Which of the following groups was not a major target of the new york city draft riots?

Rioters and federal troops clash.

On this anniversary of the New York City Draft Riots and Massacre, July 13 – 16, 1863, we share a teaching activity that helps students explore what Howard Zinn described as the most destructive period of civil violence in U.S. history. Lasting nearly a week, the riots were the largest civil insurrection in U.S. history besides the Civil War itself.

Zinn writes in Chapter 10 of A People’s History of the United States,

. . . the Conscription Act of 1863 provided that the rich could avoid military service: they could pay $300 or buy a substitute. In the summer of 1863, a “Song of the Conscripts” was circulated by the thousands in New York and other cities. One stanza:

Historical fiction for young adults by Walter Dean Myers.

We’re coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more
We leave our homes and firesides with bleeding hearts and sore
Since poverty has been our crime, we bow to thy decree;
We are the poor and have no wealth to purchase liberty.

When recruiting for the army began in July 1863, a mob in New York wrecked the main recruiting station. Then, for three days, crowds of white workers marched through the city, destroying buildings, factories, streetcar lines, homes.

The draft riots were complex — anti-Black, anti-rich, anti-Republican. From an assault on draft headquarters, the rioters went on to attacks on wealthy homes, then to the murder of African Americans. They marched through the streets, forcing factories to close, recruiting more members of the mob. They set the city’s colored orphan asylum on fire. They shot, burned, and hanged African Americans they found in the streets. Many people were thrown into the rivers to drown.

On the fourth day, Union troops returning from the Battle of Gettysburg came into the city and stopped the rioting. Perhaps four hundred people were killed. No exact figures have ever been given, but the number of lives lost was greater than in any other incident of domestic violence in U.S. history.

Harper’s Weekly illustration of the burning of the orphanage during the Draft Riots. Source: Digital Public Library of America

Click the book cover for a detailed description of the Draft Riots by Leslie M. Harris.

The Zinn Education Project offers a teaching activity called “The Draft Riot Mystery” by Rethinking Schools editor Bill Bigelow that focuses on the conflict between recently arrived Irish immigrants and African Americans.

As Bigelow explains in the introduction to the lesson:

One of the critical “habits of the mind” that students should develop throughout a U.S. history course is to respond to social phenomena with “why” questions. They should begin from a premise that events have explanations, that people don’t, for example, kill each other simply because they speak different languages, attend different churches, or have different skin colors.

This activity takes the outrages of the 1863 riots as its starting point, and asks students to piece together clues that help account for this sudden explosion of rage. It’s important to note that making explanations is different than making excuses. Here, we’re asking students to try to understand the horrors committed, not to rationalize them.

Read a detailed description, read an online excerpt from In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 by Leslie M. Harris. (Order from Bookshop.org.)

Also see the book, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War by Iver Bernstein.

Find a list of more Massacres in U.S. History.

The worst episode of large-scale urban violence in American history, the New York City draft riots were sparked by the passage of conscription laws which made thousands of male New Yorkers between the ages of 18 and 45 eligible to be drafted into the Union Army. Poor and working-class New Yorkers, many of them Irish immigrants, were especially resentful towards the draft law. Their anger was further inflamed by an exemption in the law that allowed those who could afford to pay $300 for a substitute to avoid the draft. But the city's African-American population was the main target of the rioters' anger during four days of looting, lynching and burning. The drafts were finally quelled by Union Army troops, but only after nearly a hundred people had been killed.

By 1860, one of every four of New York City's 800,000 residents was an Irish-born immigrant. While many labored in several of the city's skilled trades, the vast majority of Irish immigrants worked as unskilled laborers on the docks, as ditch diggers and street pavers, and as cartmen and coal heavers. 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.

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.

In New York, implementation of the National Conscription Act on July 11, 1863, triggered four days of the worst rioting Americans had ever seen. Violence quickly spread through the entire city, and even homes in wealthy neighborhoods were looted. 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. Leading trade unionists joined middle-class leaders in condemning the riots, but to no avail. The violence ended only when Union troops were rushed back from the front to put down the riot by force. At the end, over one hundred New Yorkers lay dead.

Source | American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
Item Type | Article/Essay