The months following the December 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg had been days of desperate re-examination by New York’s Irish of their community’s commitment to the Union war effort. The proud regiments of the Irish Brigade had been torn to pieces in useless frontal assaults on an entrenched enemy. Five months later, after a battle filled with blunders by the high command, Northern newspapers had blamed the disaster at the Battle of Chancellorsville on immigrant German cowardice. The New Year had also brought Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation which shifted the goal of the war effort from preservation of the Union to the liberation of the slaves.1
Copperhead Peace Democrats like former New York mayor Fernando Wood had long warned the Irish that Lincoln had lied in 1861 when he declared that immigrant soldiers were only fighting for the limited goal of preventing the breakup of the United States. The Peace Democrats said that the real purpose of the war was to abolish slavery and import blacks to the North where they could replace Irish workers, and their troublesome unions, with docile former slaves.2
The Irish could not help but notice that the same wealthy New York Republicans who championed emancipation were at the forefront of violent efforts to break the immigrants’ unions. These Republicans derided the Irish as beneath the level of ordinary humanity. They mocked their mixed-race neighborhoods where interracial sex and marriage was a fact of life. Elite nativists described the Irish as virtually indistinguishable from the blacks whom they derisively called “Smoked Irish.”3
While Republicans were beginning to discuss citizenship for African Americans, many Irish recalled that the same men five years earlier had favored stripping voting rights from immigrants. Only a year earlier, the Irish had found their own citizenship challenged at polling places by Republicans intent on suppressing the immigrant vote.4
When the Draft was proposed in the winter of 1863, it was initially met with approval by some Irish leaders. While men of all social classes had volunteered for the Union army when the war broke out in 1861, by the end of 1862, with an enormous harvest of the dead piled high on battlefields in Virginia and Maryland, only men with no other options were enlisting. The war was increasingly seen as a “poor man’s fight.” Irish leaders like Archbishop John Hughes believed the Draft would spread the burden of fighting and dying on rich and poor alike.5
The March 1863 Draft law that Congress passed, far from spreading the risk of dying equally, reinforced the idea that rich men’s lives were worth more than those of the poor. The new draft allowed the wealthy to hire a substitute to serve in the army in their stead, permanently exempting them from the Draft. It also provided that a drafted man could pay $300, more than a year’s wage for a laborer, to buy his way out of the army.6
The working class democratic movements in many immigrant communities recoiled at this inequity. These men had immigrated to a country where all were supposedly equal before the law. Yet, a man with a thousand dollars could buy a substitute or could pay the $300 commutation fee to avoid what was supposed to be a common civic duty.7
Another provision of the Draft law particularly enraged new immigrants. After the 1861 Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, immigration to the United States fell off sharply. The Lincoln administration saw continued immigration as a strategic asset in the war against the South. Immigrants could not only fill up depleted army regiments, they could be moved into the rapidly expanding war industry. In 1862 Lincoln relaxed citizenship requirements to encourage military enlistments and Secretary of State William Seward assured prospective immigrants that if they came to the United States, non-citizens would be exempt from any future draft. In what may have been a first in world history, immigration surged to a country engaged in a massive civil war.8
New immigrants felt betrayed when they found out that they were not protected from the Draft. Instead, they were told they could either self-deport within two months, or face being forced into the army.9
Notice from Col. Robert Nugent to men needing to correct their draft records three weeks before the riots.
