July 16, 1863---The New York Draft Riots: Day Six

JULY 16, 1863:            

The New York Draft Riots (Day Six): 

Federal troops continued to arrive from outside the city. It now became dangerous for citizens going about their ordinary business to be out, as the troops made little distinction between rioters and ordinary pedestrians. Several persons were shot as the day went on. A non-violent “Peace Rally” was held outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral at Noon, and the newspapers printed reports of the Draft having been suspended. A final confrontation occurred in the evening near Gramercy Park. Military firepower finally killed off and dispersed the remaining rioters.

Although called “riots” the Draft Riots were more than just riots. Contemporary accounts referred to what might more properly be called “The Battle of New York” as a “Confederate victory.” The city was ineradicably changed. Immediately following the Draft Riots most of New York City’s blacks fled to the City of Brooklyn and to New Jersey, allowing the poor white, mostly Irish, immigrants to fill their abandoned jobs; this gave the Irish a financial boost that allowed many of them to move out of poverty. For a week the nation’s largest city, its hub of finance and international trade, had been utterly shut down. Conscription had been suspended. Unionists and Abolitionists and newspapers had been successfully attacked. Free black citizens had been brutalized and butchered.

There is little doubt that, though most of the participants were mere ordinary working men and women with no grasp of the larger issues, these “riots” were organized quasi-military affairs. Throughout the city, rioters had set up a strategic system of barricades to keep first firemen and police and later troops from easily communicating and aiding each other. The gangs of New York, though their Five Points neighborhood had been mostly untouched by violence, had recruited many rioters from among the city’s poor white population. Blacks and Republicans were especial targets. The State and Federal Arsenals had been attacked in an attempt at seizure. The leaders of the various rioting mobs met and coordinated their activities, striking at specific targets at specific times planned to keep the civic authorities dispersed and under constant pressure. The Governor of New York State came from Albany to address the rioters en masse, reinforcing their cause. Whether this was a New York political in-fight or an urban insurrection against the United States, or both, one thing is clear: the Draft Riots were not a spontaneous eruption of mass hysteria, but a coldly calculated channeling of populist rage. 

Fortunately, after the violence ended New Yorkers responded well to the riots. Money was raised to aid those left homeless and injured, businesses received aid for repairs and rebuilding, and much of the anger underlying the Draft Riots seemed to have dissipated; when the Draft was resumed, it proceeded peacefully, and Copperhead sentiments in the city began to wane rapidly after the riots.

 

The number of killed and injured is unknown. Conservative estimates are that 150 people were killed (mostly blacks) and up to 8,000 injured.