Friends,
Imagine New York City in 1863. It consisted only of
Manhattan as Brooklyn was a separate city across the East River. A million people
crammed into its narrow confines. A large percentage of them were foreign born,
Irish and German mostly. Politically the city was solidly in the Democratic
Party folds. Modern New Yorkers would be shocked to learn that the city voted
2-1 AGAINST Lincoln in 1860 and again in 1864. This due to the fact that
Tammany Hall and the likes of Boss Tweed controlled the city with an iron fist.
The immigrants were loyal to the Democratic Machine and the Irish remembered
the fact that prior to the establishment of the Republican Party, many
prominent Republicans had been Know Nothings, an anti-immigrant and
anti-Catholic organization. In fact, textbooks today leave out the fact that
many prominent abolitionist were rabidly anti-Catholic. I find this interesting
since the very fact that George Washington owned slaves now means that he is a
bad person to a lot of historians yet they ignore the prejudices of the people
they profess to admire. But I digress. Given the very close business
relationship between New York City and the South, Mayor Fernando Wood proposed
seceding from the Union and declaring NYC to be an “open city”, free to trade
with either side. New York City business leaders were afraid that they would
lose a tremendous amount of money if the war kept them from doing business or
if the slaves were freed and their cotton imports dried up.
And what of the city itself? We have a wonderful
portrait of the city by virtue of a book called Sunshine and Shadow in New York written by an English visitor in
the immediate post war period. It is out of print but you can download it for
free on the internets. The population of Gotham doubled between 1825 and 1845
and that is BEFORE the Irish Potato Famine (really more of a genocide, but that
is another topic for another day) brought hundreds of thousands of poor Irish
men, women, and children flooding into the city. By 1860, they made up a
quarter of the population. They were crammed into some of the worst urban slums
on the planet at the time. While they lived in squalor and extreme poverty on
the Lower East Side, a few blocks to the north, the wealthy lived in opulent
mansions seemingly oblivious to the plight of so many of their fellow New
Yorkers. Crime and poverty go hand in hand and the city was known as a home to
every vice imaginable. They city boasted 600 houses of prostitution and scores
of other “houses of assignation”. Then you had saloons, lots of saloons. Some
of the saloons on the East Side had “waiter girls” which shocked the
sensibilities of the English author of the book. He said “waiter girls are not
of the highest moral order”. Seeing as how my redhead was a waitress when I met
her, I will not comment on that.
The NYPD and the Fire Department were overwhelmingly
Irish, a fact that did not escape the notice of the wealthy Protestants in the
city. They feared an urban uprising. When the day arrived, would they city’s
protectors side with the rioters? Or would they protect the lives and property
of the wealthy? No one wanted to find out for sure, though in the summer of
1863, they would. The Fire Department officially carried about 4,000 volunteers
on the rosters but only about half of them were active. The police department,
led by Superintendent Kennedy numbered around 2,100 men. Both had received
plenty of bad press in the 1850s. Their manpower was down due to the number of
men enlisting in the Army at the outset of the war, but by 1863, enthusiasm had
grown very thin.
Superintendent Kennedy
That diminished enthusiasm is exactly why Congress
enacted the Enrollment Act. It was signed into law in March of 1863. Each
Congressional District received a quota that they were to fill from the ranks
of men between the ages of 20 and 45. It was widely unpopular for two reasons.
To escape the draft, you could pay a substitute to go in your stead, something
only a wealthy person could do. Or if not substitute could be found, you could
pay the princely sum of $300 which represented the average annual wage of a
working class person. One thing that often gets left out in the discussion of
the draft is why it was needed in the first place. People often ignore the
effect that the Emancipation Proclamation had on recruitment. Notice that after
the Proclamation was announced, they suddenly needed to institute a draft. A
lot of Civil War historians try to excuse that away because it doesn’t fit the
idea of Northern soldiers fighting to free the slaves. When the Confederate
Congress passed their draft law the previous year, it exempted those who owned
20 or more slaves or those who worked as overseers on plantations. In both
cases, this was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. In New York City, the
ability of the rich to hire substitutes or pay $300 is ultimately what would
cause this unrest.