In the spring of 1863 Federal agents began fanning out to collect the names of draft-age men for inclusion in the Draft lottery. Violent resistance met the Draft registrars in half-a-dozen states. Two draft officers were killed and one hundred were injured in immigrant and native-born communities alike. In New York City, immigrants found that they could protect their young men by attacking the officers and driving them out of the neighborhood.10
The Lincoln administration created a new internal military force called the Provost Marshal to enforce the draft. The Provost also cracked down on spies, traitors, and the politically undesirable. As the number of arrests mounted, Democrats worried that traditional civil liberties were being crushed under the heels of the Republicans. A Democratic newspaper, The New York World, warned that the alleged suspension of free speech by Lincoln would lead dissenters to a “recourse to violence.” The World said that “there are times when even violence is nobler than cowardly apathy.” Even the governor of New York, Upstate Democrat Horatio Seymour, told a July 4th gathering that under Lincoln “our persons may be rightfully seized, our property confiscated, our homes entered” in disregard of the Constitution. 11
New York’s Irish poor lived desperate lives. The city’s Republican elite blamed poverty on the poor. The Free Labor ideology of the Republican Party followed the Calvinist ethic that hard work was rewarded and that wealth was a sign of worth and indicated God’s favor. Irishmen, who typically worked sixty hours each week, got little reward for their hard labor. Poverty was not an abstract judgment of God for them. The death rate for children under two living in the immigrant ghettoes of New York was 70%. A workingman knew that no matter how hard he labored for his wife and family, most of his children would die. He also knew that his efforts to increase his share of the product of his labor by unionizing and demanding an eight hour day were violently opposed by his employers and by their Republican allies.12
Immigrant workingmen put their hopes of defeating the Draft into efforts by the Democratic Party to block it in the courts. The Federal government had never enforced a Draft before and many considered it a violation of the Constitution. By the first week of July, it was clear that the administration was going ahead with the Draft no matter what the courts said. Democratic rhetoric turned red hot, with politicians announcing that while a slave’s life cost $1,000, a white man’s life was now worth $300.13
Draft wheel used on July 13, 1863 on the East Side below 14th St. and above Rivington St. in Manhattan. Source: New-York Historical Society
On July 11, the first Draft lottery was held in Manhattan without incident. Fears of violence had been high, with rumors circulating that the secret Confederate organization The Knights of the Golden Circle was planning an armed uprising. Col. Robert Nugent, the convalescing commander of the Irish Fighting 69th New York Regiment, was serving as the head of the security detail for the lottery. He had few men available in case trouble did break out because nearly all Federal troops and militia had been sent two weeks earlier to counter Robert E. Lee’s Gettysburg Campaign. Fewer than a thousand soldiers were left in the city.14
Col. Robert Nugent commanded the Fighting 69th New York until he was shot in the stomach at Fredericksburg. He was Acting Assistant Provost Marshal General for New York at the time of the riots.
On Sunday July 12, the names of those selected in the Draft were published in the newspapers. Sunday was the one day workingmen were off. Many skipped church to attend neighborhood meetings to discuss what should be done. Unionized workers argued that while their bosses were reaping windfall profits from the war, the workers were to be enslaved to the army and sent out to die.15
At 4 AM on Monday morning, men began going from worksite to worksite declaring that a general strike against the draft was underway. As workers were called out from their factories and warehouses to join the strike, they began marching in small groups uptown behind banners that read “No Draft.” Witnesses said that the strikers included Irish, German, and native-born workers. They moved quietly through the streets. One passerby thought they were a German holiday procession. George Templeton Strong, a patrician bigot, wrote in his diary that the men he saw were “the lowest Irish day laborers… Every brute…was pure Celtic.”16
The start of the riots.
The small squads of men came together on the uptown avenues and rallied in Central Park. They then marched downtown to the Draft office at 47th St. and 3rd Ave. The office was guarded by all the men Col. Nugent could assemble, 25 soldiers, most of them recovering from battlefield wounds. By the time the draft started at 10 AM, the crowd had grown to 10,000. Protesters climbed the telegraph poles and cut the wires the police and soldiers relied on for communication. Irish women began tearing up street car tracks to make it harder for the security forces to get around the city.17
A half-hour after the Draft began, the Black Joke volunteer fire company arrived. Firemen had traditionally been exempt from involuntary service in the military. They were angry that Lincoln had not retained this traditional fireman’s exemption while he had created an exemption for the rich. With the crowd cheering, the men of the Black Joke broke into the Draft office to destroy the instruments of conscription. The crowd erupted into applause and many chanted “Down With the Rich Men.”18
New York’s own civil war had begun.
This illustration shows the burning of the Draft Office at 47th St. and 3rd Ave. before noon on July 13. Note the men cutting telegraph wires and the involvement of women in the riot.
Video: Historian Barnet Schecter Discusses the Draft Riots
Resource: Excerpts from New York Gov. Horatio Seymour’s July 4, 1863 Speech at the New York Academy of Music
A few years ago we stood before this community to warn them of the dangers of sectional strife, but our fears were laughed at. At a later day, when the clouds of war overhung our country, we implored those in authority to compromise that difficulty, for we had been told by a great orator and statesman, Burke, that there never yet was a revolution that might not have been prevented by a compromise made in a timely and graceful manner. Our prayers were unheeded. Again, when the contest was opened, we invoked those who had the conduct of affairs not to underrate the power of the adversary — not to underrate the courage, and resources, and endurance,of our own sister States. All this warning was treated as sympathy with treason. You have the results of these unheeded warnings and unheeded prayers; they haye stained our soil with blood ; they have carried mourning into thousands of homes ; and to-day they have brought our country to the very verge of destruction. Once more I come before you, to offer again an earnest prayer, and bid you to listen to a warning. Our country is not only at this time torn by one of the bloodiest wars that has ever ravaged the face of the earth, or of which history gives an account, but, if we turn our faces to our own loyal
States, how is it there ? Do you not find the community divided into political parties, strongly arrayed against each other, and using with regard to each other terms of reproach and defiance ? Is it not said by those, who support more particularly the Administration, that we who differ honestly, patriotically, sincerely from them with regard to the line of duty, are men of treasonable purposes and traitors to our country ?
