t in New York City took some daring. In a week long spree of violence that erupted ten days after the Battle of Gettysburg, more than one hundred people were killed and hundreds more maimed for life. The state militia battled Irish laborers, who believed the passage of the National Conscription Act was unfair because it hit the poor the hardest while leaving the wealthy, who could afford to pay their way out or hire substitutes to take their places, virtually unscathed. A number of Union Leaguers took advantage of the loophole and avoided the war. Theodore Roosevelt paid a substitute, a decision that his eldest son could never reconcile.
“Mobs of men who did not have the same means as Roosevelt torched homes and businesses and tore up railroad tracks. While the heavy loss of life included Union Leaguers, the worst butchery was brought against the city's defenseless African Americans. Not only was the Colored Orphanage Asylum on Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street, which 237 children called home, set ablaze with a cry, “Burn the niggers' nest,” at least eleven blacks were slaughtered—lynched, knifed, shot, or burned and, in one case, dragged through the streets by the genitals.”
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
HARLEM'S HELL FIGHTERS, EXCERPT..
HARLEM'S HELL FIGHTERS: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN 369TH INFANTRY IN WORLD WAR I, by Stephen L. Harris (Potomac Books, Inc., Wash. DC: 2003), p.61-62
“For [Bill] Hayward there was no better symbolic place for the colors to be presented than at the opulent headquarters of the Union League Club at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street. As a member of the club, the colonel knew its history well and how it had always supported African-American causes, even if those causes brought danger to its own members. A case in point took place in 1863, during the Civil War, when the club had raised the all-black Twentieth New York Regiment in the aftermath of the city's murderous draft riots.
“Boasting a membership of Manhattan's leading Republicans, the Union League Club had been created to support the Union Cause in the Civil War—a counterbalance to the Northern Copperheads, mostly Democrats sympathetic to the Southern cause. One of the founders was Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape architect who designed Central Park. Olmstead believed the club would “bring the prestige and social influence of a national business and cultural elite to the work of cultivating loyal opinion among the middle and upper classes.” He envisioned a “club of true American aristocracy.” Among its first members were former New York Governor Hamilton Fish; philanthropist Theodore Roosevelt; and George Lorillard, one of the city's wealthiest landowners. More than fifty years later, the sons of Fish and Roosevelt and a cousin of Lorillard would be clubmates and fellow officers of Colonel Hayward.
“Meanwhile, in the midst of the bloodiest civil unrest in United States history, the raising of a black regimen
t in New York City took some daring. In a week long spree of violence that erupted ten days after the Battle of Gettysburg, more than one hundred people were killed and hundreds more maimed for life. The state militia battled Irish laborers, who believed the passage of the National Conscription Act was unfair because it hit the poor the hardest while leaving the wealthy, who could afford to pay their way out or hire substitutes to take their places, virtually unscathed. A number of Union Leaguers took advantage of the loophole and avoided the war. Theodore Roosevelt paid a substitute, a decision that his eldest son could never reconcile.
“Mobs of men who did not have the same means as Roosevelt torched homes and businesses and tore up railroad tracks. While the heavy loss of life included Union Leaguers, the worst butchery was brought against the city's defenseless African Americans. Not only was the Colored Orphanage Asylum on Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street, which 237 children called home, set ablaze with a cry, “Burn the niggers' nest,” at least eleven blacks were slaughtered—lynched, knifed, shot, or burned and, in one case, dragged through the streets by the genitals.”
t in New York City took some daring. In a week long spree of violence that erupted ten days after the Battle of Gettysburg, more than one hundred people were killed and hundreds more maimed for life. The state militia battled Irish laborers, who believed the passage of the National Conscription Act was unfair because it hit the poor the hardest while leaving the wealthy, who could afford to pay their way out or hire substitutes to take their places, virtually unscathed. A number of Union Leaguers took advantage of the loophole and avoided the war. Theodore Roosevelt paid a substitute, a decision that his eldest son could never reconcile.
“Mobs of men who did not have the same means as Roosevelt torched homes and businesses and tore up railroad tracks. While the heavy loss of life included Union Leaguers, the worst butchery was brought against the city's defenseless African Americans. Not only was the Colored Orphanage Asylum on Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street, which 237 children called home, set ablaze with a cry, “Burn the niggers' nest,” at least eleven blacks were slaughtered—lynched, knifed, shot, or burned and, in one case, dragged through the streets by the genitals.”