New York City Draft Riots – 1863
By
John C Abercrombie
Today is day 19 of 28 in a 28 day series honoring Black History Month 2023. Focused on Race Riots and Massacres. Who would have thought that there was a connection between New York and the South strong for them to consider joining the succession from the union.
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Day 19 of 28 days of Amazngblackhistory a tributte to Black History Month 2023 dedicated to the exposure of Racee Riots and Massacres that have affected so many on both sides of the issue. To see the entire mini-series click this incredible link
Because of the lack of truth in the history of the United States, the picture that we have is often skewed in unimaginable ways. Such is the New York Draft Riots of July 1863. The picture that the North did not profit from slavery is much exaggerated and represents many factories that supplied clothing, even ships to transport enslaved people to America and other products to the South, likewise many of the larger financial institutions such as insurance companies and banks profited handsomely from the slave trade. Many are still profitable today. Attempts to oversimply a complex situation has resulted in a very messy situation that we are still afraid to face today.
The New York Draft Riots started with anger of the working-class White New Yorkers over a federal draft law during the Civil War that saw some of the bloodiest and most destructive rioting in United States History. Hundreds of people were killed, and an even larger number seriously injured. Blacks were in the middle and the target of the rioters’ violence.
New York City itself was divided in the Pre-Civil War. It was recognized as the business capital of the nation, and most had not welcomed the onset of the Civil War as it meant losing the South as an important trading partner. Again, the skewed view that the nation was completely divided and that the North was completely on one side and the South the other is inaccurate at best. There have been slaves in the North, however it was not as conducive to the slave system as practiced in the South.
As shocking as news that New York considered secession is the fact that the slave states of Deleware, Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri did not and remained as part of the United States rather than join another country that fought against the United States.
Cotton was an extremely valuable product for the merchants of New York. Cotton represented 40% of all goods shipped out New York’s ports and long after the slave trade was made illegal in 1808, the city’s underground market in enslaved people continued to thrive.
Again we see complications that are seldom if ever talked about as there was discussion of New York succeeding from the United States of America, so entwined were the cities business interests with the Confederated States of America. This shows the intertwined nature that is excluded from history. How is it possible to learn from a bunch of lies?
As the war progressed, we see propaganda from the anti-war politicians and newspapers that fueled so much hared. White citizens were warned that emancipation would mean their replacement in the labor force would be the thousands of freed enslaves people from the South, looking for better conditions.
President Abraham Lincoln’s announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation only served to confirm the worker’s worst fears. This was not the true result of the proclamation, however but rumors without truth are like a runaway train and cause lots of lasting damage. At the time, Lincoln’s decision for emancipation sparked protests among workers in the city, as well as soldiers and officers in New York regiments who had signed up to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery.
The actual law that fed the unrest. Facing a dire shortage of manpower in early 1863, Lincoln’s government passed a strict new conscription law, which made all male citizens between 20 and 35 and all unmarried men between 35 and 45 subject to military duty. Though all eligible men were entered into a lottery, they could buy their way out of harm’s way by hiring a substitute or paying $300 to the government (roughly $5,800 today). At the time, that sum was the yearly salary for the average American worker, making avoiding the draft impossible for all but the wealthiest of men. Compounding the issue, Black men were exempt from the draft, as they were not considered citizens. These Blacks were more than willing to fight, but again we see political maneuvers that furled disruption.
While New York was the center of the discontent, other cities including Detroit and Boston had problems, just not as bad as New York.
Anti-war newspapers published attacks on the new draft law, fueling the mounting anger of White workers leading up to the city’s first draft lottery on July 11, 1863.
Thousands of White workers started by attacking military and government buildings and became violent only toward people who tried to stop them, including the insufficient numbers of policemen and soldiers the city’s leaders initially mustered to oppose them. By that afternoon, however, they had moved on to target Black citizens, homes, and businesses.
In one notorious example, a mob of several thousand people, some armed with clubs and bats, stormed the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue near 42nd Street, a four-story building housing more than 200 children.
They took bedding, food, clothing, and other goods and set fire to the orphanage, but stopped short of assaulting the children, who were forced to go to one of the city’s almshouses.
Riots Cause Violence and Bloodshed
In addition to Black people themselves, rioters turned their rage against White abolitionists and women who were married to Black men.