But on the other hand, is it not true that many of our organization look upon this Administration as hostile to our rights and liberties look upon our opponents as men who would do us wrong in regard to our most sacred franchises? I need not call your attention to the tone of the press or to the tone of public feeling, to show you how, at this moment, parties are thus exasperated, and stand in almost defiant attitudes to each other.
A few years ago we were told that sectional strife, waged in times like these, would do no harm to our country ; but you have seen the sad and bloody results. Let us be admonished now in time, and take
care that this irritation, this feeling which is growing up in our midst, shall not also ripen into civil troubles that shall carry the evils of war into our very midst and about our own homes.
Now, upon one thing all parties are agreed, and that is this : Until we have a united North we can have no successful war. Until we have a united, harmonious North we can have no beneficent peace. How shall we have harmony ? How shall the unity of all parties be obtained ? I wish to say a few words to you upon this point, which, I firmly believe, is one of the most important considerations to which I could call your attention.
Is harmony to be coerced ? I appeal to you, my Republican friends, when you say to us that the nation’s life and existence hangs upon harmony and concord here, if you yourselves, in your serious moments,
believe that this is to be produced by seizing our persons, by infringing upon our rights, by insulting our homes, and by depriving us of those cherished principles for which our fathers fought, and to which we have always sworn allegiance ? I do appeal to you, my Republican friends, and beg that you will receive this appeal in the earnest and patriotic spirit which prompts me to make it. I appeal to you if you are not doing yourselves and your country a great wrong when you declare that harmony and unity of parties are essential to save the nation’s life, essential to the highest interests of our land, and yet stigmatize men as true and honest as yourselves, and whom experience has proved to have been wiser, too, as men who do not love their country, and who are untrue to their institutions. How, then, are we to get this indispensable harmony — this needed unity? It is not to be obtained by trampling upon rights ; it is not to be obtained by threats ; it is not to be obtained by coercion ; it is not to be obtained by attempting to close our lips when we would utter the honest purposes of our hearts and the warm convictions of our judgment.
But, my Republican friends, there is a mode by which it can be reached ; there is a mode by which the nation’s life can be saved ; there is a mode by which, in the end, we will restore this Union of ours, and bring back those glorious privileges which were so wantonly thrown away. We come to you in no spirit of arrogance. We do not come to you asking you to make any concession of advantage to us. On the contrary, we only say to you, holding in your hands and in your control almost all the political power of your country, to exercise it according. to your chartered rights. We only ask that you shall give to us that which you claim for yourselves, and that which every freeman, and every man who respects himself, will have for himself—freedom of speech, the right to exercise all the franchises conferred by the Constitution upon an American. Can you safely deny us these things ? Are you not trampling upon us, and upon our rights, if you refuse to listen to such an appeal? Is it not revolution which you are thus creating when you say that our persons may be rightfully seized, our property confiscated, our homes entered ? Are you not exposing yourselves, your own interests, to as great a peril as that with which you threaten ns? Remember this, that the bloody, and treasonable, and revolutionary doctrine of public necessity can be proclaimed by a mob as well as by a government. Remember all the teachings of history ; and we implore you, with regard to your own interests, to stop and inquire if you are not doing your- selves and your own families, and all that you hold dear to you, an infinite wrong when you sustain propositions that tear away from them, as well as from us, all the protections which the Constitution of your country has thrown around public liberty. Can you tell when ambition, love of plunder, or thirst for power will induce bad and dangerous men to proclaim this very principle of public necessity as a reason why they should trample beneath their feet all the laws of our land and the institutions of our country ?
I ask you again to think if measures like these give power, dignity, or strength to our Government ? I ask you, on the other hand, if those governments have not lived out the longest periods, which, in times of public danger, instead of shrinking back from the principles of liberty and the barriers of order, have raised aloft these great principles, and battled under them, and thus given strength to the hearts of the peo-
ple, and gained the respect of the world ? I ask you if it is not an evidence of weakness, defeat, and discomfiture, when, in the presence of armed rebellion, the Administration is compelled to assert that the very charter by which it holds its power has ceased to have a virtue that can protect a citizen in his rights ? Suppose we accept this doctrine, what will be the consequences to this Government ?
