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New York rioters murdered Colonel H.F. O’Brien during the bloody anti-draft, anti-Negro riots of July, 1863.

Anyone who thinks that the Battle of Gettysburg is all that Abe Lincoln had on his mind in July of 1863 needs to think again.

Lincoln was so concerned in the last week of June that he ordered more Federal troops posted around Washington, D.C. Old Abe had a fright on Sunday, June 28 as J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry rode within two miles of the District of Columbia. The Confederate cavalry's feint toward the capital caused Union generals Howard, Reynolds, Sickles, and Sedgwick temporarily to march east and away from the Union army of Meade which was then moving toward Gettysburg.

Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton called in the 7th New York Volunteers (7th NYV) to move from Frederick, Md., to a position closer to Washington in case Lee chose to seize the city. A plan was drawn up for Lincoln and his cabinet to flee much the way President Madison had fled the British capture of Washington in 1814.

The 7th NYV was made up mostly of German immigrants who'd recently arrived in this country eager for work. Unscrupulous army recruiters promised them citizenship, financial bounties, and free land in the West if they would enlist for a brief tour of patriotic military service. J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry dash toward Washington proved to be Lady Luck's way of not spewing them forth upon the gory field of Gettysburg as these were the forces recalled to protect the federal government from rebel capture.

Lincoln and his cabinet sat by the telegraph machine for hours on Friday, July 3 and Saturday, July 4 awaiting the tap, tap, tap of Morse code messages from Meade's army just 64 miles westward.

The news was ominous. Meade appeared overly cautious even though he outnumbered Lee. By the evening of July 4, it became apparent that Lee was defeated in his objective at Gettysburg but that his army was not crushed. Twenty-eight thousand Confederates lay dead as opposed to twenty-three thousand Federals. The townspeople of Gettysburg were sickened for days by the stench of burning horse carcasses. Shallow graves hastily dug for the human dead began to expose their ghastly contents with the thunderstorm downpours of July 4.

Lee learned sometime after Lincoln did on July 4 of the surrender of Vicksburg in the west to Ulysses S. Grant. The slow retreat of Lee back to the Potomac was not actively pressed by Meade.

The hot, sultry week of July 5 through 11, Lee's decimated army retreated slowly southward as Confederate engineers rebuilt the Potomac bridge that the Union had destroyed in an attempt to trap Lee. Confederate generals Imboden, Fitzhugh Lee, and J.E.B. Stuart served as the rearguard.

A much perturbed Abe Lincoln sent a message to General Meade, "My dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee's escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so South of the river, when you can take with you very few more than two thirds of the force you then had in hand?

It would be unreasonable to expect, and I do not expect you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it."

As the cautious Meade allowed the southern forces to escape annihilation, intelligence reports began to arrive at the White House that New York City was seething in rebellion against the war and the March 3 conscription law. Desertion was the Union Army's number one problem in 1863 as many northern soldiers and civilians alike interpreted Lincoln's emancipation address of January 1, 1863, as changing the war's original purpose from preserving the union to that of liberating the slaves.

The March 3 Conscription Act called for a draft lottery drawing to take place on Monday, July 13. A similar draft drawing had taken place that morning amidst jeers and protests.

Over the weekend of July 10, 11, and 12, thousands of working class men drank their beer in New York saloons as was their custom. On this particular weekend the bar talk concerned the grisly accounts of Gettysburg then being reported in such daily papers as the New York World, the Tribune, and the Times.

The saloon gatherings soon turned malicious with rancorous talk of blacks taking all the manual day labor and the likelihood of hundreds of thousands of liberated blacks pouring into New York City soon. Amidst the alcohol and the vitriol of the saloon district on Saturday night, July 11, a plot was hatched to form a mob on Monday for purposes of ransacking the Draft Lottery building.

For years historians believed that the New York City Riots were a spontaneous outpouring of working class discontent over the war and the ease with which the middle class and the wealthy could dodge military service. The Lincoln government wanted the public to believe that the week of rioting, the bloodiest and deadliest in American history, was just a venting of wartime frustrations. However, evidence now appears to lead to well-organized groups of working class men carrying out sabotage, arson, and mayhem in a systematic fashion that threatened the future of the Union war effort.

Lincoln was fearful that the New York riots would jeopardize the recent successes in the field. According to Roy Basler's The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), he remarks: "On Saturday, July 11, President Lincoln telegraphed his son Robert at the New-York Fifth Avenue hotel in Manhattan: 'Come to Washington.' "Lincoln had early warning of the impending riot, feared the worst.

Sunday, July 12, the city of New York dawned quiet and shops of all kinds opened for business - few observing the Sabbath.

William O. Stoddard, an aide to Lincoln, happened to be in the city on a leave of absence from the White House. He and his brother Henry were having breakfast in City Hall Park when a great commotion caught their attention.

A mob of armed white men was chasing after an ambulance carrying a wounded black man.

Soon the sound of cursing, shouting, and the shattering of glass was heard. It didn't take them long to see that a retaliatory attack was being made upon the black population of the city. The Stoddard brothers returned to their hotel to retrieve a weapon and then proceeded downtown to purchase a larger caliber handgun.

New York City officials deputized hundreds of citizens and opened the armories to arm them. Wall Street was the first area posted with armed citizens.

Someone dragged a howitzer in front of the Treasury building. Young J.P. Morgan watched from a street corner. He would just returned to the city from one of his most successful business ventures yet. Morgan had purchased a supply of cheaply made rifles for $3 apiece and sold them in the field to a Union general for $22 each.

Fortunately for Morgan, he was already far away when the weapons proved too defective to use.

By Monday morning Irish rioters fearing unwanted competition from increasing numbers of blacks caroused around the streets rolling barrels of kerosene. They attacked the first of two lottery offices and set it ablaze. The lottery system was so fraught with corrupt loopholes that a mere seven percent of those drafted actually ended up in uniform. Only the most destitute men who could not bribe or buy their way out of the obligation were netted by the system.

The mob searched out black businesses and looted them. Black merchants were beaten and strung up on lamp posts. The Colored Orphanage was torched and the commander of a state militia unit, Colonel H.F. O'Brien was beaten to death as he tried to stop the violence.

Federal troops were called in and the 7th New York Volunteers were among the first on the scene, fresh from their non-combat posting just west of the nation's capital during the Battle of Gettysburg. Other army units called to New York City included the 152nd New York, the 26th Michigan, the 27th Indiana and the 7th Regiment New York State Militia.

By Wednesday, July 15 some semblance of order had returned. Estimates of dead and wounded tallied around 2,500. Actual dead ranged from 100 to 1000 depending upon whose sensational newspaper report one chose to believe. The riot was the ugliest incident of its kind in American history.

President Lincoln barely had time to digest the implications of the Gettysburg and Vicksburg news before the New York riots made him fear that similar violent outbreaks might occur in other cities. Lincoln learned not long after that the U.S.S. Wyoming, an American warship in the Pacific searching for Raphael Semmes and the C.S.S. Alabama, had wandered into Japanese waters and opened fire on the navy of Japanese lord, Mori Takachika, in what became known as the Battle of Shimonoseki Straits. America joined with Britain in trying to force Japan to open trade with the West.

"What next?" Lincoln must have thought during this week of July 12 through 18 in 1863.

When Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, entered the President's office to announce yet another record increase of the Federal debt, it must have sounded almost cheery to have some nonviolent news for a change.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant).

See more columns online at www.moultrienews.com. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com.