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New York City and the Civil War in 1863
http://www.virtualny.cuny.edu/draftriots/Intro/draft_riot_intro_set.html
On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing
all slaves in the rebellious Confederate states. The proclamation marked a major transformation
in the North's reason for fighting the Civil War. The war's first two years witnessed a string of
Confederate battlefield victories and a growing realization throughout the northern states that the
original war aim of preserving the Union had to be broadened to encompass the destruction of
the racial slavery upon which the South's fortunes rested. By summer 1863, the Union army,
which had been entirely white when the war started, began recruiting African-American soldiers,
who would soon be fighting and dying to defend the Union and to destroy the institution of
slavery.
But the North's sagging military fortunes did not immediately change with Lincoln's issuing of
the Emancipation Proclamation and the initial recruitment of black troops into the Union army.
In late spring 1863, Confederate forces, led by General Robert E. Lee, invaded the North through
Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Thousands of Union troops, many volunteers from New York
City, now rushed to Pennsylvania to defend the Union. As July dawned, a titanic battle between
Union and Confederate forces loomed at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Fear swept New York City;
if the Confederate army prevailed, southern troops could potentially invade a defenseless city
within a matter of days. And fears of a Confederate plot to incite unrest in New York City and to
set a series of fires further heightened New Yorkers' concerns about an imminent invasion.
Though Union forces would ultimately prevail at Gettysburg, driving the Confederate army back
into the South, tensions remained high in New York City, largely as a result of the imminent
enforcement by the federal government of the National Conscription Act. Passed in March 1863,
the act made all single men aged twenty to forty-five and married men up to thirty-five subject to
a draft lottery. In addition, the act allowed drafted men to avoid conscription entirely by
supplying someone to take their place or to pay the government a three hundred-dollar
exemption fee. Not surprisingly, only the wealthy could afford to buy their way out of the draft.
The Riot Begins
As a hot and muggy Monday morning dawned on July 13, 1863, a large crowd of New York
working people moved uptown, gathering workers from workshops and factories along the way.
German-speaking artisans and native-born Protestant journeymen (many of them volunteer
firemen, a powerful political and organizational force in the city) marched alongside workingclass Irish laborers; women joined with men. They banded together to express their collective
outrage at the new draft law. Once they reached the Provost Marshall's office on 46th Street and
Third Avenue, the scene of Saturday's first draft lottery, the crowd attacked the building, setting
it on fire.
The crowd quickly moved beyond the initial target of its anger: the draft office. By Monday
evening militant protest against the draft law had been transformed into a series of violent attacks
on a broad range of human and institutional targets that quickly escalated into confrontations
between groups of rioters-- overwhelmingly poor, Irish workers-- and the overwhelmed civil
authorities. Over the course of the next three days bloody street battles raged across New York
City's rich and poor neighborhoods. Before peace was finally restored with the arrival of federal
troops (many directly from the battlefield at Gettysburg) on Thursday, July 16, New York City's
draft riot would become the nation's single most violent civil disorder, with more lives lost than
in any other instance of urban domestic violence in American history.
The Riot's Targets
By analyzing who and what the rioters targeted for attack during the riot we can begin to
understand the complicated social, economic, and political conflicts that divided New York
City's citizens in July 1863.
The city's black citizens were perhaps the most obvious and visible targets of the rioters' wrath.
By the end of the first day of rioting, it was not safe for African Americans to appear in public.
Rioters beat individual black citizens and, in several instances, brutally murdered and mutilated
African-American men. Black New Yorkers weren't even safe inside their homes as roaming
bands of rioters attacked black neighborhoods. Not only were African Americans in danger;
rioters also attacked white New Yorkers who provided shelter for endangered African
Americans, sacking and burning the homes of white sympathizers.
The largely Irish crowds also subjected persons and institutions linked to the Republican party to
a variety of attacks. The Republican-led federal government started the war, instituted the hated
draft, and expanded Union war aims to embrace the abolition of slavery. Irish Catholic workers
also resented the continual efforts of Republican and Protestant reformers to close saloons and
limit drinking in the city's Irish wards.
In lower Manhattan, rioters attacked and set fire to Horace Greeley's New York Daily Tribune,
the city's most pro-Republican newspaper. Rioters even assaulted well-dressed pedestrians whom
they presumed to be Republicans and sacked the homes of wealthy citizens, which the crowd
assumed must be owned by Republicans. The crowd also targeted the badly outnumbered
Metropolitan police force, not only because of police efforts to contain the rioting but also
because of the Metropolitans' close political affiliation with the state Republican party.
Rioters also attacked city merchants and their stores throughout the four days of upheaval. While
many of the crowd attacks on mercantile establishments were merely acts of looting-- rioters
especially prized weapons, luxury goods, and liquor--other assaults had more complicated roots.
The looting and destruction of the Brooks Brothers' store in lower Manhattan on the second day
of rioting, for example, reveals a variety of crowd motivations, both political and sartorial.
Brooks Brothers, a leading clothier of the city's wealthy citizens, also produced clothing for the
Union army under contract to the federal government. And Brooks Brothers had been involved
in a lengthy and very public labor dispute with four hundred of its tailors during the spring. In
attacking Brooks Brothers, the crowd lashed out at an anti-labor symbol of the city's wealthy
citizenry that also happened to be a major supporter of the Union war effort.