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This article is naive.

NYC secession was a dead letter by the time of the draft riot (Jul., 1863). The City's corrupt former mayor, Fernando Wood, had proposed NYC secession in Jan., 1861, 2 1/2 years earlier. In 1862 Wood was denied renomination by Tammany based in part on his extremism and he was defeated by a Republican, George Opdyke, in a three-way race that fall. Elsewhere, Democrats did very well in the election. The moderate Opdyke was mayor at the time of the riot.

At the time of the riot, Lee was retreating across the Potomac. Grant was besieging Vicksburg a thousand miles away. No New York regiments were serving with Grant. New Yorkers served with Meade in Maryland or garrisoned DC and other points.

The draft was a bigger factor in the manpower-starved South than in the North. Only 8% of Union soldiers were conscripted in the Civil War compared to 25% of Confederate soldiers. So if there's a draft bogey, it's Davis, not Lincoln. The governors of Georgia (Joe Brown) and North Carolina (Zebulon Vance) were bitter opponents of the draft, the Confederate national government, and Davis.

The level of violence in the riot is unknown. Estimates of deaths range from below 100 to above 3,000. Most historians lean toward the lower figure.

The riot was the most violent civil disturbance in U.S. history excluding the Civil War itself. The movie dramatizes it into a revolution. It wasn't. The civil authorities lost control of much of the City for two days. Elsewhere and outside the city, life went on normally.