New York City draft riots

• 1. Introduction

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  The New York City draft riots erupted on the 13th of July, 1863, just ten days after the Union victory at Gettysburg, and they would not end for four days. A crowd of around 500 people, led by the volunteer firemen of Engine Company 33, attacked a government office on Third Avenue and 47th Street where draft numbers were being drawn. They hurled paving stones through the windows, burst through the doors, and set the building alight. When fire engines arrived, rioters smashed them apart.

  What began as a protest against conscription became something far darker. The crowds turned on Black residents of Manhattan with extraordinary violence, lynching men, burning homes and businesses, and destroying the Colored Orphan Asylum at 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue. By the time federal troops restored order, the official death count stood at 119 or 120, though some estimates reached far higher. The black population of Manhattan would not recover for decades.

  How did a city with such strong economic ties to the Union cause come so close to open rebellion? What drove Irish immigrant workers to target not the government that drafted them, but their Black neighbors? And what did four days of fire and murder do to the shape of New York itself?

• 2. A City Already at War with Itself

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  By 1822, nearly half of New York's exports were cotton shipments, which tied the city's commercial fortunes tightly to the slaveholding South. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, New York City had many sympathizers with the Confederacy. Mayor Fernando Wood, a Democrat, had gone so far as to call on the city's Board of Aldermen on the 7th of January, 1861, to declare the city's independence from both Albany and Washington, claiming it "would have the whole and united support of the Southern States."

  Against this backdrop, a vast immigrant population was reshaping the city's neighborhoods. Since the 1840s, most arrivals came from Ireland and Germany. By 1860, nearly a quarter of New York City's population had been born in Germany, and many did not speak English. Tammany Hall worked systematically to enroll Irish immigrants as U.S. citizens so they could vote in local elections.

  The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 alarmed much of the white working class. They feared that freed slaves would migrate north and compete for already scarce jobs. Those fears had real roots. Since the 1850s, free Black workers and white immigrants had clashed at the docks over low-wage labor. As recently as March 1863, white longshoremen refused to work alongside Black laborers and rioted, attacking 200 Black men. The Enrollment Act, passed by Congress that same month, arrived in a city already straining at its social seams.

• 3. The Draft and Its Discontents

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  Congress passed the Enrollment Act in March 1863 to establish a military draft for the first time, as Union armies needed more men. New citizens learned they were expected to register and serve. Black men were largely excluded from the draft because they were not widely considered citizens. Wealthier white men, however, could simply pay to send a substitute in their place.

  Newly elected Republican Mayor George Opdyke was already mired in profiteering scandals in the months before the riots began. The first drawing of draft numbers, held on Saturday the 11th of July, went peacefully in Manhattan. The second drawing, scheduled for Monday the 13th of July, did not.

  The volunteer firemen of Engine Company 33, known as the "Black Joke," led the initial assault on the provost marshal's office at 10:00 AM. Some of those very firemen had been among the men drafted on Saturday, which explains why, when fire engines later arrived to fight the blazes the mob had set, some firefighters refused to act against the rioters. Governor Horatio Seymour arrived on Tuesday and told a crowd at City Hall that the Enrollment Act was unconstitutional, a position that gave political cover to those who remained in the streets. Assistant provost-marshal-general Robert Nugent eventually received orders from Colonel James Barnet Fry on Wednesday the 15th to postpone the draft entirely, and the news in newspapers that day kept some rioters at home.

• 4. Four Days of Violence

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  Police Superintendent John Kennedy arrived at the Third Avenue office on Monday without a uniform, but the mob recognized him anyway. He was beaten so severely that physicians later counted over 70 knife wounds on his body alone. He would never fully recover. Commissioners Thomas Coxon Acton and John G. Bergen took command in his place.

  The 19th Company of the 1st Battalion of the US Army Invalid Corps tried to disperse the crowd with a volley of gunfire and were overwhelmed, suffering over 14 injured with one soldier missing and believed dead. The New York State Militia had been sent to Gettysburg, leaving the Metropolitan Police as the only organized force in the city. They were badly outnumbered, though they managed to keep rioting out of Lower Manhattan below Union Square.