Rumors ran throughout the Sixth Ward (aka: Bloody
Sixth) in the days leading up to the draft days. On Saturday, July 11th,
the first names were drawn, slightly over 30. The crowd gathered to listen were
somewhat boisterous. They made jokes as the names were read aloud, mostly
Irish. Not a wealthy man among them. “Well a nice vacation from the wife, Johnny”.
The draft ended and people went home. Two days later, July 13th
dawned hot and clear. As crowds began to gather in Lower Manhattan, the police
were on high alert. A large crowd congregated around the 9th
District draft office, led by firefighters of Engine Company 33, the Black
Joke. (meaning dark sense of humor, not race) A pistol discharged and they
stormed the building. The men of the Black Joke were upset because their
captain had been draft on Saturday. There is a difference between a crowd and a
mob. A crowd is just a large group of people. A mob is something quite
different. People in a mob get a certain amount of anonymity and a mob mindset
can take over quickly, as it did on that hot July day.
Superintendent Kennedy arrived to try and see
firsthand what was taking place. The mob recognized him despite his not being
in uniform. They dragged him out of his carriage and nearly beat him to death.
From the onset, he would be out of commission. The police, armed with clubs and
revolvers, charged the crowd but were beaten back. The police took heavy
casualties. As buildings were set alight, the fire department responded to the
alarms but the mobs cut their fire hoses and attacked them with clubs. The mob
then turned its anger on black residents of New York City. Why? The reason is a
little more complicated than you may realize. Yes, the fear that freed slaves
would come up North and take jobs away from the Irish was true. That idea had
been mentioned in Irish newspapers. However, the predominantly working class
Irish mobs vented their anger on black residents of New York City because they
saw them as symbol. They represented the elite white New Yorkers who, though
often abolitionist in sentiment, despised the Irish. Remember the mobs that
burned down Catholic Churches just ten years before. Many of the leaders in
that movement were now abolitionist and since the Irish could not attack them
directly, they instead focused their rage on the people who the abolitionists
cared about.
On Monday evening a mob lynched a black man and set
his body on fire as he hung from a rope, strangling to death. In an eerie
scene, something out of the Middle Ages, people danced around the burning body.
Another mob marched on the Colored Orphan Asylum with the express intent of
burning it down and perhaps murder the children inside. In a feat unparalleled
in the history of the police and fire services, a small group of police
officers and firefighters fought the mob long enough to allow the children to
be safely brought to safety out the back door. The Chief Engineer of the Fire
Department, a position similar to that of the Fire Chief, was grabbed by the
mob. They slipped a rope around his neck and were about to hoist him skyward
when he said “If you kill me, you will only stop my draft.” The crowd began to laugh. They patted him on the back
and sent him on his way. Remember, the Irish were considered to be “black” by
the elites in New York City. By attacking blacks, they were trying to racialize
themselves as “white”. Of course, they also attacked the homes of the wealthy
and Protestant churches, all people who had victimized them in the past. This
was an uprising of oppressed underclasses that targeted everyone who upset
them. The rich. The military. The city itself. And the black workers of New
York who represented the threat of a non-union labor force and who the
abolitionist cared more for than the poor Irish immigrants.
