Wartime Life, New York Draft Riots & Civilian Choices — Print · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · The draft and the three hundred dollars

Volunteering had carried the Union army through two years and was running out. The Enrollment Act made every male citizen between twenty and forty-five liable, assigned each congressional district a quota, and held a lottery wherever volunteering fell short.

The two escapes were written into the law. A drafted man could find a substitute to serve for him, or pay three hundred dollars to the government and be released from that particular draft. Congress intended the fee as a ceiling on what substitutes could charge, which it was; the effect was that a drafted clerk could borrow and pay it, and a drafted dock labourer could not.

The Confederacy had done the same thing a year earlier and worse. Its conscription law of April 1862 exempted one white man for every twenty enslaved people on a plantation, so the largest slaveholders kept their sons at home. Soldiers on both sides noticed, and the twenty-slave law did more damage to Confederate morale than almost any battle.

There is a measurement worth keeping. Of roughly 250,000 men whose names were drawn in the Union draft, only about 6 per cent actually served; most paid, substituted, or were exempted on medical or family grounds. The draft worked less as a way of raising soldiers than as a threat that raised volunteers, and the people it did catch were overwhelmingly those with no way out.

Part 2 · Four days in July

The first lottery drawing on Saturday 11 July passed quietly. The names were printed in the Sunday papers, people read them with their neighbours, and on Monday morning a crowd of several thousand marched on the Ninth District provost marshal's office on Third Avenue and burned it.

By that afternoon the target had changed. Crowds attacked Black men in the street, burned boarding houses and the homes of Black families, and set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue. The 233 children inside were led out the back as the building burned; every one survived, which was the work of the staff and of a handful of bystanders who stood in the way.

At least eleven Black men were lynched over the following days, some hanged from lampposts and burned. Abolitionists' homes were attacked, as were the offices of Republican newspapers and the houses of the wealthy on Lexington Avenue. The police were overwhelmed by Tuesday.

Regiments were recalled from Gettysburg and reached the city on Thursday 16 July, and the fighting that ended it was house to house with artillery in the streets. Estimates of the dead centre on about 119. New York's Black population, around 12,500 before the riots, had fallen to under 10,000 by 1865 as families left for Brooklyn, New Jersey and further.

The aftermath is told less often than the riot. A merchants' relief committee paid compensation to around 2,500 Black victims, and the orphan asylum was rebuilt uptown. Nobody was ever convicted of any of the lynchings and the city quietly let the matter drop; the draft resumed in August under the guns of several thousand soldiers and proceeded without incident.

Part 3 · Why this city

New York had reasons that were specific and reasons that were general. Specifically, the city's merchants had been the financial centre of the cotton trade and many had opposed the war from the start; Mayor Fernando Wood had proposed in 1861 that the city secede and keep trading. Governor Horatio Seymour spent the spring of 1863 denouncing the draft as unconstitutional, and addressed the crowd on the second day as my friends.

Generally, the city held a very large Irish immigrant population at the bottom of the wage ladder, arrived after the famine of the 1840s, poor, crowded and resented. They were told constantly that they were at the bottom, and told by Democratic newspapers that emancipation would bring competition that would push them lower.

A month before the riots that argument acquired a concrete image. Longshoremen struck in June 1863, and the employers broke the strike by hiring Black workers under police protection. For men already angry about a draft they could not buy out, that was the whole case made visible on the docks.

None of this makes the violence anything other than what it was, and the distinction is worth teaching explicitly. Explaining how a thing happened is not the same as excusing it, and the test of whether you have understood a riot is whether you can say both what drove it and what it did, without using one to soften the other.

Part 4 · The war everyone else fought

Civilians away from the fighting still ran much of the war effort. The United States Sanitary Commission, a private organisation staffed largely by women, raised something like twenty-five million dollars through fairs and subscriptions and supplied hospitals, ambulances and camp inspections. Dorothea Dix, last seen campaigning for asylums, became Superintendent of Army Nurses.

The work changed what women were understood to be able to do. Thousands nursed, ran relief organisations, taught in the contraband camps, and took over farms and family businesses, and a number of them went straight from that into the suffrage campaign after the war.

The Confederate home front was harsher by a wide margin, because the blockade and the fighting were both on its territory. Prices rose to the point where Confederate money bought almost nothing by 1865; the government impressed food and livestock from farms at fixed prices; and in April 1863 several hundred women broke into shops in Richmond demanding bread, dispersing only when Jefferson Davis addressed them personally and threatened to have the militia fire.

The letters are the part students remember. Confederate soldiers received letters from wives describing children with nothing to eat, and desertion rose steeply through 1864 and 1865. Armies are held together by more than orders, and the Confederate home front stopped being able to hold up its end some time before the armies did.

There is a general point here worth carrying beyond this war. Armies are usually described as winning or losing on battlefields, and the records that survive are weighted heavily towards soldiers and generals. The home front leaves thinner evidence -- letters, price lists, ration books, a riot report -- and it is often where the outcome was actually decided.