Marking 150 Years Since the New York City Draft Riots

At the height of the Civil War, just weeks after thousands of men had died on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pa., a sweltering New York City—crowded, filthy, and seething with class and ethnic tensions—erupted in mob violence. The draft riots would rage across the city for five brutal days, during which the white working masses—many of whom had narrowly escaped Ireland’s devastating potato famine—vented their fury on wealthy New Yorkers, abolitionists, Republicans, and, most viciously, the African-American populace. To this day the riots of July 1863 remain the bloodiest civil disturbance in American history, with an official death toll of 119, though the actual number is probably closer to 500. In the wake of the violence, thousands of blacks fled the city.

Set the scene for us. What was New York City like in 1863? And what was its relation to the Civil War?

The wealthy in New York were making a fortune off the war. But for the working class, things were worse than ever. You had this huge inflation going on. Every day you could literally see merchants putting new signs in the windows with the prices going up. Goods were harder and harder to get, and they were often adulterated—it was not uncommon to find sawdust in your coffee, sand in the sugar, red lead in the pepper, Prussian blue dye in the tea. Before the war, in the 1850s, the death rate in New York exceeded the birth rate. The population kept growing just because of the enormous immigration, but people were not living well.

And then you have this war come. Union troops volunteer, and a huge number of them were the immigrant Irish. They were very grateful to America. The war was cast as “We’re fighting to keep the country together.” They were all for it. They signed up in droves. They went down to the South, and they got butchered. They fought very bravely, but you’d come home without a leg or something, you couldn’t work; there was almost no social welfare system. Going to war really meant you risked plunging your entire family into poverty forever, even if you did return.

There’s tremendous unrest. There are a lot of strikes going on, which are being broken regularly. You had all these newspapers—several of them quite racist—saying the war is horrible, it’s a mistake, saying black men are staying here seducing your wives while you go off to war; they’re taking your jobs; they’re breaking strikes. Which they weren’t. Actually, very few of the strikebreakers were black, and black men were the only people begging to go to war at this point. They were petitioning the governor constantly to form regiments and being denied that. So all these lies were being spread; this whole atmosphere was being created. A lot of people are being arrested. So this is a city really just burning with unrest and ferment.

Lincoln desperately needs troops, and so he passes the nation’s first draft law. [But] you could buy your way out of it. For $300, you could buy a substitute. $300 was nothing to the wealthy, but it was maybe two years’ wages for a workingman in New York. We’re talking about a time when sewing girls made 17 cents a day for a 12-hour day.

So you have a lot of people who are not exactly inclined to drop everything and go fight a war. And yet they didn’t have much of a choice.

There were a lot of signs that people weren’t terribly pleased with this. The Provost Marshal’s guard had gone around getting everybody’s names in the weeks before, and suspicious things were happening to them—like, they would come to some tenement building in the Five Points, and the chimney would happen to collapse just then, or somebody would drop a flowerpot right next to their head.

Baker's 2002 novel evokes the riots in visceral detail. But they gathered enough names, and they took them up to this big wooden box that they turned. They got a known blind man to pull out the names, and they had this lottery. They had an armed guard on hand, and a big crowd gathered, and they weren’t all that happy but they got through it. It was a Saturday, and they figured, okay, the next day is Sunday, so everybody will cool off.

It was a mistake. Sunday was the day everybody goes off to the neighborhood tavern and talks about this, and they’re getting angrier and angrier, and there’s a [volunteer fire] company—Number 33, the Black Joke—which has had a lot of their guys drafted, and they’re really ticked off about this. So they decide when the draft resumes on Monday that they are going to stop it.

At the height of the Civil War, a sweltering New York City—crowded, filthy, and seething with class and ethnic tensions—erupted in mob violence. To this day the draft riots of July 1863 remain the bloodiest civil disturbance in American history. To mark their 150th anniversary, Brian Palmer sat down with Kevin Baker, author of Paradise Alley, a novel that brings the riots to life in wrenching detail. Click here to read the first half of the interview.

Yes. The Black Joke [fire company] brings up its fire wagon filled with paving stones and other rocks they’d gotten from construction sites that were all over the city. When the draft starts, they attack it—they throw the rocks through the window of the draft office, they chase away the known blind man, they beat up the soldiers, then they burn the records for the draft. And that was all that they intended to do. But this whole mob that’s gathered around them sets the block on fire, and they attack the commissioner of police and beat him half to death. And then the riot is on.

This quickly changes from being a riot against the draft to being a class riot where they attack the houses of leading abolitionists, loot them, burn them sometimes. Then it becomes a riot of opportunity—“I think the draft records are in that tavern with the really good Madeira! Let’s go and see!” And then, horribly, it becomes a race riot.

The feeling was that these people were to blame for the war. And, of course, there were the things that politicians and journalists had promoted—the idea that these people were here taking your job or taking your wife while you were off at war.

You have to realize, about the people in these mobs, what conditions they lived in and what they were coming from. By the 1840s [in Ireland], you had people living in literal ditches they had dug; as long as you could have a little plot where you could grow potatoes, you could survive. Then comes the famine, which overnight basically wipes out potatoes. These people had nothing else to eat. You had to get out of that island or you were going to die.

So then you maybe barely made it over here, and you were Catholic, maybe didn’t speak English, you had no money, no resources, and you were despised by a Protestant population. [Irish immigrants] were very conscious of themselves as a race at a time when any nationality was considered a race—Italians were a race, Germans were a race. They were very conscious of wanting to keep themselves above anybody they could. And in the U.S. that meant black people.

