The Devil's Own Work Read online

  Married to an Irish American judge, Maria Daly voiced the concerns and aspirations of the New York Irish in her diary, revealing their reluctance to fight a war for abolition, and their competition with blacks in the quest for acceptance in American society. Thus, while Walt Whitman was referring to the riots themselves, the phrase "the devil's own work" describes much more: the polarization of the country in the Civil War; the chorus of voices on both sides of the issues within the presumably unified but in fact deeply divided North; the dilemma of how to serve justice after the draft riots and during the remainder of the Reconstruction era.26

  President Lincoln's decision not to impose martial law in New York and to leave the Democrats in power; President Ulysses S. Grant's similar approach of using the army sparingly in the South to contain Klan violence; and the Compromise of 1877, which left the former slaves to the mercy of white supremacist, "redeemer" governments in the former Confederacy—all were Faustian bargains, exercises in "the art of the possible." The Civil War and Reconstruction laid the groundwork for destroying slavery and the racial caste system in America. However, the compromises in the wake of the draft riots meant the task of exorcising these "demons" from the body politic would continue far into the next century.27

  For the generation that fought the Civil War, and observed from the home front, the draft riots of 1863 appeared to be an infernal plot, an integral part of Confederate military strategy, coordinated with Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania. Few among New York's blue-blooded families or its hundreds of new millionaires—war profiteers who made up the "shoddy aristocracy"—or its corrupt aldermen heeded the warnings of sanitary reformers that the slums were a volcano ready to erupt. In June of that year, all eyes were on the Potomac River, as Lee's mighty Army of Northern Virginia charged northward, sowing panic and galvanizing the divided people of the North to repel the invaders. In more ways than one, the enemy was already inside the gates.

  *The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor carefully scrutinized poor individuals and families to determine if they "deserved" assistance.

  CHAPTER I

  "The Rebel Horde Had Invaded

  Pennsylvania in Force"

  OD HAS AGAIN CROWNED THE VALOR OF OUR TROOPS WITH SUCCESS," General Robert E. Lee telegraphed Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, on June 15, 1863. Lee's powerful army of seventy-five thousand troops had marched north through the Shenandoah Valley, and the advance corps had overwhelmed the Union defenses at Winchester, in northern Virginia, capturing their artillery, and opening the path to Maryland and Pennsylvania. The Confederate invasion of the North had begun.1

  The hungry rebel soldiers, no longer able to live off the land in war-torn Virginia, would strip the northern countryside bare in their search for food and supplies, while sending many blacks they captured south into slavery. Panicked northerners knew that if Lee crossed the Potomac River, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore would be exposed to attack, along with Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. If the rebels pushed on across the Susquehanna River, they would soon be at Philadelphia and then at New York's doorstep, where southern ironclad warships might simultaneously attack the harbor of the Union's commercial and industrial hub.2

  Horace Greeley's New York Tribune claimed to have reliable information that the invasion was "the work of the Copperheads or Peace Democrats," and that "an emissary of this traitorous faction" had visited Jefferson Davis, urging him to "lay waste" Pennsylvania's fields and towns. The term Copperhead referred to a poisonous snake, but southern sympathizers adopted the pejorative label and wore badges made from copper Liberty-head pennies to denounce northern oppression. The Tribune also reported that at least one lodge of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secretive Copperhead organization, was welcoming the rebel army into Pennsylvania.3

  The success of the invasion was crucial for Lee in part because potential disaster loomed in the western theater of the Civil War. When Lee proposed the invasion in May, he told Davis no reinforcements from Virginia could be spared to save the strategically vital citadel town of Vicksburg, in Davis's home state of Mississippi, which Union general Ulysses S. Grant had besieged. On June 15, Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston told the Confederate secretary of war that Vicksburg could not be saved and refused to attack Grant from the rear.4

