On July 11, 1863, the draft began, and on the 13th, Monday, when an effort was made to renew it, the rioting commenced. The first disturbances occurred at the draft headquarters on the corner of Third Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, which were sacked about noon; the disorders grew much worse on Tuesday, and were not entirely suppressed until Thursday. The story of the four days of bloodshed need not be rehearsed in detail, but the _Evening Post_ files afford certain new lights upon it. The historian Rhodes, in his account, draws upon the files of the _Tribune_, _Times_, _World_, _Herald_, and _Post_ as sources, but only upon the issues of the week of the riot. Ten days later (July 23) an 8,000 word history of the riot appeared in the _Evening Post_, a close-knit, graphic narrative, apparently written by Charles Nordhoff, who had been an eye-witness of much of it. Nordhoff makes it clear that the mob was against not merely the draft, but the war. “Seymour’s our man”; “Seymour’s for us”; “Yis, and Wood too”; “It’s Davis and Seymour and Wood,” were expressions heard at every turn. “Cheers for Jeff Davis were as common as brickbats.” Above all, Nordhoff was convinced that the mob had intelligent leaders outside of its own ranks. The nucleus of the mob was a gang of about fifty rough fellows who at nine o’clock in the morning began prowling along the East River wharves in the Grand Street neighborhood, picking up recruits. As the crowd grew in size it entered foundries and factories for more men. “It is absolutely certain that there was no planning or directing head among the acting ringleaders. No one could follow or watch them without seeing that they were instigated; though by whom it was impossible to tell. They were men themselves incapable of self-direction; men of the lowest order and of the most brutal passions--and at that doubly infuriated by rum.” Immediately the destruction of the Third Avenue draft headquarters was complete, the mob split into three parts, which at once sought three important objectives, a fact which Nordhoff regarded as proving outside leadership. One of the three mobs destroyed the Armory on Second Avenue at Twenty-First Street--this was on Monday at four p. m.; a second simultaneously demolished the draft office at Broadway and Twenty-ninth Street; and a third, the largest, sacked and burnt the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue. Meanwhile, small groups had begun hunting down negroes and clubbing them to death. Nordhoff describes a scene during the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum: Opposite the Reservoir stood a knot of gentlemen, strangers to each other. Said one of them, a timid, clerical-looking man: “What are we coming to? Is this to go on? Whose family and dwelling is safe?” “How long is this to last?” asked another--who might have been a merchant.