“You will no doubt be hard on us rioters tomorrow morning,” a man wrote the New York Times on the second day of anarchy, “but that 300-dollar law has made us nobodies, vagabonds, and cast-outs of a society, for whom nobody cares when we must go to war and be shot down. We are the poor rabble, and the rich rabble is our enemy by this law . . . Why don’t they let the nigger kill the slave-driving race and take possession of the South?”
