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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.