NYC Civil War draft riots!

While reading a Union soldier's letter home I read this;

"In July 1863, Company C boarded a train for New York City, where riots had broken out in opposition to a new draft law. Lincoln had ordered extra conscripts to be raised in the Northern states. The Enrollment Act made most males between the ages of 20 and 45 subject to military draft, but excused any draftee who could pay $300 to buy his way out of service or pay the same amount to an acceptable substitute. This left the poor, often immigrant masses to fight a war many didn’t support.

After names of draftees were published on July 13—a sweltering day—the streets very quickly were convulsed in a saturnalia of lawlessness. What began as a draft riot quickly became a racist rampage, with mobs burning the homes of blacks and lynching them from lampposts. Large parts of the city went up in flames."

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smith...ight-life-civil-war-soldier-180960784/?no-ist

I've read about the conscripts/draft and that one could buy their way out of fighting or pay someone else to take their place.
I've never heard of the riots that occurred in New York City.

"The New York City draft riots (July 13–16, 1863), known at the time as Draft Week,[3] were violent disturbances in New York City that were the culmination of working-class discontent with new laws passed by Congress that year to draft men to fight in the ongoing American Civil War. The riots remain the largest civil and racial insurrection in American history, aside from the Civil War itself."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots

There are quite a few articles about it on Google links.

Very interesting

That simply can't be true. RACISM is such a southern issue, you know.

Just one more of the undeniable things that happened but doesn't fit the current-day narrative so it's either completely left out of the story or very little detail given.

Thus the saying - "Rich man's war, poor man's fight."

If you've never seen the movie "Gangs of New York" there is actually a lot of historically accurate scenes in there regarding the draft riots. Straight off the boat, immigrants were being handed a pen to sign a draft agreement and then handed a rifle and uniform.

rhbama3 said:

If you've never seen the movie "Gangs of New York" there is actually a lot of historically accurate scenes in there regarding the draft riots. Straight off the boat, immigrants were being handed a pen to sign a draft agreement and then handed a rifle and uniform.

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I haven't seen the movie but it looks interesting. From what I gather the “nativists,” American-born gangs hated the immigrants especially the Irish.

The Irish and other New Yorker's saw the draft as a threat to Blacks taking over their jobs.

There was some question as to if the Navy used canon fire on the lower end of Manhattan as shown in the movie.

Irish opposition to emancipation and conscription gave them a reputation for treason and disloyalty, discounting the loyal service of thousands of Irish volunteers in the Union army. For many nativist critics, Irish participation in the Draft Riots was another indication of Irish immigrants' savagery, unfitness for self-government, and their inferiority to other white races.

Conversely, Irish papers were quick to defend the reputation of the Irish community, contesting the characterization of the mob as solely "Irish" and playing up the role of Irish men and women who worked to end the violence. While a new draft was conducted the following month without incident by "Boss" William M. Tweed (1823-1878) and his Tammany Hall Democrats, the memory of the riots remained fresh in the minds of the African American community and the Protestant elite, who forever associated the affair with the "savage Irish."

http://www.tenement.org/encyclopedia/riots.htm

elfiii said:

Thus the saying - "Rich man's war, poor man's fight."

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I think the Conscription Act which allowed a $300 exemption waiver to not fight, was one of the main causes of the riots.

We could have beat them with corn stalks, they just would not fight with corn stalks. Forget who said that but it was true. A lot of Northerners did not have the stomach for the war, but they had all the factories and all the guns and bullets.

JustUs4All said:

That simply can't be true. RACISM is such a southern issue, you know.

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agreed

KyDawg said:

We could have beat them with corn stalks, they just would not fight with corn stalks. Forget who said that but it was true. A lot of Northerners did not have the stomach for the war, but they had all the factories and all the guns and bullets.

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Yep but we had the finest gunpowder on the planet made right here in Augusta, GA.