Brooklyn History -- Draft Riots

Read Part 2 of this story.

There is nothing more frightening than a mob, nothing more uncontrollable than a riot. And there is nothing more deadly than being the innocent person or group deemed to be the target of a mob’s anger. People die, and die horribly.

This fact was found out during the events that took place in July of 1863 in what is now known as the New York Draft Riots, the worst riots in the history of this country. Like this nation’s history, the causes of the riots were much more complex that just racism and hatred; the reasons for taking to the streets more than just the unfairness of the draft.

They were the culmination of many social, political, and economic factors, coming together like a perfect storm at this time and place. Like all acts of terrorism, the riots brought out the worst of humanity and the best of it as well. Here, in a nutshell, is what happened in New York City between July 13th, and July 16th of 1863.

New York in the 1860’s was a city of contrasts. We’ve been tracing the history of slavery in the city and its neighbor, Brooklyn, and we know that in 1827, slavery was abolished in New York State. But that didn’t mean the African-Americans here were now in any way equal to whites in the city.

For the most part, black people in both cities were manual laborers, digging ditches, hauling cargo at the docks, washing clothing or performing other domestic services, performing the lowest paid jobs that could be had in the city, with little opportunities to do better.

The Abolitionist movement was growing in popularity among many New Yorkers and Brooklynites, due to the fiery preaching of Brooklyn’s Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, and others, and the tales of slavery’s horrors by men and women such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.

People of good will and conscience wanted to end the ownership of one people by another, and free the slaves on the plantations and cities of the South. After that, they really weren’t too clear about what to do next, and most gave little thought to the freemen and women already in their midst.

And there was another disconnect. By the 1860’s, the economy of New York City was inextricably tied to the fortunes of the South, and thereby to slavery. The cotton produced by slave labor in the South came north to be processed, sold, and manufactured into goods then shipped across the country and overseas.

Each step in that process made someone in NYC rich. The city’s banks, insurance companies, shipping companies, even producers of paper and other goods sold down south, were all making a fortune on the products of slavery.

Banks gave loans to southern planters with slaves as collateral, and Wall St. traded on the basis of formulas of the productivity of slave labor. Some of these capitalists made noises about how much they hated slavery, and how evil it was, but the more honest also said that that same evil kept the money flowing, and it was a tragic, but necessary consequence of business, and New York has always run on the needs of business.

If that wasn’t conflicted enough, add the immigrants. By 1855, census reports show that roughly two out of every three adult Manhattanites had been born outside of the country, and over half of the population of the city came from somewhere else.

Most of the immigrants at this time were from Ireland and Germany. Many of the German immigrants who came here in the 1850’s were fleeing that nation’s attempt to unite separate city-states, and the resulting political unrest.

In spite of the greater language barrier, they were on the whole, more middle class, better educated and skilled, and fit into established and successful German communities in both Manhattan and Brooklyn. In contrast, the majority of the Irish were a different story.

The Potato Famine in Ireland had begun in 1845 and didn’t end until 1852. The mostly Catholic Irish were serfs to an oppressive English aristocracy that had made the famine even worse. During that time, over a million Irish somehow made it to America, with the promise of a better life. For most of those who landed in Manhattan, it was a lie.

This largely peasant class had no skills, no education, many did not speak English, and no chance to rise out of the horrific slums they were crowded into, in places like 5 Points, which even today is remembered as the worst slum in the city’s history. The unskilled Irish immigrants suffered great discrimination by native born Americans, and in many ways were treated no better than black folks.

What should have brought the two groups together; a shared sense of survival and the camaraderie of oppression instead became hatred and intense competition for the bottom rung of the economic ladder. This rivalry was played out by businesses seeking only to further their bottom line.

Blacks and Irish competed for manual labor jobs, like stevedores, dock workers, and laborers. Employers would often play one group off against the other, the result being whoever would accept the lower wage would get the job.

Blacks were often used as replacement workers during strikes, and in general, Irish workers soon felt that black workers were a direct threat to their ability to feed their families. The newly empowered Democratic Party played into those fears with incendiary literature, characterizing the black workers as lackeys of the rich establishment, and inferior and uncivilized savages, both enemies of the white workingman.

