The Annals of the Civil War Written by Leading Participants North and South
Alexander Kelly McClure, Ed.

[291] street, which they burned down. The rich goods in the stores on the block of Broadway, between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets, turned the attention of the mob to plunder. It was estimated that the active rioters in this crowd were not over one hundred in number, but they were attended by an enormous horde, including women and children, who displayed a skilled expertness in appropriating property. Watches, bracelets, jewelry, and valuable goods of all kinds disappeared from the stores, as if by magic, and in an hour's time the whole block had been devastated and set on fire. It was completely destroyed. Simultaneously with these two outrages, a third and larger squad of rioters broke away in the direction of the Colored Orphan Asylum, on Fifth avenue and Forty-third and Forty-fourth streets.

The old antipathy of the Irish to the negroes had already been given full vent, and since noon had manifested itself in various parts of the city-even those remote from the scenes of worst outrage-by a sort of desultory persecution of black people wherever they were met. The station-houses were filled with the hounded creatures seeking protection; and about the time of the attack on the orphan asylum, a colored cartman had been murdered, mutilated, hanged, and burned, in Clarkson street, under circumstances of atrocity unparalleled in civilized communities. On their way, the mob stopped to sack and burn two valuable dwellings, on Lexington avenue, after which the orphan asylum was subjected to a pillage, which lasted nearly two hours; and the edifice was then, despite the earnest efforts of the firemen, burned to the ground. The inmates had been removed before the mob's arrival. Soon after this, the crowd, flushed with success and maddened with liquor, made a demonstration on the police headquarters. They were met, in Broadway, near Amity street, by Inspector Daniel Carpenter, who, after a brief struggle, drove them back with terrible punishment. No more spirited fight took place during the entire riots than this one, in which a desperate mob, armed with every description of weapon, and numbering several thousand, was totally routed by two hundred policemen, armed solely with their clubs. A similar scene was enacted at about seven o'clock in the evening, when an attack was made on the Tribune building. Here, again, the crowd was enormously in excess of the police; and here, again, the latter swept the ruffianly assailants before them like chaff before an autumn breeze. This ended the heavy fighting of the day, though minor disturbances occurred at various points during the evening, including the burning of Postmaster Wakeman's house, in Eightysixth