July 13-15, 1863 The New York Draft Riots

PatYoung

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The New York Draft Riots began on July 13, 1863. This week we recall that horrible time with five articles from 2013. The first article looks at the most famous, and infamous, immigrant neighborhood in the days before the riots began. The Five Points was the locus of New York’s Irish community. Famous, and famously misrepresented, the demolished neighborhood is New York’s modern Foley Square and Chinatown. http://www.longislandwins.com/columns/detail/five_points_on_the_edge_of_the_draft_riots
 

5fish

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We can not leave race out... Draft Riots...

LINK: https://www.loc.gov/teachers/classr...ivities/presentations/immigration/irish6.html


During much of the nineteenth century, when large numbers of Irish and Blacks were present, they were pushed into competition. There are striking parallels in the culture and history of the two groups. They began their life in America with low social and economic status. Over time, they advanced in common fields such as sports, entertainment, religion, writing and publishing, and politics. They even had similar social pathologies—alcoholism, violence and broken homes. Rather than being united by their common hard life, they were divided by the need to compete. For political benefit, this pattern was reinforced as Blacks were drawn to the Republican Party while the Irish strength in numbers was wooed by the Democratic Party.
Both the Irish and Blacks had reason to feel they were treated unfairly in the workforce, and often at one another's expense. In the antebellum South, for instance, where slaveholders viewed slaves as valuable property, Blacks were prohibited from participating in hazardous, life-threatening work. Thus, many of the most dangerous jobs were left to the Irish who did not have such protection (or limitation). Thousands of Irish lives were lost in the building of the nation's canal and railroad systems.


The Riot in Lexington Avenue

The Conscription Act of 1863 exacerbated tense relationships. This act made all white men between the ages of twenty and forty-five years eligible for the draft by the Union Army. Free black men were permitted to "volunteer" to fight in the Civil War through the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation. However, Blacks were not drafted or otherwise forced to fight. In addition, white men with money could illegally bribe doctors for medical exemptions, legally hire a substitute, or pay for a commutation of a draft. Lower-class workers could not afford to pay for deferments. The inequities in draft eligibility between blacks, monied whites, and lower-class whites (many of whom were Irish), inevitably increased racial tensions.
Several cities suffered draft riots in which enrollment officers and free blacks were targeted for violence. The largest such incident began on June 11, 1863, in New York City when more than 100 people were murdered by an angry mob. After burning down a draft office and attacking police officers and well-dressed whites, this mob of lower-class whites (including many Irish) focused its energy on killing black bystanders. The Report of the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People . . . documents some of the acts perpetrated by the mob in the section, Incidents of the Riot.
 

5fish

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Here is another background look...


Snip...

When the Civil War began in 1861, large numbers of New York City's white workers did not embrace the fight to preserve the Union. Many resented the war effort, which brought economic hardship and increasing unemployment to the city's working-class neighborhoods, especially following a sharp economic downturn in the war's first year. Competition for jobs between Irish and black workers, already intense before the war, increased dramatically in the conflict's early years and racial tensions mounted in work places and in working-class neighborhoods throughout the city. Even the return of wartime prosperity in 1862 did not lessen these tensions, as living costs rose faster than wages, further undercutting working-class living standards. In spring 1863, in the midst of a strike of Irish dock workers, strikers attacked and beat African-American strike-breakers before federal troops arrived to protect the black workers.

Snip...

In several of these occupations they competed directly with the city's African-American workers. The city's African-American community, which dated to before the Revolutionary War, grew during the first four decades of the nineteenth century, establishing and sustaining churches, newspapers, literary societies, and free schools. Black workers lived in close proximity to white workers in racially mixed communities that dotted the lower half of Manhattan. Increased immigration from Europe after 1840 diminished employment opportunities for black New Yorkers. Working-class African Americans competed directly with immigrants, especially newly arrived Irish, for unskilled jobs, a competition that often turned ugly and violent in the years before the war.

Snip...

Both women and men, many of them poor Irish immigrants, attacked and killed Protestant missionaries, Republican draft officials, and wealthy businessmen. However, New York City’s small free black population became the rioters’ main target. Immigrants, determined not to be drafted to fight for the freedom of a people they resented, turned on black New Yorkers in a rage. Rioters lynched at least a dozen African Americans and looted and burned the city’s Colored Orphan Asylum

 
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