White dockworkers, long opposed to the Black men working on the docks alongside them—a demonstration against employers hiring Black workers on the docks had turned violent earlier in 1863—took the opportunity to destroy many of the businesses near the docks that catered to Black workers, and attack their owners, as part of their effort to erase the Black working class from the city.
By far the worst violence was reserved for Black men, a number of whom were lynched or beaten to death with shocking brutality. In all, the published death toll of the New York City draft riots was 119 people, though estimates of the actual number of people killed reached as high as 1,200.
How the Draft Riots Ended
New York leaders struggled with the task of containing the draft riots: Governor Horatio Seymour was a Peace Democrat, who had openly opposed the draft law and appeared sympathetic to the riot.
New York City’s Republican mayor, George Opdyke, wired the War Department to send federal troops but hesitated on declaring martial law in response to the rioting.
On July 15, the third day of the protests, rioting spread to Brooklyn and Staten Island. The following day, the first of more than 4,000 federal troops arrived, from New York regiments who had been fighting in the Battle of Gettysburg.
After clashing with rioters in what is now the Murray Hill neighborhood, the troops were finally able to restore order, and by midnight of July 16 the New York City draft riots had come to an end.
Aftermath and Legacy
In addition to the death toll, the riots had caused millions of dollars in property damage and made some 3,000 of the city’s Black residents homeless.
The New York Draft Riots remain the deadliest riots in U.S. history, even worse than the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the 1967 Detroit Riots.
When the Colored Orphan Asylum attempted to rebuild on the same site after the riots, neighboring property owners protested, and the orphanage would eventually be relocated to the sparsely settled area north of the city that would later become Harlem.
Stunned by the riots, the abolitionist movement in New York City revived itself slowly, and in March 1864, less than a year after the draft riots, New York City saw its first all-Black volunteer regiment in the Union Army march with pomp and circumstance through the streets before boarding their ship in the Hudson River.
But despite this meaningful victory, the draft riots would have a devastating impact on the city’s Black community. While the 1860 census recorded 12,414 Black New Yorkers, by 1865 the city’s Black population had declined to 9,945 by 1865, the lowest number since 1820.
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New York City Draft Riots
New York City Draft Riots of 1863
It was the second largest insurrection in United States history and occurred in the middle of the largest insurrection in United States History. The History Guy remembers when immigrants, police, African Americans and the army clashed in New York City in the midst of the Civil War.
The History Guy uses images that are in the Public Domain. As photographs of actual events are often not available, I will sometimes use photographs of similar events or objects for illustration.
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Book
The New York City Draft Riots of 1863: The History of the Notorious Insurrection at the Height of the Civil War
Most adults alive today either remember or have heard of the turbulent 1960s, but far fewer are familiar with the similarities those more recent protests had with the earlier unrest of a century earlier. Although the Civil War is remembered as the seminal event of American history, and it is often portrayed as the Lincoln administration and the North fighting bravely to preserve the Union and ultimately end slavery, the truth at the time was far more complicated. Perhaps most notably, as with Vietnam, the Civil War was very unpopular among many in the North, especially in large, manufacturing cities that were dependent on the South for raw materials. Also, as African Americans made their way north in the hopes of making new lives for themselves, they often encountered racism and outright violence. Native-born Americans and newly-arrived immigrants alike often resented black men taking jobs they felt were theirs by right, and in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, many men were hesitant to fight on behalf of a cause that they saw as being for the benefit of blacks.
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The New York City Draft Riots: US History Review
What were the 1863 NYC Draft Riots? In this video lecture, we will look at the historical context which led to these Civil War era riots, the riots themselves and the important effects. Check out HipHughes History on the web at www.hiphughes.com where you can access the video arsenal of over 450 history and teaching videos.
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Book
The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War
For five days in July 1863, at the height of the Civil War, New York City was under siege. Angry rioters burned draft offices, closed factories, destroyed railroad tracks and telegraph lines, and hunted policemen and soldiers. Before long, the rioters turned their murderous wrath against the black community. In the end, at least 105 people were killed, making the draft riots the most violent insurrection in American history.
