"My friends." : When in July 1863, the city of New York was under the reign of a mob, when stores were closed, workshops shut, cars and stages laid up, alarm bells ringing, dwellings burning, inoffensive women and children seeking prisons for safety, unoffending men hanging and roasting at lamp posts, the horizon lighted up by burning orphan asylums, at such a time when no man felt safe, when every citizen had to guard his home, when peaceful law-abiding citizens had to patrol the streets for mutual protection, when law and order were as it seemed, dead, when arson, plunder, murder, and all the infernal passions of a brutalized mob were holding high carnival, and civilization went draped in mourning, then Horatio Seymour. the candidate of the McClellan Confederate Peace Democracy for governor of New York, requested the men doing these bloody deeds, to meet him in front of the City Hall in New York, and there began his coaxing, blarneying address to them, with the words "My friends." ...