BOSS TWEED: The Corrupt Pol who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York Read Free Page A

immigrants crammed into teeming slums amid grinding poverty. Many immigrants had volunteered and fought bravely for the Union, but they saw no honor in a draft, only hardship for workingmen with families to feed. Irishmen particularly felt no quarrel with Southerners and no sympathy for blacks or slaves who, once freed, easily could come north to New York and steal their jobs.
    Just weeks earlier, Irish workers had gone on strike at New York’s riverside docks demanding better wages, only to see black strikebreakers brought in from Southern states and protected at bayonet-point by Union army soldiers. These tensions had caused even Horace Greeley, the Republican firebrand publisher of the New York Tribune , abolitionist and war hawk, to urge delay in starting the draft.
    Speaking at Brooklyn’s Academy of Music on July 4, Seymour had fanned the flames again by criticizing Lincoln’s military failures and proclaimed “the bloody, treasonable, revolutionary doctrine of public necessity”—the basis for the draft law—“could be used by a mob as well as by a government.” 4 Critics later would call Seymour’s speech a call to arms, as if the riots a few days later were Seymour’s own invention.
    News the next week of a Union military victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, brought little comfort; long lists of dead and crippled soldiers filled the newspapers, some 23,040 Union boys dead, wounded and missing—more seas of blood for Lincoln’s war.
    Army officials had ignored Seymour’s warnings and decided to begin the draft on Saturday morning, July 11, at their office on Third Avenue and 46th street—an uptown neighborhood they considered safe and loyal. They spun a large wooden wheel to pick names of conscripts, which were then printed in the newspapers on Sunday. An unsettling quiet had hung over the city that Sabbath as troublemakers had a full day to sit around, stew at the news, and plan.
    Now, on Monday morning, July 13, the street gave its answer.
    Horatio Seymour, on receiving the news in his carriage by the New Jersey seashore, decided to leave at once for New York City. But he chose to travel alone and refused to let his nephew accompany him. Riots, after all, were nothing new to New York F OOTNOTE and, as governor, he’d only be taking a back seat to police unless things got out of hand. Besides, the early reports Monday gave little warning of how ugly this latest outburst would turn.
    Seymour took a wayward route. Instead of catching a direct steamboat from Long Branch to Manhattan or an immediate train and ferry through Jersey City—either of which would have gotten him to the city by mid-afternoon that day—he traveled inland, stopped and spent the night in New Jersey, and then waited until mid-morning the next day, Tuesday, July 14, before riding a steam-ferry from Jersey City across the Hudson to Manhattan, hoping perhaps the crisis would have blown over by then. Instead, things had deteriorated badly.
    As Seymour reached the city and stepped onto the pier, he heard sounds of battle from all directions—gunshots, screams, breaking glass, angry voices. He saw smoke billowing from rows of burning buildings and smelled the acrid odor of gunpowder. Squads of police ran in all directions. Rioters had cut telegraph lines and crippled city communications—panic and rumor had replaced logic and sense. Seymour followed a small entourage to a line of carriages that snaked through narrow streets to Broadway and then north to the St. Nicholas Hotel near Spring Street where he kept a room. Here, Seymour walked past rows of police guards; inside, he found New York Mayor George Opdyke, a 58-year old Republican millionaire dry-goods merchant, tall and gaunt, who’d been elected a year earlier with no political back-ground beyond a single term in the state legislature. Opdyke had fled City Hall the prior morning fearing mob violence and moved his office to the Hotel.
    Sitting with Opdyke behind closed doors,