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.

[504] course, the thieves, burglars, and other predatory classes, the graduates of European prisons and the scum and sediment of Old-World felony, who bytens of thousands have their lairs in the great emporium, were too glad to embrace the opportunity afforded them to plunder and ravage under the garb of popular resistance to Abolition despotism, and made haste to swell the ranks and direct the steps of the drunken, bellowing, furious mob, who now rushed through street after street, attacking the dwellings of peaceful citizens who were stigmatized as Abolitionists, or who were exposed to odium by some sort of connection with the Government. By 3 P. M., the rioters had become many thousands in number; and they were probably more numerous throughout the two following days.

The most revolting feature of this carnival of crime and villainous madness was the uniform maltreatment to which the harmless, frightened Blacks were subjected. That The Tribune building should have been for days beleaguered by a yelling, frantic crowd, who constantly sought to incite each other to an attack which they were too careful of their own safety to make (save once, just at dark of the first day, before it had been armed, and when they for a moment had possession of the business office, and had just time to dismantle and set it on fire before they were charged and driven out by the Police), was quite intelligible, if not so clearly justifiable; and so of the attacks on enrollment offices, arsenals, police stations, &c.; but that an inoffensive negro boy should be hunted at full speed by a hundred White miscreants intent on his murder, while many a poor Black woman had her humble habitation sacked and devastated as she narrowly escaped into the street — barely saving her life, and nothing else — several of this abused race being killed without even a suggestion or suspicion of fault on their part, and all the rest put in mortal terror — was an exhibition of human fiendishness which the Nineteenth Century has rarely paralleled. In one case that was noted, (and there were doubtless others as atrocious,) a colored boy not ten years of age was set upon in the most public part of the city, and pelted with sticks and stones by scores of men and boys until he managed to make his escape. In another case, a Black man, no otherwise obnoxious save by his color, was chased, caught, hung, and all his clothing burned off. His dead body remained hanging for hours, until cut down by the Police.¹

The Colored Orphan Asylum was