Books: 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."