, has been already indicated. The main object of the parties
in the background, who had constantly been fomenting discord, was
undoubtedly to aid the cause of the Southern rebellion, with whom they
sympathize, not perhaps because they care for the South, but because
they think their own interests demand its cooeperation. The chief design
of the first peacebreakers was to stop the draft, that they might not be
forced away from home to fight, against their wishes. That they knew the
real designs of their instigators, or that they had any prompters to the
specific acts which inaugurated the riot, is not probable; that, after
the commencement of the sedition, they were joined by such, and urged to
further violence, cannot be doubted.

The insurrection had not, therefore, in its largest proportions, one
single distinctive purpose, and was not the work of one set of men. It
was a rising against the draft, but not wholly so. It was a blow in aid
of the South, though not this only. It was a thieves' tumult, but that
was not all. It was all of these, with some other ingredients,
previously mentioned, the whole clustering and crystallizing around a
nucleus of crude, ignorant, hard-working, passionate, rough, turbulent
men, deceived by the adroit misrepresentations of interested persons,
until, driven to madness by a sense of supposed injustice, they believed
themselves justified in securing redress by the only means they knew.

Shall we stop here in our analysis of the nature and constituents of the
New York mob? Have we yet discovered the fundamental causes which
produced the riot, so that we shall be able to prevent such recurrences
in the future? Or have we in reality only penetrated the crust of the
question, and ascertained the immediate and superficial causes, not the
radical and basic ones? The latter is the case. We have thus far seen
the apparent and proximate causes merely--which brought to the surface,
at the present time, a riotous disposition, always existent in the
community, a volcano slumbering and smouldering, ever ready to burst
forth and deluge society with its withering and destroying lava,
whenever the flame is fitly fanned. Until we know the source of this
riotous tendency in a portion of our population, the deeper cause of
this recent outbreak, as of all our outbreaks, we are yet ignorant of
the true sources of the frightful disturbance which our social order has
sustained, in any such sense as makes a know