Were more hateful words ever howled by a mob in New York history?

“Burn the niggers’ nest.”

This was one of the cries taken up by a crowd that descended on the Colored Orphan Asylum during the first night of the draft riots in July 1863. The sentiments left no doubt about the attackers’ goal: to kill African-American children.

Providence and quick thinking spared the 233 youths from death or injury, though the riots would claim more than 100 lives. But the asylum, a Greek Revival building that sat prettily atop a hillock off Fifth Avenue, between West 43rd and 44th Streets, was destroyed by the mob.

“Some 500 of them entered the house,” the asylum managers reported on July 25, 1863, in a record book now kept at the New-York Historical Society. “After despoiling it of Furniture, Bedding, Clothing, &c. &c. — they deliberately sat fire to it, in different parts — simply because it was the home of unoffending colored Orphan Children.”