The so-called New York City Draft Riots of 1863 remain one of the bloodiest instances of civil unrest in American history. What ostensibly started as a raucous protest against conscription quickly morphed into a violent campaign of terror directed against New York City’s African American population. Rioters, drawn mostly from New York City’s poor Irish population, beat, tortured, and lynched African Americans. Some torched Black homes and neighborhoods in an attempt to erase any presence of African Americans within the city. Meanwhile, massive crowds of rioters clashed with police forces and later soldiers in a desperate struggle to control Manhattan.
Explore some of the principal confrontations and acts of violence in the map below.
As slavery, race, and labor became increasingly heated
national issues in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, politicians racialized
economic anxieties in order to win votes and galvanize their base. In 1860,
during the presidential election, a Democratic politician made an explicit
connection between local caloric concerns and national politics when he
thundered to New York City’s “Irish laborers” to “take care when you cast your
votes for Lincoln that you are not putting out the fire on your domestic hearth
and excluding light for your table and bringing ruin on your wife and children.
When they say that they vote to exclude slavery, let them take care that they
do not exclude bread from their own tables.”[1]
Fearmongering regarding slavery and labor continued following Lincoln’s
victory. In one vehemently racist 1861 piece appearing in The New York Herald, allies of mayoral candidate Fernando Wood
concluded their appeal by writing that “our laboring classes, especially among
the Irish and Germans, will show that they do not intend to be supplanted in
their daily occupations by emancipated slaves, while they themselves are either
driven into exile or the poorhouse.”[2]
In the ensuing 1861 mayoral election, working class Germans and Irish
overwhelmingly refused to support the Republican candidate, and 65.8 percent of
New York City voters sided with a Democrat. However, bitter infighting had
resulted in two separate Democratic candidates jostling for the office, and the
Republican George Opdyke would win the mayoralty with just over 34 percent of
the vote. Partially as a result of the Democratic rhetoric surrounding
anti-slavery candidates, Opdyke generally performed poorly in Irish and German
wards. His worst results were in the heavily Irish Fourth and Sixth Wards,
where he won 12 and 9 percent of the vote, respectively.[3]
Despite the brief wave of patriotism that swept the city
with the outbreak of the war, concerns regarding abolition remained. With the
Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, racial and economic tensions in
New York City began to reach a fever-pitch. Later in January, employers tried
to cut the pay of longshoremen down from $1.50 to $1.12. A wave of strikes
ensued, and, in March – the same month as the enactment of the Enrollment Act –
a foreman on the Erie Company Railway Pier attempted to hire Black
strikebreakers, leading to a sudden outburst of violence in which the Irish
strikers successfully drove off their would-be replacements.[4]
Sporadic violence against African American New Yorkers continued throughout the
spring and early summer months, until, on Monday, July 13, members of the “Black Joke” Fire Engine Company No. 33
battered down the doors of the Ninth District provost marshal’s office and
sparked the New York City Draft Riots.
What began on
July 13, 1863 at the Provost Marshall’s Office may
have started out, for some, as a genuine protest against the draft and the
Union war effort. By the second day of rioting, however, the unrest had
transformed into something much more terrible and complex. Observing the
behavior of anti-draft German workers helps to demonstrate this point.
Working-class Germans had voted with the Irish against Opdyke, and as a group
supported the anti-conscription action of the first day, but, when the riot grew
more radical they quickly began to support the city,
and even organized militias to protect their neighborhoods from Irish rioters.[5] The more
radical Irish rioters were not satisfied in winning the sympathy and support of
local elites regarding conscription – they were intent on remaking the city.
New York City’s African American inhabitants would suffer most acutely in the
nightmarish campaign of violence which followed. African American and Irish New
Yorkers competed within New York City’s unskilled labor market, and many Irish
feared that the end of enslavement would bring even greater economic competition
and precarity. During the riots, lynching, arson, and ritual mutilation were employed
as tools of terror, designed to compel Black New Yorkers to abandon the city. The
true extent of the suffering endured by the city’s African American population will
never be fully known.
[1] “Another Union Meeting,” The New York Herald, October 28, 1860.
[2] “The Army, the N****r Question, and
the Coming Election,” The New York Herald,
November 28, 1861.
[3] Percentages tabulated from “The
Tribune Almanac for 1862” in The Tribune
Almanac for the Years 1838 to 1868 (New York City: New York Tribune, 1868),
58. For more on voting, city politics, the rioting, and an excellent map of the
1863 mayoral election, see Bernstein.
[4] Albon P. Man Jr., "Labor Competition and the New York Draft Riots
of 1863,” The Journal of Negro History
36, no. 4 (1951): 394-400.
[5] Iver
Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots:
Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil
War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 42.