In this vividly written book, Iver Bernstein tells the compelling story of the New York City draft riots. He details how what began as a demonstration against the first federal draft soon expanded into a sweeping assault against the local institutions and personnel of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party as well as a grotesque race riot. Bernstein identifies participants, dynamics, causes and consequences, and demonstrates that the “winners” and “losers” of the July 1863 crisis were anything but clear, even after five regiments rushed north from Gettysburg restored order. In a tour de force of historical detection, Bernstein shows that to evaluate the significance of the riots we must enter the minds and experiences of a cast of characters–Irish and German immigrant workers, Wall Street businessmen who frantically debated whether to declare martial law, nervous politicians in Washington and at City Hall. Along the way, he offers new perspectives on a wide range of topics: Civil War society and politics, patterns of race, ethnic and class relations, the rise of organized labor, styles of leadership, philanthropy and reform, strains of individualism, and the rise of machine politics in Boss Tweed’s Tammany regime.
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In Search Of History – The Civil War Draft Riots (History Channel Documentary)
The Draft Riot of 1863: Irish whiteness, industrialization and how contemporaries and media since have “black-washed” the events.
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Book
The Great Riots Of New York, 1712 To 1873: Including A Full And Complete Account Of The Four Days Draft Riot of 1863.
Published in 1873, this is the history of the great riots in New York between the years of 1712 and 1873. Includes a complete account of the four days draft riot of 1863.
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The Draft Riot of 1863
The Draft Riot of 1863: Irish whiteness, industrialization and how contemporaries and media since have “black-washed” the events
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Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past
America’s top historians set the record straight on the most pernicious myths about our nation’s past.
The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media have led large numbers of Americans to believe in fictions over facts, making constructive dialogue impossible and imperiling our democracy.
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In Search Of History – The Civil War Draft Riots (History Channel Documentary)
The New York City draft riots (July 13–16, 1863), known at the time as Draft Week, were violent disturbances in Lower Manhattan, widely regarded as the culmination of white working-class discontent with new laws passed by Congress that year to draft men to fight in the ongoing American Civil War.
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As we discuss the subject of Black History, many of us are in a quandary. Where was this information all of my life? Why have I not heard about this? How do I find more information? All legitimate questions and deserving of answers.
We have not heard about most of this information because it can be embarrassing to Europeans who want to preserve a picture of perfection when it comes to their actions. This is unfair not only to people of color who are denied their history, accomplishments, struggles and triumphs and most of all opportunities. For the same reasons it is totally unfair to White people because they have been denied the opportunity to realize the importance of others on the team. Many White people carry around guilt because history has been manipulated to such an extent. They believe that all Whites were slave owners and readily accept the shame of the system. There are large numbers of Whites who disagreed with the system even in the South as well as Whites in the North who agreed with it. It is the lack of truth that makes the discussion so painful. We have gone to lengths to include other sources of information such as videos and books.
Books that have spoken the truth all along but have been hidden in an attempt to avoid any hint of controversy. Let us jump ahead here. We can’t change history, but we can respond to it and work to make a better future. If you had slave owners in your family, there is nothing you can do about the past, but you can face the reality and work to make a better future. The Books featured here are available in several forms, soft cover, hard cover, Kindle (eBook) and Audible (read to you). Using our links you can sample the books before buying and make yourself a lot smarter about this difficult subject.
Sample and amaze yourself, but with the knowledge that you are buying directly from Amazon or other trusted partners.
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Black Roots: A Beginners Guide To Tracing The African American Family Tree
Trace, document, record, and write your family’s history with this easy-to-read, step-by-step authoritative guide.
Finally, here is the fun, easy-to-use guide that African Americans have been waiting for since Alex Haley published Roots more than twenty-five years ago. Written by the leading African American professional genealogist in the United States who teaches and lectures widely, Black Roots highlights some of the special problems, solutions, and sources unique to African Americans. Based on solid genealogical principles and designed for those who have little or no experience researching their family’s past, but valuable to any genealogist, this book explains everything you need to get started, including: where to search close to home, where to write for records, how to make the best use of libraries and the Internet, and how to organize research, analyze historical documents, and write the family history.
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It should not be a surprise that New York considered succession from the United States of America, after all enslavement and the resulting greed that accompany it are American values. Rather it is a shocker because we have gone to extremes to present a united and totally one-sided view of history. Yes, it may be embarrassing to some, but is that a valid reason to misconstrue the facts? While we can’t go back and change history, we can be mature enough to recognize the devastating impact of teaching generations false information. It is time to return truth to history, have mature conversations and improve our future.