nd strength in a
feeling of bitter injustice, entertained by ignorant, simple-minded,
crude men, the lowest class of our population, who had been deliberately
deceived in relation to facts, by unscrupulous politicians, for
ambitious purposes. They had been inflamed with wrath by supposed wrong;
their worst passions were aroused, they had lost their self-control, and
became reckless. It matters little whether the actual hostilities began
by a spontaneous outburst of anger, when the passions had simmered a
long time; or whether the emissaries of the politicians actually incited
to the specific act at a preconcerted period. The responsibility of the
latter is noways diminished if no such intervention occurred; the
essential nature of the outbreak is the same if it did. Had there not
been this deep-seated feeling of wrong on the part of a portion of the
people, the instigations of the emissaries would have met no response.
The sinew of the insurrection was this honest resentment of fancied
injury.

Everything goes to prove that, in the outset, so far as the _original
active rioters_ were concerned, the draft was the immediate cause of the
disturbance. They first burnt one provost marshal's office, and then
proceeded a mile or more to burn another. Then they burnt the colored
asylum. This was the first day's work mainly. There is no adequate
explanation of the hatred exhibited to the negro throughout this riot,
other than the supposition that the mob, or rather that portion of it
who were abusing the blacks, believed that they were being forced from
their homes in the service of a war, the object and purpose of which was
the liberation of the negroes, and that, therefore, in a certain sense,
the colored people were the cause of their being drafted. The peculiar
feature of this mob, as contrasted with ordinary ones, was this
bitterness against the negro.

On the succeeding days, however, the elements of the mob changed. The
same nucleus remained, but other constituents were added to it. Thieves
and plunderers joined it, for the sole purpose doubtless of robbing in
safety; probably the first peacebreakers themselves, not ordinarily
pilferers, carried off the articles of value, which were scattered among
the ruins their rage had created. Scheming politicians fanned the flame
which their teachings had already lit; the journals which are almost
undisguisedly in favor of a dishonorable peace, and of a return of the
Southern Stat