Lesson Learned? Considering the Draft Riots of 1863 for Today

The arrival of 4,000 Union troops in Manhattan on Thursday, July 16, 1863, marked the beginning of the end to four days of civic unrest and racial violence throughout New York City, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. That week, hundreds of buildings had been ransacked and burned. 119 people had been killed (although some estimates push that number closer to 500) including 19 African Americans, 11 of whom had been publicly lynched.

At the height of the Civil War, the events that came to be known as the Draft Riots ignited simmering class and racial tensions in a city–and country–spiraling in the wake of rapid demographic change and a growing social divide born from increasingly loud cries for the abolition of slavery. On this 157th anniversary, we look back at this grim local incident and consider the warning this history lays out before us today. The first two years of the Civil War were fought by soldiers who had voluntarily enlisted, recruited to join regiments seeking “100 men" or "30 good men." As the conflict dragged on and casualties mounted, the need for more fighting men became dire. In March 1863, the federal government passed the National Conscription Law, the first mandatory military draft in the nation’s history. It required all men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five to serve in the Union Army. However, a loophole in the law that exempted from service those who could pay $300 exacerbated existing tensions between New York’s working-class Irish American and free black communities, the region’s most vulnerable and marginalized groups.