  If Vicksburg fell, along with Port Hudson, Louisiana, to the south, and Grant gained control of the Mississippi River, the Confederates knew he would open it to commerce while stopping the flow of recruits into the rebel army from the western states of the Confederacy: Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Loss of the river would also expose the South to invasion from the west. Lee's invasion of the Northeast was planned to offset that possible loss by securing recognition for the Confederacy from Britain and France, raising a clamor for peace among war-weary northerners, and strengthening the Peace Democrats—Lincoln's most bitter political opponents—perhaps even handing them a victory in the presidential race the following year.5

  The South did not have the manpower and resources to fight indefinitely, so Lee had recently advised Davis to exploit political divisions in the North by encouraging the "rising peace party" and trying to bring about an armistice. While some Peace Democrats might favor reunification of the North and South—and the Confederacy certainly did not—Lee's main goal was to get the North to sue for peace; the terms could be discussed later.

  To take full advantage of the anticipated success of the invasion, Davis also sent Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens on a mission to approach Lincoln and open peace negotiations. While Lee's army moved north, to grab the Union by the throat, Stephens was on a boat headed for the mouth of the Potomac, where he hoped Lincoln would grant him a pass to cross into Union territory and up the river to Washington.6

  The timing of the invasion was critical in Lee's eyes, because northern newspapers revealed that the terms of enlistment for tens of thousands of Union soldiers were about to expire. With 130 regiments leaving for home in May and June, the War Department needed to bring in 300,000 men to replace them. The new conscription law, passed in March—the first federal draft in U.S. history—was expected to replenish the Union ranks. Lee anticipated this period of transition would cause confusion in the enemy army and saw an opportunity to attack.7

  No document records that Lee thought his invasion would also coincide with rioting against the draft in northern cities. However, northern Democrats had been marshaling popular opinion against the new law and its clause exempting from the draft anyone who could provide a substitute or pay three hundred dollars—almost a year's salary for the average worker. The habitual violence of urban mobs in the North was viewed by many southerners as an asset to the Confederacy.8In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, South Carolina's Charleston Mercury had predicted that lower tariffs in the South would divert European trade away from New York, and that "pauperism and general distress will be so great that uprisings and riots will take place."9A year earlier, the Mercury had serialized Edmund Ruffin's Anticipations of the Future.10

  Lee's triumphant message of June 15, 1863, to Davis in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, reflected his faith in the invincibility of his army, seemingly justified by the first two years of the Civil War. Starting with the rebel capture of Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1861, the war had gone badly for the North, and the outcome of the struggle remained in doubt. While the initial Union war cry had been "Forward to Richmond," Lee's nimble army and a succession of incompetent, irresolute northern generals had barred the way. Irvin McDowell, George McClellan, John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, and finally Joseph Hooker commanded the federal forces, alternately displaying extreme caution, then fighting and losing tens of thousands of men.11

  New York City had poured almost fifty thousand men into the field in the heady opening months of the war. A year later, the city's poor who had fled the slums by joining the army quickly discovered that war was a waking nightmare, not an escape or adven
ture, and their families learned it too. Amputees were seen everywhere in the streets; funerals were frequent. Civic leaders and businessmen who had recruited volunteer units in 1861 were not professional officers and turned out to be incompetent in battle, losing huge numbers of men. New York City's Irish and Italian regiments were being decimated. Irish and Germans captured by the Confederacy were disdained as "Huns" and "barbarians" and treated with special harshness. Newspapers told of the bloodbath, as did illustrated magazines. Deserters fled to the city, where they could disappear in the crowd and avoid prosecution.12

  The previous six months had been the worst. At Fredricksburg in December 1862, almost thirteen thousand Union troops were killed or wounded. "It was a living hell from which escape seemed scarcely possible," recalled Colonel Robert Nugent of New York's Irish Sixty-ninth Regiment of Volunteers, which was assigned to lead the doomed assault. "By virtue of the commanding position of the enemy no attack could have been successful."13 Defeated again at Chancellorsville on May 2—6, 1863, Union forces suffered another seventeen thousand casualties. Lee had gained the confidence to invade the North in June.14

  By the summer of 1863, Lincoln's three main strategic goals for the year were stalled. One priority was to capture Vicksburg. Grant was on his sixth attempt and remained undaunted as well as unsuccessful. While Lee planned his invasion to precede the North's draft, Grant, with opposite objectives, also felt time pressure because of the upcoming conscription. Grant assumed that if he failed to make progress in his campaign against Vicksburg, "the draft would be resisted, desertions ensue, and the power to capture and punish deserters lost."

