Horace Greeley, The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, 1860-65: its Causes, Incidents, and Results: Intended to exhibit especially its moral and political phases with the drift and progress of American opinion respecting human slavery from 1776 to the close of the War for the Union. Volume II.

[505] one of the noblest charities of the city. It had a spacious and elegant edifice, worth, with its furniture, some $200,000, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 46th-street, not far from the enrolling office, where the riots began. It was a school as well as an asylum, affording shelter, sustenance, and Christian nurture, to some 200 colored orphans, under the patronage and management of a society of philanthropic ladies. At 5 P. M., a vast mob surrounded it, disabled or drove off the few policemen who attempted to bar an entrance, and, having afforded time for the hasty exit of the inmates, fired and destroyed the edifice and all its remaining contents; having meantime stolen a liberal share of the carpets, iron bedsteads, and other portable furniture, which women stood ready, at a little distance, to carry off, so soon as they were handed to them by their husbands or sons. Some of the garments, which the fleeing inmates had left behind in their haste, were thus appropriated. The cool, business-like manner wherein this wholesale robbery and arson were perpetrated astonished even the most callous reporters. A liberal but not very responsible offer of “$500 for the sight of a Black Republican,” chalked in gigantic letters on the fence of the adjacent cattle-market, failed to elicit any proffers.

The enrolling office of the VIIIth District stood at the corner of Broadway and 29th-st., in a block of stores filled with costly goods, including a goldsmith's shop, heavily stocked with watches and jewelry. These were speedily stripped of their contents and then fired; the firemen here, as at the Orphan Asylum and elsewhere, being forbidden to play on the obnoxious building — an order which the mass of them seemed quite too willing to obey. In twenty minutes after the matches were ignited, the walls fell with a loud crash. The firemen were allowed to play upon and save, so far as they might, all structures not obnoxious to the rioters.

The riots, thus begun on Monday, July 13th, were kept up throughout the three following days, and extended to Brooklyn, where an expensive new Grain Elevator, worth $100,000, which was obnoxious as reducing the demand for labor, was among the buildings burned. But, by this time, some soldiers had been called in from the military posts in the harbor, and some militia mustered in the city; so that, though there was more fighting than on the first day, there was less devastation; and the loss of life was decidedly greatest on the side of the rioters, who were gradually crowded back into those quarters where they were naturally strongest, and no longer plundered and burned at will. But the running of the city railroads was generally stopped by the mob on these days, in order to impede the movements of the defenders of order, as well as to swell the ranks of the rioters; laborers could not be obtained to load vessels in port, and the industry of the city was very generally paralyzed.

But a riot stoutly confronted and checked has reached its culminating point; and this one--which would almost certainly have broken out on