me. Benjamin
Snow, a smart Colored man, keeping a restaurant on the corner of
Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, was reported to have made some
remark of a bravado kind derogatory to the wives of white mechanics;
whereupon this class, or those assuming to represent them, made a
descent upon his establishment, destroying all his effects. Snow
himself, who denied using the offensive language, with difficulty
escaped unharmed, through the management of white friends, taking
refuge in Canada, where he still resides. The military was promptly
called to the rescue, at the head of which was General Walter Jones,
the eminent lawyer, who characterized the rioters, greatly to their
indignation, as "a set of ragamuffins," and his action was thoroughly
sanctioned by the city authorities.

At the same time, also, there was a fierce excitement among the
mechanics at the Navy Yard, growing out of the fact that a large
quantity of copper bolts being missed from the yard and found to have
been carried out in the dinner-pails by the hands, the commandant had
forbid eating dinners in the yard. This order was interpreted as an
insult to the white mechanics, and threats were made of an assault on
the yard, which was put in a thorough state of defence by the
commandant. The rioters swept through the city, ransacking the houses
of the prominent Colored men and women, ostensibly in search of
anti-slavery papers and documents, the most of the gang impelled
undoubtedly by hostility to the Negro race and by motives of plunder.
Nearly all the Colored school-houses were partially demolished and the
furniture totally destroyed, and in several cases they were completely
ruined. Some private houses were also torn down or burnt. The Colored
schools were nearly all broken up, and it was with the greatest
difficulty that the Colored churches were saved from destruction, as
their Sabbath-schools were regarded, and correctly regarded, as the
means through which the Colored people, at that time, procured much of
their education.

The rioters sought, especially, for John F. Cook, who, however, had
seasonably taken from the stable the horse of his friend, Mr. Hayward,
the Commissioner of the Land Office, an anti-slavery man, and fled
precipitately from the city. They marched to his school-house,
destroyed all the books and furniture, and partially destroyed the
building. Mrs. Smothers, who owned both the school-house and the
dwelling adjoining the lots,