1862 Race Riots in Cincinnati...

5fish

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The were race riots in Cincinnati in 1862, the white Irish drove the Blacks workers off the priers along the river and even attack their neighborhoods in the city...


Snip... it seem Morgan raid cause the opportunity...

Morgan's dash through the Union lines had placed the defenseless city of Lexington, Kentucky, in danger of attack. Troops from the camps around Cincinnati were immediately sent to Lexington, and the city council, recognizing the danger, added 120 policemen to the military units moving south on Sunday, July thirteenth. In retrospect, it is difficult to imagine just why the council made such an ill-advised, albeit well-meaning, decision. Cincinnati policemen were incapable of effective resistance to Morgan's veteran cavalry on their own, and their numbers were too few to provide adequate reinforcements to the military defenders of Lexington. In addition, their departure left only forty policemen to cope with the "evil spirits" which were left in the city.9 Thus the city council itself was partly responsible for the violence which followed.

Snip...

The Catholic Telegraph and the Daily Enquirer came closest to the truth in stating the riot had been caused by Negroes underbidding white labor on the levee. The whites, jobless and hungry, sought to retain their jobs by driving the Negroes from the levee and the city.24 Neither newspaper attempted to explain why, after years of fairly peaceful co-existence between levee workers, there was a breakdown in relations which led to violence. The Telegraph did not, however, try to explain the violence in Bucktown as labor strife. To its editors these disturbances were two distinct affairs: the one being labor strife and the other a continuation of an old problem — Irish efforts to drive Negro sinners from their midst (thus the destruction of two Negro brothels). Although the Telegraph had an interesting point, it is doubtful that two simultaneous riots should have taken place for different reasons. While it may have been that different groups took part in each phase of the riot, there was a basic underlying economic motive for the violence: the decline of river commerce.

snip...

As an overall attempt to frighten the Negroes from Cincinnati, the riot failed, for the Negroes returned after the violence subsided. As well as can be discerned, however, the riot was successful in eliminating the Negro stevedore as a major competitive factor on the levee. A comparison of job statistics gathered from the 1860 and 1870 census returns for Cincinnati shows that total Negro employment in the steamboat industry fell approximately 48 percent from 1860 to 1870, yet the industry as a whole did not suffer a similar decline. Negro levee workers, the original targets of the rioters, fell from a total of 196 in 1860 to only twenty-four in 1870 — a decrease of 87.8 percent. Negro wealth was also affected in that property derived from employment in river commerce in 1870 was less than it had been in 1860 — accounting for 5.6 percent of the total Negro wealth in 1870 as against 18.7 percent in 1860.28 The real tragedy of the riot was that prior to 1862, the Negroes of Cincinnati had been an integral part of the steamboat trade, and it, in turn, represented the only means of major Negro penetration of the white industrial-commercial economy. With little more than half as many Negroes employed in river commerce in 1870 as there had been in 1860, and with the railroad supplanting the steamboat as the major vehicle of commerce, the Negroes of Cincinnati lost one opportunity, at least, to break into the mainstream of economic life.

Get the whole story at the link above...
 

5fish

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Here some more...

http://library.cincymuseum.org/topics/c/files/civilwar/chsbull-v35-n2-sou-098.pdf

The recession of 1861-1862 hit Cincinnati hard as the river trade collapsed and Cincinnati businessmen felt the loss of Southern markets. Irish-Americans in the city developed strong anti-emancipation feelings and feared that the freed Negroes would release a flood of "cheap labor" on the North and the ex-slaves •would steal jobs from them.

The patriotic surge felt at the outbreak of the war ebbed as the war caused manufacturers and businessmen to lose their markets and trade.

snip...

Irish-Americans in Cincinnati had several opportunities to learn that the fear had a realistic base, as "contrabands," a term applied to ex-slaves freed by the southward advance of Union troops, displaced Irish workers in hotels, on river boats, and on the docks. In 1862, the proprietor of the Burnet House, characterized as "the finest hotel in the West," dismissed fifty Irish work-hands (mostly chambermaids) and replaced them with contrabands. The editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer aggravated Irish apprehensions by repeating a Philadelphia story about how the use of "colored workers" had depressed wages in Pennsylvania. Fanning the flames of racial hatred, the Enquirer added an editorial note:

"Like causes will produce like results here. How do our white laborers relish the prospect that the emancipation of the blacks spreads before them? What do they think of the inundation of the two or three thousand free [Negroes] into Ohio, which inundation will come if we carry out the emancipation policy of President Lincoln. How many whites will be thrown out of employment? How much will it reduce the price of labor?"

The replacement of Irish-American dock workers and boat men by "contrabands" in June and July, 1862, brought tempers to the boiling point.4 On July 15, Irish workers drove newly-hired blacks off boats and docks. The rioting spread and the Irish-Americans invaded "Shantytown" or "Bucktown," terms applied to the section of the city inhabited by black residents. The riotous Irish put some homes to the torch and beat up every black man who did not flee.5 Blacks retaliated by burning some buildings in "Dublin," the Irish section of the city. The mayor issued a proclamation in behalf of law and order while the police chief called out a posse approximating one hundred in order to suppress the violence. Anyway, when emancipation became the official policy of the Lincoln administration, the Irish-Americans became even more disenchanted with the war and, invariably, voted the straight Democratic ticket.

snip...

A British traveler, a keen observer, visited Cincinnati during the first year of the war and wrote: . . . "the trade of Cincinnati was paralyzed for a time. Many of the stores and shops were closed; in most of those open there being notices that, for the present, business could only be done for cash. The prices of the theatres and entertainments were advertised as "reduced to suit the times." There was little shipping about the wharves, and what goods were being shipped were mostly military stores. Work was scarce, and there was much poverty, I was told, among the working classes . . . ."
 
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