Black Gotham Stories

When it came to their black victims, the rioters did not distinguish between the elite and lower classes, between men and women, between adults and infants. They lynched black men, hanging them from lampposts and then mutilating their bodies; they beat black men and women on the streets and left them to die or pursued them into the river where they drowned. They threw black babies out of windows. They attacked black property, destroying the homes of well-to-do blacks.

In perhaps the most egregious act of all, they burned the Colored Orphan Asylum to the ground. Founded in 1834 by two Quaker women, Anna Shotwell and Mary Murray, to care for orphaned and destitute children, the asylum was an important institution in the black community.  By the early 1840s it occupied a substantial building on Fifth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets.  Around this time, the asylum hired James McCune Smith to be its physician and by the early 1860s several other African American men and women had been added to the staff.

During the draft riots of 1863, the asylum was burned to the ground on the very first day of the violence.  The mob's grievances were many.  In destroying the asylum, they vented their rage at whites who they believed were giving so much to undeserving blacks; at their black beneficiaries who, once equipped with education and jobs, would increasingly become economic competitors; and at an institution that portended possibilities of interracial cooperation that would leave poor whites out in the cold.