Download Draft Riot and Emancipation Reading

Draft Riot of 1863,
Draft Riot of 1863 major four-day eruption of violence in New York City resulting from deep
worker discontent with the inequities of conscription during the U.S. Civil War. Although
labouring people in general supported the Northern war effort, they had no voice in Republican
policy and occasionally deserted from the army or refused reenlistment. Because of their low
wages, often less than $500 a year, they were particularly antagonized by the federal provision
allowing more affluent draftees to buy their way out of the Federal Army for $300. Minor riots
occurred in several cities, and when the drawing of names began in New York on July 11, 1863,
mobs (mostly of foreign-born, especially Irish, workers) surged onto the streets, assaulting
residents, defying police, attacking draft headquarters, and burning buildings. Property damage
eventually totaled $1,500,000.
The New York draft riot was also closely associated with racial competition for jobs. Northern
labour feared that emancipation of slaves would cause an influx of African American workers
from the South, and employers did in fact use black workers as strikebreakers during this
period. Thus, the white rioters eventually vented their wrath on the homes and businesses of
innocent African Americans, and Civil War freedmen’s associations were forced to send aid to
their brethren in New York. (This racial ill feeling in the ranks of urban labour persisted into the
second half of the 20th century.) The four-day draft riot was finally quelled by police
cooperating with the 7th N.Y. Regiment, which had been hastily recalled from Gettysburg, and
the drawing of names proceeded on August 19 without incident.
During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation
Proclamation, calling on the Union army to liberate all slaves in states still in rebellion as “an act
of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity.” These three million slaves
were declared to be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” The proclamation exempted the
border slave states that remained in the Union at the start of the Civil War and all or parts of
three Confederate states controlled by the Union army.
As a Republican politician, Lincoln had fought to isolate slavery from the new territories, not
outlaw it outright, and this policy carried over into his presidency. Even after the Civil War
began, Lincoln, though he privately detested slavery, moved cautiously on the emancipation
issue. However, in 1862, the federal government began to realize the strategic advantages of
emancipation: The liberation of slaves would weaken the Confederacy by depriving it of a major
portion of its labor force, which would in turn strengthen the Union by producing an influx of
manpower.
That year, Congress annulled the fugitive slave laws, prohibited slavery in the U.S. territories,
and authorized Lincoln to employ freed slaves in the army. Following the major Union victory at
the Battle of Antietam in September, Lincoln issued a warning of his intent to issue an
Emancipation Proclamation for all states still in rebellion on New Year’s Day.
The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the Civil War from a war against secession into a
war for “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln stated in his Gettysburg Address in 1863. This
ideological change discouraged the intervention of France or England on the Confederacy’s
behalf and enabled the Union to enlist the 200,000 African-American soldiers and sailors who
volunteered to fight between January 1, 1863, and the conclusion of the war. In 1865, the 13th
Amendment to the Constitution formally abolished slavery.