MAKING HISTORY COME ALIVE NEWSLETTER CONTINUES WIH HISTORY OF SLAVERY, NEW YORK CITY DRAFT RIOTS JULY, 1863
“I am a whitewasher by trade, and have worked, boy and man, in this city for sixty-three years. On Tuesday afternoon I was standing on the corner of Thirtieth street and Second avenue, when a crowd of young men came running along shouting “Here’s a nigger, here’s a nigger.” Almost before I knew of their intention, I was knocked down, kicked here and there, badgered and battered without mercy, until a cry of “the Peelers are coming” was raised; and I was left almost senseless, with a broken arm and a face covered with blood, on the railroad track. I was helped home on a cart by the officers, who were very kind to me, and gave me some brandy before I got home.”
Our attention was early called to this outrage by a number of letters from the relatives and friends of the children, anxiously inquiring as to the whereabouts of the little ones. It is well known that as soon as the Bull’s Head Hotel had been attacked by the mob, their next destination was the Colored Orphan Asylum, on Fifth Avenue, near Forty-third Street. The crowd had swelled to an immense number at this locality and went professionally to work in order to destroy the building, and, at the same time, to make appropriation of anything of value by which they might aggrandize themselves. About four hundred entered the house at the time, and immediately proceeded to pitch out beds, chairs, tables, and every species of furniture, which were eagerly seized by the crowd below, and carried off. When all was taken, the house was then set on fire, and shared the fate of the others.
While the rioters were clamoring for admittance at the front door, the Matron and Superintendent were quietly and rapidly conducting the children out the back yard, down to the police station. They remained there until Thursday, (the burning of the Asylum occurred on Monday, July 13th, when they were all removed in safety to Blackwell’s Island, where they still remain.There were 230 children between the ages of 4 and 12 years in the home at the time of the riot.
What you are reading did not occur in a third world nation or one that was threatened by terrorists, this was New York City in 1863, a riot that developed into the largest racially themed in our country.
New York was going through a point in its history where politics were so polarized that Mayor Fernando Wood went to Albany to push for secession of New York City from the state of New York. Although Republicans attempted to keep abolitionists from taking a leading role in New York's antislavery politics during the early years of the war, by 1862 abolitionist speakers drew huge audiences, black and white, in the city. Increasing support for the abolitionists and for emancipation led to anxiety among New York's white proslavery supporters of the Democratic Party, particularly the Irish. From the time of Lincoln's election in 1860, the Democratic Party had warned New York's Irish and German residents to prepare for the emancipation of slaves and the resultant labor competition when southern Black people would supposedly flee north.
Remember New York City was a divided city pre-civil war. As the business capital of the nation, New York City had not welcomed the onset of the Civil War, as it meant losing the South as an important trading partner.Cotton was an extremely valuable product for New York’s merchants: Before the Civil War, cotton represented 40 percent of all the goods shipped out of the city’s port. And long after the slavery trade was made illegal in 1808, the city’s underground market in enslaved people continued to thrive.
The city was also a continuing destination of immigrants. Since the 1840s, most were from Ireland and Germany. In 1860, nearly 25 percent of the New York City population was German-born, and many did not speak English. During the 1840s and 1850s, journalists had published sensational accounts, directed at the white working class, dramatizing the evils of interracial socializing, relationships, and marriages. Reformers joined the effort. Newspapers carried derogatory portrayals of Black people and ridiculed "black aspirations for equal rights in voting, education, and employment". From the time of Lincoln's election in 1860, the Democratic Party had warned New York's Irish and German residents to prepare for the emancipation of slaves and the resultant labor competition when southern Black people would supposedly flee north.
The Democratic Party’s Tammy Hall political machine had been working to enroll immigrants as U.S. citizens so they could vote in local elections and had strongly recruited Irish. In March 1863, with the war continuing, Congress passed the Enrollment Act to establish a draft for the first time, as more troops were needed. In New York City and other locations, new citizens learned they were expected to register for the draft to fight for their new country. Black men were excluded from the draft as they were largely not considered citizens, and wealthier white men could pay for substitutes.
