Half the block was in flames before the firemen could break through and
reach the burning buildings.

Down the Avenue, the maddened mob swept with resistless impulse,
jelling, cursing, shouting its defiance.

"Down with the Abolitionists!"

"Hang Horace Greeley on a sour apple tree!"

"To the _Tribune_ Office!"

Howard, a reporter of the _Tribune_, was recognized:

"Kill him!"

"Hang him!"

The mob seized the reporter, dragged him to a lamp post and were about
to put the rope around his neck when a blow from a cobblestone felled
him to the sidewalk, the blood trickling down his neck.

A man bending over his body, shouted to the crowd:

"He's dead--we'll take the body away!"

A friend helped and they carried him into a store and saved his life.

For three days and nights this mob burned and killed at will and fought
every officer of the law until the streets ran red with blood. They
burned the Negro Orphan Asylum, beat, killed or hanged every negro who
showed his face, sacked the home of Mayor Opdyke, at 79 Fifth Avenue,
and attempted to burn it. They smashed in the _Tribune_ building, gutted
part of it and would have reduced it to ashes but for the brave defense
put up by some of its men.

On the third day the announcement was made that the draft was suspended.
Five thousand troops reached the city and partly succeeded in restoring
order.

More than a thousand men had been killed and three thousand
wounded--among them many women.

The Democratic papers now boldly demanded that the draft should be
officially suspended until its constitutionality could be tested by the
courts. The State and Municipal authorities of New York appealed to the
President to suspend the draft.

He answered:

"If I suspend the draft there can be no army to continue the war and the
days of the Republic are numbered. The life of the Nation is at stake."

They begged for time, and he hesitated for a day. The victories of
Gettysburg and Vicksburg were forgotten in the grim shadow of a possible
repetition of the French Revolution on a vast scale throughout the
North. The mob had already sacked the office of the _Times_ in Troy,
broken out in Boston, and threatened Cincinnati.

The President gave the Governor of New York his final answer by sending
an army of ten thousand veterans into the city. He planted his artillery
to sweep the streets with grape and cannister, and ordered the draft to
be immediately enforced.

The n