To-day the great masses of conservatives who still battle for timehonored principles — for chartered principles of government, amid denunciation, and contumely, and abuse — are the only barriers that stand between this Government and its own destruction. If we accept tomorrow this teaching — if we to-morrow should acquiesce in the doctrine that in times of war constitutions are suspended, and laws have lost their force, then we should accept a doctrine that the very right by which this Government administers its power has lost its virtue, and we would be brought down to the level of rebellion itself, having an existence only by virtue of material power. Would not a vital blow be struck to liberty ? If we should accept this doctrine, what would be the consequence ? When men accept despotism, they may have a choice as to who the despot will be. The struggle then will not be, Shall we have constitutional liberty ? But, having accepted the doctrine that the Constitution has lost its force, every instinct of personal ambition, every instinct of personal security, will lead men to put themselves under the protection of that power which they supposed most competent to protect their persons. And then this Administration would find that in putting military rulers over us, they had made military masters for themselves ; for this war teaches us that the general who will betray the liberties of the people for the purpose of gaining the favor of power, will, when opportunity occurs,
seize power itself.
Source: SPEECHES, MESSAGES, PROCLAMATIONS, OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE, AND OTHER PUBLIC UTTERANCES OF HORATIO SEYMOUR; FROM The Campaign of 1856 to the Present Time COMPILED AND EDITED BY THOMAS M. COOK and THOMAS W. KNOX (1868) beginning on page 118.
1. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 byEdwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (1998); The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007); The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War published by Oxford University Press (1990); Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum by Tyler Anbinder published by Simon and Schuster (2001); The Tiger: The Rise And Fall Of Tammany Hall by Oliver E. Allen published by De Capo Press 1993; Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (1984);SPEECHES, MESSAGES, PROCLAMATIONS, OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE, AND OTHER PUBLIC UTTERANCES OF HORATIO SEYMOUR; FROM The Campaign of 1856 to the Present Time COMPILED AND EDITED BY THOMAS M. COOK and THOMAS W. KNOX (1868); New York Times; New York Irish-American.
2. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (1998)
3. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (1998)
4. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (1998) p. 556.
5. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007)
6. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007)
7. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007)
8. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007) p. 18-19.
9. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007) p. 18-19.
10. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007) p.19.
11. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007) p. 27.
12. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007) p. 55-60.
13 The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007) p. 114-118.
14. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007) p. 120-122.
15. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007) p. 119-122.
16. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007) p. 128; The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War published by Oxford University Press (1990) p. 18.
17. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007) p. 125-128.
18. The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America by Barnet Schecter (2007) p. 131.
The Immigrants’ Civil War is a series that examines the role of immigrants in our bloodiest war. Articles will appear twice monthly between 2011 and 2017. Here are the articles we have published so far:
1. Immigrant America on the Eve of the Civil War – Take a swing around the United States and see where immigrants were coming from and where they were living in 1861.
2. 1848: The Year that Created Immigrant America – Revolutions in Europe, famine and oppression in Ireland, and the end of the Mexican War made 1848 a key year in American immigration history.
3. Carl Schurz: From German Radical to American Abolitionist– A teenaged revolutionary of 1848, Carl Schurz brought his passion for equality with him to America.
5. …And the War Came to Immigrant America -The impact of the firing on Fort Sumter on America’s immigrants
10. Immigrant Day Laborers Help Build the First Fort to Protect Washington-The Fighting 69th use their construction skills.
12. Immigrants Rush to Join the Union Army-Why?– The reasons immigrants gave for enlisting early in the war.
17. Immigrant Regiments on Opposite Banks of Bull Run -The Fighting 69th and the Louisiana Tigers
39. A German Regiment Fights for “Freedom and Justice” at Shiloh-The 32nd Indiana under Col. August Willich.
40. The Know Nothing Colonel and the Irish Soldier Confronting slavery and bigotry.
43. Union Leader Ben Butler Seeks Support in New Orleans-When General Ben Butler took command in New Orleans in 1862, it was a Union outpost surrounded by Confederates. Butler drew on his experience as a pro-immigrant politician to win over the city’s Irish and Germans.
49. The Irish Brigade Moves Towards Richmond-The Irish brigade in the Peninsula Campaign from March 17 to June 2, 1862.
50. Peninsula Emancipation: Irish Soldiers Take Steps on the Road to Freedom-The Irish Brigade and Irish soldiers from Boston free slaves along the march to Richmond.
54. Making Immigrant Soldiers into Citizens-Congress changed the immigration laws to meet the needs of a nation at war.
60. Emancipation 150: “All men are created equal, black and white”– A German immigrant reacts to the Emancipation Proclamation
Immigration Vacation -Civil War Sites