32
IN THE FIVE DAYS OF MOB VIOLENCE THAT RAGED THROUGHOUT Manhattan in mid-July 1863, rioters reserved their most unspeakable atrocities for African Americans. As noted in chapter 31, mobs outnumbered, overpowered, tortured, maimed, and murdered dozens of helpless black victims during the five days of hellish pandemonium. The historian Leslie Harris has recounted some of the specifics in painful detail; for example, one all-white gang of dockworkers beat and attempted to drown a man named Charles Jackson, while another brazenly roughed up a nine-year-old black boy on the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street—in full view of City Hall.
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In another particularly horrific incident, a white man named George Glass seized the black coachman Abraham Franklin from his home and dragged him through the muddy streets, where a lynch mob soon strung him up from a lamppost. When a jeering crowd cut Franklin’s body down, a sixteen-year-old white boy named Patrick Butler dragged the corpse along the streets by the genitalia, as onlookers shouted in amusement and approval. After another mob stabbed and stoned a black sailor named William Williams, a crowd of witnesses not only failed to intervene but cheered and vowed “vengeance on every nigger in New York.”
But no act of racial violence against the innocent seemed more heartless than the brutal attack on the city’s four-story Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue between Forty-third and Forty-fourth streets on the initial afternoon of rioting, July 13, 1863. Founded in 1836 by charitable Quaker women from the New York Manumission Society, the institution had moved in 1843 into this spacious and well-ventilated new headquarters just a block from what is now the main branch of the New York Public Library—then the site of the municipal reservoir. The beautifully appointed orphanage featured basement playrooms, an ample first-floor kitchen, second-floor classrooms, a dining room, a laundry, a nursery, two infirmaries, and separate boys’ and girls’ dormitories in flanking wings. The imposing structure stood sheltered by a grove of trees that afforded the young residents—who ranged in age from infancy to the teenage years—a shady haven for outdoor recreation. No institution in the city offered stronger evidence of liberal-minded white philanthropists’ commitment to indigent children of color. And that alone made it a target during the July 1863 unrest.
In its first twenty years of operation, the asylum had processed, aided, and educated more than twelve hundred orphans and abandoned children in need. Few knew that at the time of the riots a dozen of those in the asylum’s care were the sons and daughters of black soldiers killed in action or of active recruits unable to care for children while they were off fighting in the ranks for the Union. In fact, just two days before the draft riots broke out in New York, one of the asylum’s alumni, James Henry Gooding, had joined the heroic 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry in its fabled attack against Battery Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina.
At 4:00 p.m. on July 13, 1863, according to well-preserved Orphan Asylum records, “the children numbering 233, were quietly seated in their school rooms, playing in the nursery, or reclining on a sick bed in the Hospital, when an infuriated mob, consisting of several thousand men, women, and children, armed with clubs, brick bats, etc. advanced upon the Institution.” In a whirlwind of horror that lasted twenty minutes, the rioters broke their way into the locked building and pillaged it from basement to attic, hauling away all the chairs, beds, blankets, food, and clothing they could carry. Then they torched the first floor of the building, making sure enough straw from the remaining mattresses had been scattered around to conduct the flames swiftly. When a handful of firefighters already exhausted from battling the flames at the draft office a few blocks east tried twice to douse the blaze, rioters beat them back.
Only minutes earlier, hearing shouts of “Burn the niggers’ nest!” teachers had gathered the orphans into a common room. There, one of them implored the frightened boys and girls: “Children, do you believe that Almighty God can deliver you from a mob?” They answered yes. “Then I wish you now to pray silently to God to protect you from this mob. I believe that he is able and that He will do it. Pray earnestly to Him, and when I give the signal, go in order, without noise, to the dining-room.” From there the teachers led the crying children outside amid “the yells and horrible sounds” directed at them from the rioters.
Though the mob prevented the firemen from extinguishing the blaze, by some miracle of forbearance even the enraged, liquor-fueled looters and arsonists swarming outside could not summon the cruelty to harm the frightened children as the superintendent and matron of the asylum together “noiselessly” escorted them out of the Forty-fourth Street doors and toward sanctuary at a police station nine blocks south.