  Lincoln hoped as well to take Chattanooga and drive the rebels out of central Tennessee, but General William Rosecrans had been bogged down there since an indecisive battle more than six months earlier. Equally discouraging for the North was the inability of the army to advance on Richmond. Adding to Lincoln's frustration in the eastern theater was a failed assault on Fort Sumter in April by eight Union ironclads. The fort, and thus Charleston—capital of the first state to secede and a symbolic prize of great value—remained out of reach.15

  The capture of Richmond would have put the Confederate government to flight, challenged the South's status as a legitimate, separate nation, and signaled the demise of the rebel war effort. Instead, Lee in June 1863 stood poised to turn the tables on the North, to invade its territory, not to occupy it but to gain European recognition and dictate the terms of peace, thus ensuring the continued existence of the Confederate States of America.

  Such a victory over the power of the federal government and vindication of the states' right to secede threatened to dissolve the United States. The Confederacy proclaimed this would be a victory for their independence over a tyrannical central government. Lincoln and his supporters instead viewed the United States as "the last, best hope" for free government on Earth.16

  "The Pennsylvania Governor, [Andrew] Curtin, cried to us for help; the President called out from the White House that he wanted us to come down to the Border; our Governor, [Horatio] Seymour, said go, and accordingly we hurriedly kissed those we loved best, and started for the wars," recalled John Lockwood, a militiaman in the Twenty-third Regiment, New York State National Guard. While Lee was telegraphing Davis on June 15 about the capture of Winchester, Lincoln issued a call for one hundred thousand state militiamen from the adjacent states—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, and West Virginia— to assist the army and thwart the invaders.

  Doubtful of a full response, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton privately appealed to Governor Horatio Seymour of New York and Major General Charles Sandford, head of the state's militia regiments, for an additional twenty thousand men, to serve for up to six months, until Pennsylvania could muster enough troops to repel the invasion. The states would have to pay the soldiers a bounty but would also have these men deducted from their quota in the upcoming federal draft.

  By the following day, June 16, the entire city of New York "moved with a common impulse," Lockwood wrote, as militiamen reported for duty and volunteers hurried to sign up with their favorite regiments. In addition to the regular U.S. Army and the militia, volunteer units comprised a third category of troops in the Union forces.* Uniformed men "were dashing frantically backward and forward through the streets, and in and out of the various armories of the city, in search of essentials," recalled militiaman George Wingate of the Twenty-second Regiment.

  On the morning of the seventeenth, "rain fell in torrents" but well-wishers turned out with umbrellas to cheer the city's "gallant" Seventh Regiment, composed of smartly uniformed, well-drilled young men, mostly American-born sons of the upper middle class. The highly disciplined Seventh was the militia unit city fathers habitually relied on to put down the frequent riots that had plagued New York for decades, and it became the first to depart for the front, followed by two other regiments in the evening.

  In the emergency of the Confederate invasion, social tensions faded into the background, for the moment. "Martial enthusiasm pervades all classes, welling up from the several armories and overflowing the twin cities" of New York and Brooklyn, Lockwood wrote. The regiments departed, "amid tumultuous cheering, the fluttering of handkerchiefs, the ringing of bells, and the thousand bewildering noises of an enthusiastic crowd," recalled Wingate.