  Targets multiplied through the day. The office of the New York Times was defended by staff manning Gatling guns, including Times founder Henry Jarvis Raymond, turning back the mob. The New York Tribune was not so lucky: it was looted and burned before police arrived. The Bull's Head hotel on 44th Street was torched after it refused to serve alcohol to rioters. Abby Gibbons, a prison reformer and the daughter of abolitionist Isaac Hopper, had her home burned on Tuesday. White women married to Black men, including Ann Derrickson and Ann Martin, were attacked. James McCune Smith's pharmacy at 93 West Broadway, believed to be the first pharmacy owned by a Black man in the United States, was destroyed.

  At around 4 PM on Monday, a mob of several thousand, including women and children, descended on the Colored Orphan Asylum at 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue. The asylum sheltered around 230 children and was described as a symbol of white charity to Black people and of Black upward mobility. The mob looted the building of its food and supplies, but police secured it long enough for the children to escape through the back door, escorted by Superintendent Davis to the Twentieth Precinct station house, where Sergeant Petty received them. The building burned to the ground.

  On the final night of rioting, a confrontation near Gramercy Park killed twelve people, according to historian Adrian Cook. Major General John E. Wool, commander of the Department of the East, stated on July 16 that martial law ought to be proclaimed but that he did not have a sufficient force to enforce it. By then, the 152nd New York Volunteers, the 26th Michigan Volunteers, the 27th Indiana Volunteers, and the 7th Regiment New York State Militia had returned from Frederick, Maryland, after a forced march. Several thousand militia and federal troops were eventually garrisoned in the troubled areas.

• 5. Terror Against Black New Yorkers

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  Eleven Black men and boys were hanged over five days. One man was attacked by a crowd of 400 with clubs and paving stones, then lynched, hanged from a tree, and set alight. Near the midtown docks, rioters went into the streets seeking, in their own words, "all the negro porters, cartmen and laborers" to eliminate every trace of Black and interracial life from the waterfront district. White dockworkers attacked and destroyed brothels, dance halls, boarding houses, and tenements that served Black residents.

  Among those murdered was a seven-year-old boy named Joseph Reed, the Bermudian nephew of Robert John Simmons, a soldier serving with the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. Simmons had written a letter from South Carolina on the approach to Fort Wagner on the 18th of July, 1863; the letter was published in the New York Tribune on the 23rd of December, 1863, after Simmons had died of wounds received in the assault on Fort Wagner in August.

  According to historian James M. McPherson, 119 or 120 people were killed, though other estimates reach as high as 1,200. At least 2,000 people were injured by the most reliable counts. Herbert Asbury, whose 1928 book Gangs of New York was the basis for the 2002 Martin Scorsese film, put the figures dramatically higher, at 2,000 killed and 8,000 wounded, a number disputed by other historians. Property damage totaled roughly $1-5 million, and the city treasury later paid one-quarter of that amount in indemnifications.

• 6. A City Transformed

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  Historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that the riots were "equivalent to a Confederate victory." Fifty buildings burned, including two Protestant churches and the Colored Orphan Asylum. Some 4,000 federal troops had to be pulled from the Gettysburg campaign to suppress the riots, soldiers who might otherwise have pursued the battered Army of Northern Virginia as it retreated from Union territory.

  Landlords, fearing mob destruction of their buildings, drove Black residents out during the riots themselves. Hundreds of Black New Yorkers left the city permanently. Physician James McCune Smith and his family relocated to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or New Jersey. By 1865, the Black population of Manhattan had fallen below 10,000, the lowest it had been since 1820. Many residents moved to Brooklyn, and the demographic makeup of Manhattan's neighborhoods shifted durably.

  Toby Joyce observed that the riots represented a "civil war" within the Irish community itself: mostly Irish American rioters confronted police, soldiers, and pro-war politicians who were also, to a considerable extent, from the local Irish immigrant community. The Union League Club and the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People raised nearly $40,000 for about 2,500 riot victims, helping them find new work and housing.

  On the 19th of August, the government resumed the draft in New York. It was completed within ten days without further incident. Of the 750,000 men selected for conscription nationwide, about 45,000 were sent into active duty, far fewer than the white working class had feared. In December 1863, the Union League Club recruited more than 2,000 Black soldiers, outfitted and trained them, and sent them off with a parade through the city to the Hudson River docks in March 1864. A crowd of 100,000 watched that procession.