When the Civil War started in 1861, the general sentiment was that this was a war to bring the southern states back into the Union, and repair the country. When the Union Army defeated Robert E. Lee’s Confederates at the Battle of Antietam, Maryland, in 1862, Abraham Lincoln thought that this would be the opportune time to issue his Emancipation Proclamation.

He thought that the combination of a decisive Southern defeat and the freeing of the slaves would propel the Northern forces into a greater effort to defeat the Confederacy, restore the Union, and win a great moral victory. For New York, that strategy was a disaster.

The War was no longer a struggle to preserve the Union, but now it directly was a call to end slavery. The merchants and bankers whose fortunes depended on slavery were now being called to end it. The immigrants who were being drafted to fight were being called to increase the freedom of a group of inferior people they felt were already stealing the jobs from white men. Now they were supposed to fight to free more of them?

As the Civil War dragged on, volunteers became fewer and fewer, and heavy casualties and desertion were taking their toll. The National Conscription Act of 1863 was enacted to fill the ranks with able bodied (white) men.

The final insult and catalyst for the riots was the rule instituted in that Act that allowed a $300 buy out of the draft, which essentially exempted anyone wealthy enough to pay. Three hundred dollars was almost half a year’s pay for an unskilled working man.

The rationale behind this buyout was that those vital to society would be spared, such as captains of industry. This totally backfired, as it was immediately seen for what it was – a way for the rich to ensure that the poor would do their fighting for them.

This was going to be a poor man’s army sent to fight and die, for the benefit of even more inferior blacks, who would no doubt flood into New York and the North, taking what few jobs were available away from these same fighters. It was unthinkable, and was not going to happen.

The Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, ended on July 3, 1863. Over 8,000 men on both sides were killed, with almost 29,000 men wounded, and 12,000 captured or missing. The first lottery of the new draft was held on Friday, July 11th.

People were restless and angry, and trouble broke out in Buffalo, NY, but nothing happened in NYC. That weekend plans were made for the next step. Two days later, on Monday, July 13th, the second lottery was called, and within hours, a mob of 500 men attacked the Provost Office on 47th and 3rd Avenue, where the lottery was taking place, breaking windows, and doors, and eventually setting fire to the building.

The militia was not in the city. All but a small fraction of the units had been sent to help protect Pennsylvania, as Confederate troops advanced to within 10 miles of the Pennsylvania capital, Harrisburg. It was the worst time for them to be gone.

The police were outnumbered and unable to stop the crowds of mostly working class Irishmen, who streamed through the city from the docks, shipyards, building sites, and streets, ready to take on both those above them and those below.

The targets were the rich and the city elites and their institutions which had ignored their poverty while exploiting their labor. Their other targets were the black people who they felt were taking the jobs that were rightfully theirs, and were the symbols of a war being fought to free a people they despised.

Finding both would be easy, and disastrous. The political party of the city’s elite was the Republican Party. Tammany Hall and its ward bosses were Democrats, as were most of the lower classes. Tammany Hall’s active recruitment of the Irish and other immigrant groups was legendary, even in the 1860’s.

The mob went through the streets looking for Republicans and rich people. Rioters targeted anyone who looked well-off. There were shouts of “There goes a $300 man!” in reference to those who could afford to buy out of the draft, or “Down with rich men.”

The mob attacked and burned Brooks Brothers, the hated purveyor of rich men’s clothing, and beat up and killed policemen and soldiers, as representatives of the Republican authorities. They looted and burned mansions on tony Fifth Avenue.

When the Superintendent of Police, John A. Kennedy, reached the riots, he was recognized and beaten within an inch of his life. Colonel Henry O’Brien of the 11th New York Regiment was stripped, beaten, tortured and shot in the head after he fired his howitzer into a crowd, accidentally killing a woman and child.

By the second day, the mob headed towards Wall Street, intent on destroying it, but Wall St. was the most defended part of the city. Behind the police and militia barricades, the Customs House workers made bombs, and the workers at the Bank Note Company prepared vats of sulfuric acid to pour on rioters, if necessary.

But while Wall Street was being protected by offshore warships, there was little protection for the black people who were the other objects of the mobs’ wrath. Rioters ran through the streets, attacking and killing any black person they could find. These horrors, Brooklyn’s role in the riots, and the aftermath, in the conclusion of the story on Thursday.

Brooklyn History -- Draft Riots
The squalid homes of the rioters. New York State Historical Society.

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