  The next day was mercifully overcast for the departing militiamen of the Twenty-third Regiment heading for Fulton Ferry in Brooklyn, sweating under heavy packs filled with equipment and two days' cooked rations. "From the armory all the way down to the river it is a procession of Fairy-Land," Lock-wood reported. "The windows flutter with cambric; the streets are thronged with jostling crowds of people, hand-clapping and cheering . . . while up and down the curving street . . . the gleaming line of bayonets winds through the crowding masses—the men neatly uniformed and stepping steadily as one."17

  The invasion had stirred a war-weary public in New York, but the rush of patriotism left the city and state virtually defenseless. The Pennsylvania militia had generally failed to muster for the emergency, and in the next two and a half weeks, New York sent almost sixteen thousand men to Pennsylvania—more than any of the neighboring states called on by President Lincoln. Governor Seymour telegraphed Colonel Marshall Lefferts of the Seventh Regiment to assure him the troops would not be kept any longer than necessary: "Will see the regiment is not kept longer than thirty days."18

  Seymour had reason for concern. The day before Stanton's request for militia regiments, on June 14, Major General John Wool, commander of the U.S. Army's Department of the East, headquartered in New York City, had written to Seymour, warning that the eight forts in New York's harbor were woefully undermanned and the city was vulnerable to attack. Altogether, the forts had only 550 men. After the militia left, Richard Delafield of the U.S. Corps of Engineers also wrote to Seymour, calling for the harbor defenses to be properly garrisoned. "Should the enemy be successful, we are at this moment without any reserve, or, indeed without any force whatever to check an advance on this city."19

  The Union's first line of defense was the ninety-thousand-man Army of the Potomac, then led by "Fighting Joe" Hooker, who, after Chancellorsville, showed little appetite for another direct clash with Lee's forces.* Encamped on the Rappahannock River in Virginia, Hooker had sent scouts who discovered Lee's march northward in early June, and the Union general proposed an attack on the enemy's rear. Instead, Lincoln told him to confront the rebel intruders head-on. Hooker then suggested a march to Richmond to counter the invasion of the North, at which point Lincoln realized the general would have to be replaced. In the meantime, Lincoln told Hooker to stay on Lee's flank while he moved north toward the Potomac River and attack if possible at a weak point in the long Confederate column that stretched from Fredericksburg to Winchester.20

  Pressing northward after the capture of Winchester on June 15, Lee's entire army had crossed the Potomac into Maryland by the twenty-seventh, unimpeded by Hooker's forces, which followed to
o late. Still, Lincoln believed that with Lee cut off from his base in Virginia, Union troops could finally surround and destroy his army. Hooker, however, immediately offered the same excuses as McClellan had—he needed reinforcements, the politicians in Washington were scheming against him—and Lincoln replaced him with General George Meade on June 28. Though Meade was a corps commander and unknown to the rank and file of the army at large, who adored McClellan, their morale soared after leaving the hostile territory of Virginia to defend northern soil.21

  Lee's troops had quickly divided, preparing to seize various objectives in Pennsylvania, but news of Meade's forces crossing the Potomac in pursuit prompted Lee to concentrate his strength for a major battle. Union cavalry commander John Buford was also thinking ahead to a decisive clash with the enemy and on June 30 sent two brigades to a hill overlooking Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a thriving village which he expected the Confederates to enter and try to occupy because of the dozen roads that led in and out of it, and the high ground surrounding it, making it easy to defend. Aside from its strategic value, the town was supposed to have a large supply of shoes, badly needed by many barefoot Confederates. The arrival of a rebel division on the morning of July 1 sparked a three-day battle—the biggest and most pivotal of the Civil War.22

  Instead of shoes, the Confederates found Buford's cavalrymen dismounted and firing at them rapidly with breech-loading carbines from the cover of fences and trees. While the cavalrymen fended off a much larger Confederate force during the early morning, messengers for both armies quickly spread the word of an impending battle, and infantry were rushed to the scene. Lee's plans had been overtaken by events: With his army still scattered, the Federals had drawn him into a general engagement on ground of their choosing. Meade hadn't planned on a confrontation at Gettysburg either, but Buford could hardly have scouted a better spot.23