The Emancipation Proclamation was confirmation of their worst fears of the white population. Those who could afford to hire a substitute or pay the government three hundred dollars might avoid enlistment. The Conscription Act that would trigger the rioting in July 1863 was an act born of necessity Those who could afford to hire a substitute or pay the government three hundred dollars might avoid enlistment. Black people, who were not considered citizens, were exempt from the draft. With 130 regiments scheduled to leave for home in May and June, the Union Army needed 300,000 new recruits, and leaders in Washington were worried that few of the initially optimistic volunteers would reenlist. The new bill called for all male citizens between the ages of 20 and 45 to be enrolled in two classes. The first included single men between the ages of 20 and 45 and married men between the ages of 20 and 35, while the second included married men between the ages of 35 and 45. The second class would only be called up after the first class had been exhausted. Those men who were mentally or physically disabled, or who were the sole support of aged or widowed parents or orphaned children, were exempt from service. The bill’s most controversial provision allowed a draftee to escape service by providing a substitute or paying a $300 commutation fee. At a time when a New York laborer might make no more than $6 a week, paying a $300 commutation fee represented a financial impossibility.
In the month preceding the July 1863 lottery, in a pattern similar to the 1834 anti-abolition riots, antiwar newspaper editors published inflammatory attacks on the draft law aimed at inciting the white working class. They criticized the federal government's intrusion into local affairs on behalf of the "nigger war." Democratic Party leaders raised the specter of a New York deluged with southern Black people in the aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation. White workers compared their value unfavorably to that of southern slaves, stating that "[we] are sold for $300 [the price of exemption from war service] whilst they pay $1000 for negroes." In the midst of war-time economic distress, they believed that their political leverage and economic status was rapidly declining as Black people appeared to be gaining power.
On Saturday, July 11, 1863, the lottery of the conscription law was the first drawing of draft number occurred peaceably in Manhattan. The second drawing was held on Monday, July 13, 1863, ten days after the Union victory at Gettsburg. At 10 am, a furious crowd of around 500, led by the volunteer firemen of Engine Company 33 (known as the "Black Joke"), attacked the assistant Ninth District provost marshal's office, at Third Avenue and 47th Street, where the draft was taking place. New York was grievously ill prepared to respond to any large-scale civil disturbance. Twenty thousand state militiamen who might otherwise have been in the city were in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where Union forces led by Maj. Gen. George G. Meade were repulsing Robert E. Lee’s Confederate invasion. Maj. Gen. John Wool, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War who now commanded the Department of the East, had a mere 550 men scattered in small garrisons at the city’s harbor forts and the navy yard, plus the Invalid Corps and the Provost Marshals. There were almost no military vessels in the harbor.
The crowd threw large paving stones through windows, burst through the doors, and set the building ablaze. When the fire department responded, rioters broke up their vehicles. Others killed horses that were pulling streetcars and smashed the cars. To prevent other parts of the city being notified of the riot, rioters cut telegraph lines. the local New York Metropolitan Police Department was the only force on hand to try to suppress the riots. Police drew their clubs and revolvers and charged the crowd but were overpowered. The police were badly outnumbered and unable to quell the riots.
The Bull's Head hotel on 44th Street, which refused to provide alcohol to the rioters, was burned. The mayor's residence on Fifth Avenue was spared by words of Judge George Gardner Barnard, and the crowd of about 500 turned to another location of pillage. The Eighth and Fifth District police stations, and other buildings were attacked and set on fire. Other targets included the office of the New York Times. . The mob was turned back at the Times office by staff manning Gatling guns , including Times founder Henry Jarvis Raymond. Fire engine companies responded, but some firefighters were sympathetic to the rioters because they had also been drafted on Saturday. The New York Tribune was attacked, being looted and burned; not until police arrived and extinguished the flames was the crowd dispersed. Later in the afternoon, authorities shot and killed a man as a crowd attacked the armory at Second Avenue and 21st Street. The mob broke all the windows with paving stones ripped from the street The mob beat, tortured and/or killed numerous black civilians, including one man who was attacked by a crowd of 400 with clubs and paving stones, then lynched , hanged from a tree and set alight.
The Colored Orphan Asylum at 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue, a "symbol of white charity to blacks and of black upward mobility that provided shelter for 233 children, was attacked by a mob at around 4 pm. A mob of several thousand, including many women and children, looted the building of its food and supplies. However, the police were able to secure the orphanage for enough time to allow the orphans to escape before the building burned down. Throughout the areas of rioting, mobs attacked and killed numerous black civilians and destroyed their known homes and businesses, such as James McCune Smith’s pharmacy at 93 West Broadway, believed to be the first owned by a black man in the United States. This was just the first day of rioting.
