sparked frustration into rage and sent him into the streets.

To the Rock Pile. The full extent of their fury makes Watts look like a street squabble. The mobs were so huge that they sometimes completely jammed the broadest streets. They tore down telegraph poles and burly Irish women wielding crowbars tore up the tracks of the street railways. At one point, 50 soldiers formed a double line with fixed bayonets and tried to halt a mob marching on Third Avenue. They fired a volley into the crowd before they were overrun and took to their heels. One soldier tried to escape by scrambling up a rock pile near 42nd Street. A gang of toughs followed him, "grabbed him, and taking him to the top of the rocks stripped his uniform off him, and after beating him almost to a jelly, threw him over a precipice some 20 feet high on the rocks beneath."

The worst brutality was reserved for Negroes; blacks were blamed for the Abolitionist movement and thus were held responsible for the Civil War. The Colored Orphan Asylum, a handsome brick building on Fifth Avenue, was one of the first buildings pillaged and burned. A Negro man was caught near his home on Clarkson Street on the lower West Side and hanged from a tree. A fire was lighted beneath the dying man, and the mob capered around it shrieking as they pelted the body with stones and clods.

On the second day, Governor George Seymour appeared in the city. He was opposed to both the war and the draft, so a crowd gave him a hearing, if a somewhat sullen one, when he spoke from the steps of City Hall. He addressed the crowd, some with bruised faces and bandaged heads, as "my friends" and declared that he had sent his personal adjutant to Washington to try to have the draft stopped.

Confederate Spies? But his speech did not stop the rioting. Only after ten regiments of U.S. regulars moved in did the crowds disperse. McCague estimates that at least 1,200 people were killed and property damage ran to about $5,000,000.

No formal investigation of the riots was ever held.

Horace Greeley's Tribune suggested that it was all a conspiracy against the Union by Copperhead Democrats. Some people apparently believed that the mobs had been led by Confederate spies. Author McCague makes a convincing case that the rioting was exactly what it seemed: a spontaneous eruption by an angry underdog population that had no intention of fighting in an unpopular war.

In a fit of panicky generosity, the New York City Common Council set up a fund of $3,750,000 from which prospective draftees could get exemption money. But ironically, the downtrodden Irish were not as seriously threatened as they had thought. Out of more than a million names drawn in the draft lottery in all the Northern states, only 42,000 ever wound up in uniform.

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