During this exodus, as the orphans made their way to safety, one reportedly “Irish” voice cried out: “If there is a man among you, with a heart within him come and help these poor children.” The mob “laid hold of him, and appeared ready to tear him to pieces,” but his plea was successful. The Times reported that one benevolent “young Irishman, named Paddy M’Caffrey, with four stage-drivers of the Forty-second Street line and the members of Engine Co. No. 18, rescued some twenty of the orphan children who were surrounded by the mob, and in defiance of the threats of the rioters, escorted them, to the Thirty-fifth Precinct Station-house. It hardly seems credible, yet it is nevertheless true, that there were dozens of men, or rather fiends, among the crowd who gathered around the poor children and cried out, ‘Murder the d——d monkeys,’ ‘Wring the necks of the d——d Lincolnites,’ etc. Had it not been for the courageous conduct of the parties mentioned, there is little doubt that many, and perhaps all of those helpless children, would have been murdered in cold blood.”
Such individual acts of bravery helped ameliorate the impact of the tragedy. A six-year-old orphan girl who wandered away from the procession to the police precinct all the way to Seventh Avenue was rescued by a man named Osborn, who bravely “took her into his own house.” When a seven-year-old boy got lost, too, and tried to find refuge at a nearby home, the lady of the house, afraid the mob would burn her out for sheltering him, “appealed to an Irishman passing by for redress.” The unidentified pedestrian, who fortuitously turned out to be a contractor at the orphanage, wrapped the child “in a cloth and carried him like a bundle to his own home,” from which his daughter returned the boy to “a faithful colored officer of the Asylum.”
Colored Orphan Asylum, albumen print, 1861
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Three days later armed police and Zouave guards escorted the dispossessed children by boat across the East River to safety at an almshouse on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island. Among the few inanimate objects that miraculously survived the invasion, fire, and dislocation is an immeasurably emotional relic now in the New-York Historical Society: the asylum’s Bible.
The story of its rescue lives in the Society’s collection as well. The library owns a century’s worth (1836–1936) of minutes and records of the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans, among which is a meticulously detailed, handwritten account of the riot, highlighted by a heart-wrenching description of the children’s escape from the doomed building—and an explanation for the survival of the holy book: “One little girl, as she walked through the Dining Room, took up a large family Bible, to which she had been accustomed to listen twice each day, and looking up at the Superintendent with a sweet smile, her whole face beaming with the love of God; she said, Mr Davis, I’ve got the Bible. This dear child carried this treasured volume from the Asylum to the Station House and thence to Blackwell Island.”
This Bible still survives—the sole, improbable artifact to endure the sacking and destruction of the orphanage. Once the property of the Reverend Moseley Hooker Williams, it came to the New-York Historical Society through a donation by his son Clarence Williams in 1938.
As for the Colored Orphan Asylum, though it, too, survived, it never returned to its prime location on Fifth Avenue. When its philanthropic board made plans to rebuild there, neighboring residents did not exactly offer their welcome. Instead, they pressured the patrons to find another location. “Better build at a distance from the mob,” advised an anonymous correspondent signing himself “An Old Subscriber” in an audacious letter to the New York Times a few weeks after the attack.
Short of funds, as the beneficiary Anna Shotwell lamented, “by the malice of a mob,” organizers had little choice but to open a modest new temporary orphanage on Fifty-first Street. By this time, the city’s clearly endangered black population had understandably dwindled to its lowest numbers in more than forty years. Reluctant to reenter long-integrated neighborhoods where they had been exposed to such deadly menace, many families relocated to Brooklyn or New Jersey. Others founded easier-to-defend new all-black communities uptown. In one such area, a neighborhood that would later become Harlem, a permanent Colored Orphan Asylum finally reopened in 1867 on 143rd Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.
“People who burn orphan asylums and murder inoffensive negroes because of their color,” editorialized Harper’s Weekly on August 8, a few weeks after the riots, “must expect a sharp and extreme punishment.” But as far as we know, none of the rioters who plundered and torched the Colored Orphan Asylum on July 13, 1863, was ever brought to justice.
The Riots in New York: Destruction of the Colored Orphan Asylum,
wood engraving, 1863
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