Near the docks, tensions that had been brewing since the mid-1850s between white dock workers and Black workers boiled over. As recently as March of 1863, white employers had hired Black people as dock workers, with whom Irish men refused to work. An Irish mob then attacked two hundred Black people who were working on the docks, while other rioters went into the streets in search of "all the negro porters, cartmen and laborers . . . they could find." They were routed by the police. But in July 1863, white dock workers took advantage of the chaos of the Draft Riots to attempt to remove all evidence of a Black and interracial social life from area near the docks. White dockworkers attacked and destroyed brothels, dance halls, boarding houses, and tenements that catered to Black people; mobs stripped the clothing off the white owners of these businesses.
With these actions white workers enacted their desires to eradicate the working-class Black male presence from the city. The Longshoreman's Association, a white labor union, patrolled the piers during the riots, insisting that "the colored people must and shall be driven to other parts of industry. such as cartmen and hack drivers, not to mention skilled artisans, also sought to exclude Black workers” The riots gave all these workers license to physically remove Black people not only from worksites, but also from neighborhoods and leisure spaces. The rioters' actions also indicate the degree to which the sensational journalists and reformers of the 1840s and 1850s had achieved their goals of convincing whites, and particularly the Irish, that interracial socializing and marriage were evil and degrading practices. The riots unequivocally divided white workers from Black people. The act of rioting may itself have released guilt and shame over former interracial pleasures. Finally, and most simply, white workers asserted their superiority over Black people through the riots. The Civil War and the rise of the Republican Party and Lincoln to power indicated to New York's largely Democratic white workers a reversal of power in the nation; Black labor competition indicated a reversal of fortunes in New York City itself. White workers sought to remedy their upside-down world through mob violence.
Such ferocity characterized the rioters’ attacks throughout the second day of violence. The assault on African Americans was ongoing. William Williams, a seaman from the naval transport Belvidere, was attacked and beaten when he asked for directions to a grocery store. An Irish laborer who lived nearby threw stones at Williams before dropping a heavy flagstone on his chest and jumping up and down on it. Police later took Williams to the hospital, where he soon died of his wounds. Others proved more fortunate, fleeing their homes while the mobs were busy ransacking them. Mrs. Hester Scott later recounted a dramatic escape from her four-story house: “We tied the sheets together, attached them to the roof, and we got down on the sheets,” she noted. “One little girl, ten years of age, was let down; my husband lowered me and then my little girl; and then my husband came down.”
Individuals and families were not the only targets of racially motivated attacks. After rioters attacked a vessel from Nassau that had tied up near Fulton Ferry, the British consul general in New York successfully appealed to Admiral Reymond of the French frigate Guerriere to take Black sailors from British ships on board. The French vessel took 200 English seamen on board. An additional 100 blacks from the West Indies took shelter in the British consulate building.
About noon on Tuesday, Opdyke formally appealed to Edwin Stanton to send federal troops. The secretary of war immediately dispatched five regiments to the city from Pennsylvania and Maryland. For Republicans, the soldiers could not arrive soon enough, and many still held out hope that Opdyke would declare martial law. To some, the current state of affairs demanded such a drastic step. One businessman described the current state of affairs as “the beginning of a new era of violence, resistance to law, contempt of the government, and disregard of all public and private good.”
The human costs were harder to calculate. There was no conclusive agreement on the number of people who had lost their lives, with the count ranging from a low of slightly more than 100 to a high approaching 1,500. No more than 119 deaths can be definitively accounted for. The relative anonymity of the large crowds, as well as understandable reluctance on the part of surviving family members to report the death of a loved one for fear of official reprisals, make a persuasive case for a much higher death toll. The ferocity of the fighting, particularly on Tuesday and Wednesday, would certainly suggest that many more than 105 people died.
Despite promises from Opdyke and Oakley Hall, the city’s district attorney, that they would deal harshly with rioters, few were ever brought to justice. Of the 443 people arrested as suspected rioters, 221 were released, 10 were discharged by the judge due to insufficient evidence, 13 were allowed to enlist in the Union Army, two were deserters who were returned to the military, and one escaped. Of those remaining, the grand jury refused to indict 36 cases, and the 74 cases that were indicted were never brought to trial. Eighty-one rioters came to trial: 14 were acquitted and 67 were convicted. The court sentenced 25 of those convicted to six months or less.
The draft riots in New York City represented a serious, if brief, threat to the Union. Although events during these four July days played out on a local level, their implications were national. Failure to enforce conscription would have starved the Union Army of much-needed soldiers and blunted its momentum. The larger question was whether Lincoln’s expanded administration could survive. The riot, one Union League member warned Edwin Stanton, was “the last great card of the rebellion.” That it had been played not by Confederates but by immigrant laborers and their Democratic patrons was a reminder of just how fragile popular support remained for the Union war effort in teeming, combustible New York City.