Desperate calls for reinforcements went out from city leaders and the War
Department rushed soldiers to the city to restore order. New York Governor
Horatio Seymour, who was a little pro-South as it was, told Lincoln “Remember this—that the bloody and
treasonable doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as
by a government." Many of the reinforcements had recently fought at
Gettysburg. The mob attacked them too. They pulled up bits of the pavement and
carried it to the rooftops. When dropped on the street, the paving stones and
bricks shattered, peppering the ranks of police officer and soldiers with
shrapnel. Accounts speak of cannons being fired and pitched gunfights in the
streets between the mob and the military. I don’t know how accurate those
accounts are, but they ring true. And what of those gallant men of the New York
City Police Department? They fought armed mobs often armed with nothing more
than clubs themselves. Teams of them would stream inside their stations for a
break from the action, battered and bruised. Many sported bandages on their
heads and supported broken limbs as they walked. After a brief respite they
would form up and go back into the fray, clubs tapping out a beat on the pavement
as they marched. No one knows for sure how many of them died over the course of
those few days, somewhere in the vicinity of 10. A few hundred were injured,
some so severely that they could never work again.
From the moment the war ended, there was a constant
effort to downplay this incident in the official histories and to turn it into
a race riot. It was a race riot, but it morphed into that. The Irish did not
wake up that day and say “Let’s go kill some black people.” It started as a
riot against the draft which was seen as an unfair and corrupt. Remember, when
the war started the Irish were among the first to enlist. Tens of thousands of
them fought with gallantry and honor. Historians also like to gloss over this
incident because, as I mentioned in the beginning, it doesn’t fit in their nice
little Civil War box whereby the North, a paragon of freedom and equality,
fought against the slavish backwards South. This is an example of the victors
writing the history.
Furthermore, the official casualties that historians
cite are so far off the mark to be laughable. James McPherson states that around
120 civilians died, including 11 black men who were lynched. I will call
bullshit on that for a few reasons. First of all, there are plenty of accounts
of a few black women being lynched too. He must not be aware of that. Second,
you don’t have pitched gunfights in narrow streets for three or four days with
only 120 deaths. Third, there are plenty of accounts that say that the mob
slipped out under the cover of darkness each night and removed their dead.
Finally, what of the military casualties, which are thought to be pretty
severe, as are the police department losses. Superintendent Kennedy estimated
that around 1,100 people died, which is probably more accurate. Herbert Asbury
estimates 2,000 deaths and that is probably too high. Bodies were incinerated
in burning buildings, tossed in the rivers, or dragged away and a count of 120
is absolutely insane. I could go on about McPherson's creative use of only the
sources that agree with his viewpoint, but I won’t. I will say this, use his
estimate of the deaths as a bit of proof for what I said. These riots are
downplayed and when discussed at all, it is turned into a race riot when it was
really an example of class warfare. And since many historians, it seems, come
from the middle or upper middle class strata of society, they just don’t
understand the mindset of working class people. If you have spent your life in
an ivory tower and never seen what a mob of people can do, then you will have a
hard time grasping what happened that long hot summer in New York City and why.
So, as you can see, history is not, pardon the pun, a
black and white thing. It is nuanced and not as simple as we try to make it.
Some blame this “dumbing down” of history on things like the History Channel,
but I disagree. I think it has more to do with our idea of a story having good
guys and bad guys and a clear distinction between right or wrong. There is
nothing wrong with this, of course. But we also need to understand that the
truth is always more complicated. Every historian has his or her biases that
keep them from being truly objective. The more they claim that they don’t, the
more likely they probably do. Remember, the guilty man flees when no man
pursueth. I have mine too. And I freely admit them. As proud as I am of my heritage, murdering innocent people is wrong, no matter what justification you attach to it.
Let us remember that intrepid band of police officers
and firefighters who fought back angry mobs of their own people to save
innocent lives and property, as they were sworn to do. They were the true
heroes of this sad tale. And let us ask ourselves what we would have done. Remember too, that the Draft Riots of 1863 is the worst case of urban rioting in American History, bar none. The term riot here is almost too "friendly" a word to use to describe what happened. It was more of an uprising or insurgency than a riot.
My name is Lee Hutch and I am a Half A$$ Historian who
is sad that this incident happened. It is not “My People’s” finest hour to say
the least. But just as we discuss the great things the Irish have done in this
country, we must too mention the bad.