It was an odd thing, because at the same time, they’re living cheek by jowl with black Americans more than any whites would for another century or more in the city. It was kind of a tragedy that there was this real race mixing and at the same time all this built-in racial hatred. And this all comes bubbling out during the draft riot. The mob just starts attacking black people wherever they can find them. There’s a black sailor who comes ashore from a ship just looking to buy a loaf of bread without knowing what’s going on; he’s set upon and brutally beaten to death by a mob. Other people are lynched from trees, from lampposts. And, in possibly the single most horrible crime ever committed by New Yorkers, a mob marches on the Colored Orphan Asylum and burns it to the ground, chanting, “Burn the n—– nest!” Fortunately, the orphans all escaped by the skin of their teeth.

There are whites who help. It’s probably the best day in the history of the New York City police force, which not only courageously fights the mob but shelters black New Yorkers wherever they can and actually arms them at times, which for the time was pretty extraordinary.

Baker's 2002 novel evokes the riots in visceral detail. But the police are wildly outnumbered. There’s only so long that this can go on. Finally they rush up troops fresh from Gettysburg—Invalid Corps but also whole regiments, some troops from New York, including Irish New Yorkers. So the troops come in and they set up barricades in the streets, and when the mob charges, they shoot them. They chase them with bayonets, and they put down the rebellion. This really saves the Union.

If there had been an actual out-and-out rebellion, and if, say, the troops had sided with the rioters, or if, say, the Irish troops had revolted en masse, it would have been impossible to keep conducting the Civil War. The other thing that saves the Union is, they’re having to send huge numbers of white troops down to Virginia in shackles because otherwise they’re going to desert and sign up again to get the signing-up bonus under a different name. So the question is, who is going to fight the war? The answer was, 180,000 black troops in the Union Army from this point to the end of the war, 38,000 of whom died. This is like having three new armies put into the war on the Union side. And the first time after the riot is when New York State says OK, you can form these black regiments, and they march off to war. They’re honored by various white abolitionists and pro-Union groups, but completely mocked by a lot of the Democratic papers. But they go off and essentially win the war.

It’s one of these things that’s slowly emerging more into the public consciousness. A lot of Americans don’t want to hear this, but it’s a vital part of our country.

This island of Manhattan is one of the most fought-over pieces of real estate in America. You go back to things like the slave revolt of 1712, the supposed slave revolt of 1741, the draft riots, the Irish-ethnic riots, the riots in Harlem in ’35 and ’43, the Stonewall uprising in ’69—this has always been the place where people have fought out who is going to be an American and what that’s going to mean—who has rights and what those rights are going to mean.

Many soldiers of the Confederacy wore uniforms colored a yellowish-brown by dye made of copperas and walnut hulls. The term later became a synonym for the soldier, but also for Democrats in the North who supported them or peace at any price.

The Butternut Region referred to Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where sentiment for the war was tepid, because many of the people who lived there had southern sympathies.

This outlasted the war. Southern Indiana was where the second KKK arose in the 1920s. Though oriented more to oppose immigrants and Catholics, it showed that their southern sentiments remained strong. Even linguistically they shared many “southernisms” in speech.

Clement Vallandigham, the effective leader of the Copperheads, was from Ohio. Ironically, while he and Lincoln were bitter enemies, a close personal friend of Vallandigham was none other than Edwin M. Stanton, later Lincoln’s Secretary of War, who before the war had loaned him the astronomical sum of $500 to set up his law practice.

Both Democrats, they were still on opposite sides of the slavery issue.

You can admire the Confederacy, while still cursing the Copperheads as traitors. Right or wrong, both the Confederacy and the Union had honorable men supporting them. But just because scoundrels side with you does not mean they are, or should be, your friends.

Benedict Arnold was accepted by the British, and they even rewarded him, modestly, for his treason. But they never embraced him, nor saw him as an honorable man thereafter.

Clement Vallandigham then was as Harry Reid is today. Both villains destined for oblivion.

Thanks for more information on that. I knew butternuts were like walnuts (both grow in NY, though butternuts are a bit more rare), but I didn’t know they were used for the dyes for Confederate uniforms or that it was a term for supporters of peace with the Confederacy. There’s a lot we didn’t learn in school. Look up Fernando Wood, for instance.

There was some irony in calling Confederates butternuts, as the Butternut tree generally does not grow in the South.

Copperas is ferrous sulfate, which would bind the dark yellow to light brown color of the walnut shells to the fabric. Both of which were inexpensive, commonly available, and gave fabric a uniform color. A color distinct from the Union Army blue coats.

The Confederacy didn’t seem to think so. After Vallandigham’s trial and conviction, Lincoln ordered his deportation to the Confederacy under a flag of truce. He was sent to Wilmington, North Carolina by President Davis and put under guard as an “alien enemy.”

This did not stop Vallandigham, however. He began to advise the Confederacy to not conduct any military campaign North into Pennsylvania, as it would interfere with the political campaign of Lincoln’s rival, Democrat George B. McClellan, even though McClellan had repudiated the Democrat party’s anti-war platform, and insisting on peace only if the Confederacy vied for peace *and* returned to the Union.

It indicated to the Confederacy that Vallandigham was less interested in peace than Democrat political power in the North. And he later proved this by traveling by blockade runner to Bermuda, then Canada, from where he ran for governor of Ohio. He lost in a landslide, but created much acrimony in the state.

He talked to a Confederate representative in Canada about plans for forming a Northwestern Confederacy, consisting of the states of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, by overthrowing their governments.

He requested money for weapons from the Confederates. Vallandigham refused to handle the money himself and it was given to his associate James A. Barrett. Part of the Confederate plan was to liberate Confederate prisoners of war. The intended revolt never materialized.

So, top to bottom, the Confederacy was right to look at him through a jaundiced eye. As with the modern Operation ANSWER, anti-war movement, run by Maoist Marxists, peace was never seen as an end, but a means to something entirely different.

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